Category Archives: USA

FBI recruiting Muslim spies, group says

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Michigan Muslim organization said Thursday it has asked U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate complaints alleging the FBI is asking followers of the faith to spy on Islamic leaders and congregations.

The Council of Islamic Organizations of Michigan sent a letter last week to Holder after mosques and other groups reported members of the community have been approached to monitor people coming to mosques and donations they make.

Sandra Berchtold, a spokeswoman in the FBI’s Detroit office, had no immediate comment.

Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said such complaints aren’t new, but concerns grew after a recent revelation the FBI planted a spy in a Southern California mosque.

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US polls: 48% unfavourable towards Islam, 10% still think Obama is Muslim

Posted on by Bob Pitt

President Obama is visiting Turkey, which looks to be the occasion of his promised “major address” in a muslim-majority country. In some sense it’s a “safe” choice, as Turkey is seeking EU membership and clearly is trying to position itself between the western and islamic worlds. I think that a major address in Cairo would have been far more significant, especially in building credibility amongst the muslim masses for Obama’s rhetoric about respect and engagement with the muslim world. Maybe next time.

In stark contrast to the President’s agenda, however, is the astonishing finding by ABC News’ poll (PDF) that finds 48% of Americans have an unfavorable opinion towards Islam, the highest since 2001. 29% believe that mainstream Islam encourages violence towards non-believers (a point of view that is internalized as dogma in the Republican Party especially).

That’s not all, though. Another poll by the Pew Center finds that 10% still believe Obama is a muslim! That’s the same level as during the campaign. This really speaks to the existence of a basal level of Islamophobia in the population at large, for the muslim smear to have such staying power this long (and in the face of such obvious and overwhelming evidence to the contrary).

beliefnet, 6 April 2009

Preserving Western Civilization

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Preserving Western CivilizationThe Preserving Western Civilization conference drew about 100 men and women from Canada, the UK, and the USA to a suit-and-tie affair at a hotel near the Baltimore-Washington International airport. The event was organised by 76 year-old Michael Hart, who received his PhD in astrophysics from Princeton and is known in white nationalist circles for his proposal for a racial partition of the United States. Hart is also Jewish, as were a significant percentage of the conference speakers and the attendees. These were “scientific racists”, seeking to root their anti-Islamic politics in genetics, rather than simply in culture.

The conference from 6-8 February was the first significant white nationalist confab since President Obama’s inauguration, and influential figures such as J. Philippe Rushton, Peter Brimelow and a representative of the British National Party were among the speakers. As such, the proceedings pointed to the direction at least one part of the movement will take in the near future.

This was an attempt to create a new ideological pole friendlier to Jewish participation, but within the broader white nationalist movement. They would bind Islamophobia and nativism with scientific racism.

Opening the conference, Hart proclaimed that the white race and Western Civilisation are the “pinnacle of human history”. Setting the stage for the rest of the weekend, he outlined the three problems faced by Western Civilisation – Islam, immigration, and white guilt.

Islamophobia was a dominant theme of the conference. Hart would encourage the audience to equate Islam with Nazism, and the Koran with Mein Kampf.

In a professorial monotone, Serge Trifkovic kicked the weekend’s Islamophobia into high gear with a lengthy attack on Muhammad and all of Islam. Trifkovic, a Serbian expatriate who before becoming the foreign affairs editor at the paleo-conservative magazine Chronicles was a spokesman for the convicted war criminal Biljana Plavsic, warned that Western Civilisation faces an old existential enemy, an aggressive foe. Echoing themes from his inflammatory 2002 book, The Sword and the Prophet, he warned that the threat was not from “Islamo-fascism”, but from Islam. Period. Gloomily, he predicted that “the survival of civilisation is at stake”.

Rushton, the soft-spoken psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario and a leading figure among academic racists, went even further, contending that Islam was not just a cultural, but a genetic problem. According to Rushton, the Muslim problem is not just a condition of their particular belief system. Instead, he argued that Muslims have an aggressive personality with relatively closed, simple minds, and are less impervious to reason than one might expect.

Not to be outdone, Lawrence Auster, whose biographical details boast that his blog, View from the Right, was “influential in defeating the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill in the Senate in 2007”, pushed a different sort of policy proposal in front of this crowd. Pretending that he was president, Auster ran through a list of Islamopohobic charges while stumping for a startling Constitutional Amendment to ban Islam and all Muslims from the United States. His proposal received a rousing applause.

Armed with a handful of papers, Patricia Richardson took the stage on Sunday morning to talk Islamophobia from a British perspective. Searchlight readers are no doubt familiar with Richardson, an elected BNP councillor who takes pains to remind people that she is Jewish. When Richardson announced that she was from the BNP, cheers rang out. She ran through several news items to paint a picture of Muslim immigration as a demographic catastrophe. “If they’re not plotting and planning unrest, they’re planning how to get your money,” she noted.

Searchlight, April 2009

National Secular Society promotes ‘Islamization’ of Britain

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Traditional Values CoalitionWhich will no doubt come as a surprise to the deeply Islamophobic NSS. But the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon is convinced:

“A disturbing cultural trend is emerging in Britain – one that could result in the eventual Islamization of this great ally in the war on terrorism. More than 100,000 Brits have downloaded ‘certificates of de-baptism’ from a National Secular Society (NSS) web site. These men and women have decided to openly reject their Christian heritage….

“Last year, the Bishop of Rochester, England, Right Rev. Michael Nazir-Ali warned against the increased secularization of British culture. He noted that Britain’s ascendency in world history could never have been achieved unless it had been based on Christian principles. He noted that Islam poses a major threat to England. In fact, he was so outspoken about Islam last year that he faced death threats. Regrettably, he resigned his post just a few days ago. A prophetic voice is now gone.

“With a Christian vacuum emerging in England, radical Islam will fill the void – and those Britains who so casually rejected their Christian heritage, will eventually be subjugated under Shariah Law…. Christianity not only brought the truth of Jesus Christ to Britain and other nations, but the concept of progress and human freedom. As Britains reject Christianity, the evil totalitarian political system known as Islam waits to fill this vacuum. If Brits thought Nazism was bad, wait until Islam seizes control of this island nation.”

Traditional Values Coalition, 1 April 2009

Ban on Muslim scholar angers rights activists

Posted on by Bob Pitt

tariq-ramadan2The lines between the Obama and Bush administrations appeared blurred this week after a lawyer for the government argued a ban should be upheld against the entry of Tariq Ramadan, a leading Muslim scholar.

A group of US civil rights organisations is suing on behalf of Mr Ramadan, the Swiss-born grandson of Hasan al Banna, the man who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928. He has been refused a visa several times since 2004 when he was offered a job at the University of Notre Dame, the renowned Roman Catholic institution in Indiana.

David Jones, assistant US attorney, told a federal appeals court it should uphold the ban or else the government would face a “quagmire” with others seeking reversals. “Consular decisions are not subject to litigation,” he said. When Mr Jones was asked what level of the government had considered Mr Ramadan’s case, he said “upwards in the state department”.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which argued against a judge’s ruling in 2007 that upheld the ban, said foreign scholars should not be excluded because of their political beliefs. “It’s disappointing to come here today and hear Obama administration lawyers argue the same sweeping executive power arguments,” Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU lawyer, said after Tuesday’s hearing. “There should be a clean break of the Bush administration national security policies.”

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US Islamic academy will ‘train Muslim children to hate and wage war’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Islamic Saudi AcademyA controversial private school for Muslim children is seeking to expand a campus in Fairfax County, a proposal that has made reluctant partners of neighbors concerned with the impact on traffic and water quality and critics who oppose what they say is the school’s radical agenda.

The Islamic Saudi Academy has asked the county for permission to build a state-of-the-art building on one of its two campuses, a 34-acre property near Fairfax City. The increased capacity could draw as many as 200 additional students to the 750-student campus each day, which has sparked concern among neighbors.

But at a public hearing last week, mundane neighborhood concerns were overshadowed by a longstanding dispute over the school’s teachings and the perception that it promotes intolerance of other cultures.

In addition, a federal jury in 2005 convicted one of the academy’s graduates, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, of joining an al-Qaida conspiracy to kill George W. Bush. It was one fact critics seized on Wednesday in an attempt to persuade the county to reject the school’s expansion plans.

“The Islamic Saudi Academy’s purpose is to train young and innocent Muslim children to hate and wage war into the future against our children,” James Lafferty, a spokesman for the Traditional Values Coalition, a church lobbying group, said during the hearing. His remarks prompted heckles and boos from teachers, parents and other supporters of the school.

“Don’t you sometimes have people who get in trouble with the law who graduate from school who go to churches?” asked Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, in an interview. “It is guilt by association, and I hope the commissioners will see that this is pure hate propaganda and driven by a political agenda.”

Washington Post, 23 March 2009

Islamophobia is a lucrative business – for Steven Emerson

Posted on by Bob Pitt

American+JihadIn a post-Sept. 11 America, inciting Islamophobia and attempting to marginalize Muslims is a lucrative business. Extremists like Steven Emerson seek to polarize our nation and world to continue profiting from the industry of fear.

Emerson uses methods of distortion, exaggeration and outright falsehood to demonize Muslims and urge fellow Americans to fear Islam. In a post-Sept. 11 America, inciting Islamophobia and attempting to marginalize Muslims is a lucrative business. Extremists like Steven Emerson seek to polarize our nation and world to continue profiting from the industry of fear.

He borrows terminology and tactics once employed by Nazi Germany to justify anti-Semitic hate to help create similar hatred of American Muslims in America.

In his talk, titled “The Islamic Threat,” Emerson is quoted by The Desert Sun as saying that “Islam’s ‘leadership and organizational superstructure’ threaten Western values” and that (radical) Muslims “want to conquer the United States. They want to conquer Europe.”

Try replacing the word “Islam” or “Muslims” with the word “Jews,” “Latinos,” “Catholics” or “blacks” in his quotes and note how repulsive and hateful those comments sound. So, why have we become desensitized to anti-Muslim bigotry?

Hussam Ayloush at CAIR, 19 March 2009

What was real reason for banning Tariq Ramadan from U.S.?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tariq Ramadan 5A group of academic and civil rights organisations has written to the Obama administration asking it to end U.S. visa refusals to foreign scholars apparently because of their political leanings.

Probably the best known of these cases is that of Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss-born Islamic scholar who was just about to take up a chair at the University of Notre Dame in 2004 when a visa already issued to him was suddenly revoked. Ramadan is a leading Muslim intellectual in Europe with a strong following among young Muslims who like his message that they can be good European and good Muslims at the same time.

The American Civil Liberties Union will plead his case for lifting the ban before the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York on March 24. Given the way President Barack Obama has rolled back several policies of the preceding Bush administration, there could now be a chance that Washington will simply lift the ban and let Ramadan take up the many invitations to speak that he would probably get from U.S. universities and think tanks. That would be a victory for academic freedom, but it still leaves one question unanswered.

This official explanation has never sounded convincing and it always seemed Ramadan was being punished for his political views, which are left-wing, pro-Palestinian and critical of the Bush administration. I suspect there was something else going on behind the scenes, either a political decision made by administration officials or a direct intervention by someone or some body outside the administration who was opposed to letting him speak freely in the U.S. Ramadan himself has blamed Daniel Pipes, a controversial U.S. commentator on Islam who welcomed the ban. Other suggestions are French government officials or intellectuals who dislike the way he promotes a kind of Muslim pride and ensures religion remains a public issue.

If the Obama administration does lift the ban, let’s hope it goes all the way and publishes any Bush administration paperwork explaining it, so we can see a more convincing explanation for keeping him out of the United States.

Tom Henegan at FaithWorld, 19 March 2009

US Muslim woman asked to leave line at credit union because of head scarf

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Kenza ShelleyA Muslim woman was asked to leave her place in line at a credit union in Southern Maryland and be served in a back room because the head scarf she wore for religious reasons violated the institution’s “no hats, hoods or sunglasses” policy, the woman said yesterday.

The incident at the Navy Federal Credit Union on Saturday was the second in a month for Kenza Shelley, and Muslim advocates fear it could become a problem nationwide as many financial institutions, intent on curbing robberies and identity theft, ban hats and similar items without appropriate accommodations for religious attire.

“This may be the tip of the iceberg,” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations. “There’s got to be a way to work it out so that this security concern does not lead to violations of constitutional rights.”

Washington Post, 10 March 2009

‘Vote NO Muslims’ slogan in LA County election

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Southeast Los Angeles County, which has struggled for years with public corruption investigations and bruising politics, is emerging from Tuesday’s municipal elections with a pair of black eyes. In the mostly Latino cities of Bell and Cudahy, candidates have been smeared as terrorists, had their cars vandalized and had bricks thrown through windows, and a former mayor was accused of raping a young girl in Tijuana.

Over the weekend, Bell City Council candidate Ali Saleh was alerted about fliers someone found at a local grocery store. Someone superimposed Saleh’s face on a picture of a man holding a sign that read, “Islam will dominate the world.” The flier also showed pictures of radical Iraqi cleric Muqtada Sadr, the burning towers of the World Trade Center and terrorists wearing black hoods and standing over a kneeling hostage, presumably about to be executed. At the bottom of the flier was a message to voters: “Vote NO Muslims for the City Bell Council 2009.”

The 33-year-old Saleh, who grew up in Bell, said he never expected his candidacy to lead to an attack on the city’s Lebanese American and Muslim community, which numbers about 2,000. Saleh was one of two Lebanese Americans running for council, along with Hussein Chahine. They lost. “Politics can get dirty. But usually they just say something about you,” Saleh said. “But when you come and tell people not to vote for any Muslims, you’re talking about an entire group. I was born in this country. I want to be part of this American democratic system. This is very upsetting.”

Los Angeles Times, 4 March 2009