Category Archives: USA

Columnist challenges women to wear hijab for a day

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Writing in the Louisiana State University newspaper The Daily Reveille, Shirien Elmasraya proposes to her fellow students that they should share her experience of wearing Islamic clothing:

“Ever wonder what it’s like for women that wear hijab – or the head scarf? I certainly get some crazy questions sometimes. ‘Do you take a shower with that on?’ is pretty common. And so is, ‘Do you wear that because you’re bald?’ That one’s my favorite. I certainly don’t mind the questions, and I am happy to answer them whenever I get them. But, now it’s your turn. I challenge the women on this campus to walk a day in my shoes. I challenge women to wear hijab for a whole day on April 25, 2008 and then talk about the experience afterward.”

‘Jihad comes to Wall Street’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“If you’ve seen Geert Wilders’s film Fitna, you may not have noticed a single headline amongst all the bombings, beheadings, and earnest expressions of Islam’s eventual world domination: Halal-fund: investments for Muslims. But the investment vehicles referenced are an essential part of radical Islam’s efforts to insinuate itself into Western societies in order to destroy them from within. And Wall Street, barely out of the woods from its disastrous run-in with sub-prime mortgages – and having lost one of its historic investment houses, Bear Stearns, in the process – is now chasing the very kind of ‘sharia finance’ against which Wilders’s movie warns, a business line that may eventually wind up being even more calamitous than the subprime-mortgage fiasco….

“Sharia is a reactionary-to-the-core medieval Islamic doctrine that claims control over every aspect of every Muslim’s life. It imposes such ‘ethical’ mandates on Muslims as the obligation to discriminate against women and non-Muslims; to kill homosexuals, adulterers, and apostates; to establish and maintain Muslim rule around the world; and to carry out violent offensive jihad against infidels. Notably, for those Muslims who cannot engage in physical jihad using force of arms, sharia requires that they support jihad financially. This is what sharia finance is all about.”

Alex Alexiev at National Review Online, 3 April 2008

Update:   Mad Melanie Phillips entirely agrees: “Of all the manifestations of the Islamisation of the west sharia finance is perhaps the most deadly, because it effectively sells the west to Islam.”

Melanie Phillips’s blog, 7 April 2008

Hijabs at a Harvard gym

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Ruth Marcus“It’s a measure of America’s multicultural journey over the past half-century that we’ve gone from ‘God and Man at Yale’ to Allah and Woman at Harvard. In a contretemps scarcely imaginable in William F. Buckley’s day, Harvard has closed one of its gyms to men for six hours a week so that Muslim women can exercise comfortably. ‘Sharia at Harvard,’ warned blogger Andrew Sullivan. A Harvard Crimson columnist blasted ‘Harvard’s misguided accommodationist policy.’

“Meanwhile, a separate controversy has flared over broadcasting the Muslim call to prayer from the steps of Harvard’s main library during Islamic Awareness Week. Three graduate students, writing in the Crimson, argued that the prayer sowed ‘seeds of division and disrespect’ by declaring that ‘there is no lord except God’ and that ‘Mohammad is the Messenger of God’. Harvard, they wrote, ‘should not grant license to any religious group, minority or otherwise, to use a loudspeaker to declare false the profoundly important and personal beliefs of others.’ …

“My reaction is more along the lines of: ‘Get a grip.’ It’s reasonable to set aside a few off-peak hours at one of Harvard’s many gyms. It’s not offensive to have the call to prayer echoing across Harvard Yard, any more than it is to ring church bells or erect a giant menorah there.

“I share the apprehensions stirred up by the more radical followers of Islam, with their drive to restore the caliphate and subjugate women. But I come to this issue as a member of another minority religion, Judaism, whose adherents often seek flexibility from the majority culture in order to practice their faith. As with Islam, my religion’s more observant believers endorse practices – segregating the sexes at prayer, excluding women from engaging in certain rituals – that I find disturbing, bordering on offensive. I have relatives who would shrink from shaking my hand. Still, I would defend to the death their right not to touch me.”

Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post, 26 March 2008

Cf. Debbie Schlussel’s comments

Qaradawi urges killing of Wafa Sultan (according to Robert Spencer)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Yusuf_al_QaradawiAccording to Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, Yusuf al-Qaradawi has taken time out from calling for gay men to be stoned to death in order to urge the murder of Wafa Sultan:

“… now he has directed his rage against Sultan, a fifty-year-old Syrian-American psychologist: ‘She said unbearable, ghastly things that made my hair stand on end’. Specifically, ‘she had the audacity to publicly curse Allah, His Prophet, the Koran, the history of Islam, and the Islamic nation’. He repeated that she ‘leveled accusations against Islam and the Muslims, and cursed Allah, His Prophet, the Islamic nation, the shari’a, and the Islamic faith and culture’. These are serious charges, and Qaradawi states them in terms that his jihadist minions will understand as meaning that she must be killed.”

Front Page Magazine, 25 March 2008

Even the MEMRI-edited transcript of Qaradawi’s Al-Jazeera broadcast provides no basis for this hysterical nonsense.

Author challenges Hollywood stereotypes of Arabs, Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

George Clooney asked him to work as a consultant on two films, including “Syriana,” and national news programs and networks such as “The Today Show,” “Nightline” and CNN have featured the author on a regular basis. But retired communications professor Jack Shaheen says it’s a lonely job taking Hollywood to task for the ethnic stereotypes it portrays.

His latest book, “Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs after 9/11,” examines Arab and Muslim images in more than 100 post-9/11 movies, and challenges industry heavyweights to shatter the villainous stereotypes that the cinema presents to both the American and international public.

“I remember going to the library looking for literature and there was nothing on Arab images in American popular culture. Zilch,” he says. “But there were books on images of Jews, women, blacks, Hispanics and Asians, and I just gobbled those up. I studied them all to learn from their strengths and weaknesses. The exposure to that literature and history helped me not only look at images of the past from a different perspective, but it made me look for commonalities in demonization.”

Through his research, Shaheen found the same formula was repeatedly being used by Hollywood and TV to denigrate minorities.

“In order for a stereotype to be successful, they can’t be like us. They can’t have children. They can’t be devout. They can’t value human life as much as we do. They are violent. They oppress their women. They are savages,” Shaheen says.

“When I grew up, it was Native Americans. Blacks. … We had the red scare with Communists. So we have all of these formulas from the past that sort of make their way to the present. Now it’s Arab equals Muslim equals the godless enemy Other. And it’s hard, because once we begin to get a fixed image of a people or a faith in our minds, it’s difficult to shake.”

Detroit Free Press, 23 March 2008

High school student threatens to sue over teacher’s ‘terrorist’ remark

Posted on by Bob Pitt

CHICAGO —  An Illinois high school senior is threatening to file a discrimination lawsuit against his school district after he says a teacher told him he fit the stereotype of a terrorist and humiliated him in front of his peers.

Maysam Amanishourbariki, 17, who was born in the United States and is of Iranian heritage, claims his Italian language teacher told him last semester that he fit the stereotype of a terrorist during an exchange in class over his clothing.

“Right after she said it, one of the students – a freshman – got up and gave her a high five,” Amani told the Waukegan News-Sun. “I was like, ‘Is this kid serious?’ They treated it like a joke, but it’s not a joke.”

Fox News, 18 March 2008

US paper distributes free anti-Prophet book

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Robert Spencer (4)A right-wing American weekly newspaper will distribute free copies of a book that insults Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and associates Islam with terrorism, Washington-based news agency America in Arabic reported.

The neo-conservative, Republican-oriented Human Events newspaper will distribute Robert Spencer’s The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion (2006), America in Arabic said. The book – regularly priced at 30 dollars – is released by Regnery, which has published a string of controversial neo-con books and is a division of Eagle Publishing, which owns Human Events.

Well-known British writer Karen Armstrong, author of Muhammad: A Prophet of Our Time, has said that the book is “written in hatred,” contains “basic and bad mistakes of fact” and that the author “deliberately manipulates the evidence”.

Al Arabiya, 16 March 2008

Why Shariah?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“… for most of its history, Islamic law offered the most liberal and humane legal principles available anywhere in the world. Today, when we invoke the harsh punishments prescribed by Shariah for a handful of offenses, we rarely acknowledge the high standards of proof necessary for their implementation. Before an adultery conviction can typically be obtained, for example, the accused must confess four times or four adult male witnesses of good character must testify that they directly observed the sex act. The extremes of our own legal system – like life sentences for relatively minor drug crimes, in some cases – are routinely ignored. We neglect to mention the recent vintage of our tentative improvements in family law. It sometimes seems as if we need Shariah as Westerners have long needed Islam: as a canvas on which to project our ideas of the horrible, and as a foil to make us look good.”

Noah Feldman in the New York Times, 17 March 2008