Six years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans should distinguish between mainstream Muslims and the radical fringe, the leaders said. “Muslim Americans feel an increasing level of tension and scrutiny in contemporary society,” said Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, the largest Muslim organization in the United States and the convention organizer.

The image problems were among the topics most discussed by many of the 30,000 attendees. A fresh example cited was an open letter from two Republican House members, Peter Hoekstra of Michigan and Sue Myrick of North Carolina, that attacked the Justice Department for sending envoys to the convention because, the lawmakers said, the Islamic Society of North America was a group of “radical jihadists”. The lone Muslim in Congress, Representative Keith Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota, the keynote speaker here, dismissed the letter as ill informed and typical of bigoted attacks that other minorities have suffered.

Leaders of American Muslim organizations attribute the growing intolerance to three main factors: global terrorist attacks in the name of Islam, disappointing reports from the Iraq war and the agenda of some supporters of Israel who try taint Islam to undermine the Palestinians. American Muslims say they expect the attacks to worsen in the presidential election and candidates to criticize Islam in an effort to prove that they are tough on terrorism.

New York Times, 4 September 2007

The question is posed by the Christian Science Monitor. There’s an informed article by Jocelyne Cesari, professor of Islamic studies at Harvard, who points out that “recent polls show that Muslims praise democracy as the best political system. At the same time, they acknowledge the importance that sharia, or Islamic law, plays in their lives. This is where misunderstanding often occurs. Sharia does not refer to actual laws but to a set of moral principles and norms that guide Muslims in their personal and social choices.” However, in the interests of “balance” we also treated to the thoughts of one Bill Warner, director of the Center for the Study of Political Islam, who tells us that “Islam has two sets of ethics. One set is for Muslims and the other set is for kafirs; this is dualistic ethics. A Muslim should not harm another Muslim, but the kafir can be robbed, killed, or cheated to advance Islam.”

“Islamophobia” and the defamation of Islam are the most conspicuous forms of racism and intolerance today, and a global U.N. conference on racism planned for 2009 should come up with practical solutions to deal with them, an Islamic bloc representative told a preparatory meeting in Geneva Monday. The 2009 meeting is intended to review a U.N. conference on racism, held in Durban, South Africa, just days before 9/11, but the 56-nation Organization for the Islamic Conference (OIC) wants Islam to be high on the agenda.

“The world since 2001 has not remained static and witnessed new forms of racism and racial discrimination,” Pakistan’s representative to the U.N., Masood Khan, said at a meeting of the planning body, or “prepcom bureau,” according to prepared remarks. Speaking on behalf of the OIC, Khan told the meeting that “there has been a stark rise in hate crimes, discrimination, racial profiling and intolerance against Muslims in many countries.”

The Hudson Institute’s “Eye on the U.N.” project, which is observing the process in Geneva, described it Monday as the U.N.’s “latest anti-Jewish and anti-American extravaganza.”

CNS News, 28 August 2007