Karin Friedemann on the controversy over the Boston mosque.
Category Archives: USA
$287,000 awarded in Ramadan scarf suit
A federal jury has ordered Alamo Rent A Car to pay a Muslim woman $287,640 for firing her because she refused to remove a head scarf she was wearing during the holy month of Ramadan. The firing of Bilan Nur, then 22, came just four months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued the company for what it termed a “post 9/11 backlash,” alleging that Nur was fired because of her religious beliefs in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
U.S. District Judge Roslyn O. Silver ruled last year that the government had proven religious discrimination and Alamo had shown no proof that it had taken reasonable steps to allow Nur to follow her beliefs before firing her. That left the jury in the trial that ended Friday with only the question of how much damages to award, said Mary Jo O’Neill, the regional attorney for the EEOC. The jury in the three-day trial awarded Nur $21,640 in back wages, $16,000 in compensatory damages and $250,000 in punitive damages.
US media ignore ‘Christian terrorists’
“Mark Uhl, a student at Liberty University, was in possession of homemade bombs when he was arrested at [Jerry] Falwell’s funeral. He reportedly planned to use them against any protesters who might disrupt the festivities.
“Uhl had this to say on the social networking website My Space. ‘Christians, fear of death, fear of death. The fear of death shows you don’t believe.’ He added this eye opening statement as well. ‘God needs soldiers to fight so his children may live free. Are you afraid??? I’m not. SEND ME!!!’ Uhl sounds an awful lot like Osama bin Laden, who exhorts Muslims not to fear death when fighting in the name of their religion.
“While Americans have been told to fear Islam and all things Muslim, Christians are riding around with home made bombs. The Uhl story was mentioned by the media for only a day or two. The threat from Christians who publicly express a willingness to die for their faith goes unreported.”
Margaret Kimberley at Black Agenda Report, 30 May 2007
Who’s afraid of Tariq Ramadan?
Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism, which has become the bible of ex-leftist supporters of the “War on Terror” like Nick Cohen, has a major article in The New Republic devoted to attacking Tariq Ramadan.
Mad Melanie Phillips hails Berman’s “magisterial piece of writing” which she claims “not only manages to disinter the extremism that Ramadan goes to such lengths to conceal but he also comprehensively shreds the various useful idiots who have sanitised Ramadan’s thinking for public consumption”.
Mel expresses her outrage that “despite the fact that Ramadan was excluded from the US because of his suspected links with extremism, Oxford university has given him an academic berth – and the British government appointed him as one of its advisers on how to deal with … Islamist extremism. Berman’s article shows just how deeply the west’s collective brain has been put to sleep.”
Fox News uses Al Qaeda tape to whip up fear and hatred of American Muslims
Rather than analyze the seriousness of the threat or the effectiveness of the US war on terror, FOX News used a recently-released video tape from an American Al Qaeda member to foment hatred toward Muslims, particularly American Muslims.
On last night’s (5/30/07) Hannity & Colmes, Sean Hannity, in his scripted introduction to the discussion about the tape made by Adam Yehiye Gadahn, read, “(Gadahn’s) involvement with Al Qaeda may no longer come as a surprise to many Americans. Remember, a poll released last week revealed that 25% of young Muslims in America say that they would condone suicide bombings in defense of religion.”
‘America must not ignore a dangerous percentage’
“According to Pew’s data, one-quarter of younger American Muslims approve of the presence of skin-ripping, skull-crushing, organ-piercing violence in civilian life as a religious imperative – ‘in defense of Islam’…. According to Pew, the total Muslim population in America is 2.35 million, 30 percent of whom are between 18 and 29. By my figuring, the suicide-bomb-approving cohort works out to 183,000 people….
“Multiculturalism preaches that all civilizations are the same, all religions are the same, all peoples are the same. The Pew results, meanwhile, tell them something else again: Some people – some young American Muslim people – approve of suicide bombing in defense of Islam. Does this finding perhaps introduce a qualitative difference among civilizations, religions and peoples? That is, is there something more desirable about societies that don’t inspire and glorify suicide bombings – something worth preserving? Conversely, is there something about Islam our own society requires protection against?”
Diana West assesses the Pew Research Center poll of American Muslims.
‘New study shows US Muslims are extremists’ (unlike Debbie Schlussel)
“The message of the just-released Pew Research Center study on ‘Muslim Americans’ is clear … America hasn’t moderated Islam or its adherents. Islam has made America[‘s] Muslim residents more extreme, just as with its European counterparts. Wealth and education and opportunity and freedom have done nothing to moderate them….
“The study shows that even from 2000-2007, 18% of Muslims are still immigrants – significantly up from the 1980s. Why – after 9/11 – are we letting one in five Muslims in America in from countries and a religion that hate us? It isn’t news to me. But it should be disturbing, nonetheless, that we have a policy of affirmative-action immigration for the religion of 19 hijackers and assorted worldwide beheaders, homicide bombers, and rioters.”
US pundit Debbie Schlussel (herself well known as a beacon of moderation who renounces all forms of extremism) writes at debbieschlussel.com, 23 May 2007
Read the Pew Center report here.
See also BBC News, muslimmatters.org and Abu Aardvark.
The poll result that has been flagged up by right-wing US pundits is that, in response to the question “Can suicide bombings of civilian targets to defend Islam be justified?”, 15% of those aged 18-29 said that such attacks were sometimes or often justified, 11% that they were rarely justified, and 69% that they were never justified (overall the figures were 8%, 5% and 78% respectively). This is the source of all those headlines claiming that 26% of young US Muslims are potential terrorists.
However, when members of the general American public were asked in a November-December 2006 poll (pdf here) whether “bombing and other types of attacks intentionally aimed at civilians” were justified, 24% replied that such attacks were sometimes or often justified, while 27% said they were rarely justified, and only 46% said they were never justified.
Which, applying the same calculation, means that 51% of all Americans are potential terrorists.
The differences between Islam and Christianity
“Alvin J. Schmidt, Ph.D., provides extensive documentation from history, the Koran, and the Bible that there are indeed chasm-wide differences between the two religions – and between the societies where they hold sway. ‘Islam is not just a different religion’, argues Professor Schmidt, ‘but interwoven with it is also a very different culture.’
“In comparison to the Christian West, he shows, Islamic nations throughout history have been culturally sterile, technologically backward, materially impoverished, prone to barbarism and cruelty, and almost perpetually at war not only with their non-Muslim neighbors but with each other.”
Human Events reviews The Great Divide: The Failure of Islam and the Triumph of the West by Alvin J. Schmidt.
FBI agent threatened Muslim student at University of Calfornia
Nearly a year after a top FBI official said the agency does not monitor students at UCI, police are investigating an incident in which a Muslim student says he was threatened by a federal agent. The incident occurred Monday night in view of campus police and dozens of Muslim student spectators, who were helping to disassemble a large wooden representation of the wall that Israelis have built in occupied Palestine.
‘Know your enemy’
John Cassady invites readers of the Asheville Citizen-Times to test their knowledge of “radical Islam”.