Category Archives: USA

Stillwater, Oklahoma sinks into dhimmitude

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Easter – the most joyous and important holiday in the Christian calendar. But there was no mention of it on the front page of an Oklahoma newspaper in a town served by more than 70 churches. Instead, page 1 of the Stillwater NewsPress was dominated yesterday by a story about efforts to battle anti-Islam bigotry by the Muslim Student Association of Oklahoma State University. ‘You wouldn’t have known it was Easter at all according to the paper if it wasn’t for the full page Hobby Lobby ad situated toward the back of the paper,’ one unhappy reader told WND.

“To him and others who saw the paper on Easter morning, there was surprise to see page 1 dominated by a large photo of Muslims praying – a picture that illustrated a story about ‘Muslim 101’, a monthly educational series begun on campus because of negative stereotyping about Islam following Sept. 11. The classes began last November, but the Stillwater NewsPress featured the story on the holiest of Christian holidays yesterday.”

World Net Daily, 9 April 2007

Muslims on alert after hate crime

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Jerome Heath hasn’t heard of a hate crime in Clarksville in the seven years he’s lived here. But now he finds himself in the midst of one – a crime that is placing Muslims on higher alert.

Two hours before the Islamic Center of Clarksville held its 1 p.m. Friday prayer service, called Jummah, a Quran was found vandalized on the front steps. The front of the Quran, Islam’s holy book, read “Mohammad pedophile” while an expletive was written inside, smeared under two strips of bacon, according to a Clarksville Police report. 

The report labeled the incident a hate crime. Bacon is offensive to Muslims because they are forbidden from eating pork. “We were upset. Actually, some of us were outraged, but everyone was upset,” said Heath, a representative of the center. “We see it a lot on the news in Nashville (because) Nashville has a large Muslim population. But here in Clarksville – being a lot smaller (and) being very diverse with Fort Campbell – it was the last we thing we expected.”

The Islamic Center was founded in June 2005. Heath estimates that more than 40 Muslim families live in the Clarksville and Fort Campbellareas.

Heath said police told him they would contact the FBI and send out more patrols to monitor the center. Surveillance cameras have since been installed. “We have put our community on alert and warned everyone to keep their eyes open,” he said.

The Leaf-Chronicle, 10 April 2007

See also “CAIR seeks FBI probe of ‘hate crime’ at TN mosque”, CAIR press release, 10 April 2007

Update:  Islamophobes are outraged that such an attack should be categorised as a hate crime. “Is Clarksville, Tennessee, under Sharia law?”, Robert Spencer demands.

US Muslims fear Islamophobia following workplace controversies

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The recent controversies involving teetotaler Muslim cabbies and the Target cashier who wouldn’t ring up pork products touched off a barrage of comments on newspaper Web sites and blogs. The tone of some of these comments is frightening to local Muslims.

“Too bad our troops can’t kill them fast enough,” said one of the more than 900 comments posted on Buzz.mn, which first reported the Target incident. Muslim leaders said comments like this are on the rise, and they are calling it: “Islamophobia.”

“Islamophobia is a distrust or fear of anything that has to do with Islam,” explained Haris Tarin, director of community development at the California-based Muslim Public Affairs Council or MPAC. Speaking at a seminar in Minneapolis on Thursday, Tarin said the anti-Muslim rhetoric is driven by a “group of people who want to see the voice of Muslims marginalized in America.”

The vehicle used by these groups, Tarin said, is a new controversial documentary called “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.” Under a backdrop of 9/11 scenes, the Madrid bombings and the London bombings, the film intersperses Muslim prayers with Nazi rallies.

“The idea is to instill a fear among Americans about Islam,” said Tarin.

Minnesota Monitor, 7 April 2007

‘Anti-Muslim rhetoric’ cited after vandalism at Arizona mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Islamic Center TucsonOfficials with the Islamic Center of Tucson say a recent rise in “anti-Muslim rhetoric” may have spurred vandalism at the University of Arizona-area mosque.

Tucson Police Department detectives are investigating a Sunday-night break-in at the mosque during which someone smashed the lock on a side door, broke an office window, ransacked the office and wrote “Bush was here” in magic marker across a computer screen. Nothing was stolen, mosque officials said.

Mosque spokesman Muhammad As’ad said it’s possible Sunday’s break-in was a hate crime. “There’s an increasing obsession with Islam that’s been stirred up by a small cadre of people,” he said. “The obsession is growing because of events overseas. We deplore the hate speech going on. After all, Muslims, like Christians, are encouraged to love their neighbors.”

As’ad said an example of the “anti-Muslim rhetoric” was former CNN reporter Steven Emerson’s December lecture at the Tucson Jewish Community Center. Though he denied the accusations, local Muslims accused Emerson of being a disingenuous “fear-monger” who carelessly interchanges the words “Muslim” and “terrorist.”

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Relatives of interned Japanese-Americans side with Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Holly Yasui was far away when a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled last June that the government had wide latitude to detain noncitizens indefinitely on the basis of race, religion or national origin. The ruling came in a class-action lawsuit by Muslim immigrants held after 9/11. But Ms Yasui, an American citizen of Japanese ancestry, had reason to take it personally.

Her grandparents were among thousands of Japanese immigrants in the United States who were wrongfully detained as enemy aliens during World War II. And her father was one of three Japanese-Americans who challenged the government’s racial detention and curfew programs in litigation that reached the Supreme Court in the 1940s.

Now, Ms Yasui, along with Jay Hirabayashi and Karen Korematsu-Haigh, a son and a daughter of the two other Japanese-American litigants, is urging an appeals court in Manhattan to overturn the sweeping language of the judge’s ruling last year.

The ruling “painfully resurrects the long-discredited legal theory” that was used to put their grandparents behind barbed wire, along with the rest of the West Coast’s Japanese alien population, the three contend in an unusual friends-of-the-court brief filed today in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

In recent years, many scholars have drawn parallels and contrasts between the internment of Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the treatment of hundreds of Muslim noncitizens who were swept up in the weeks after the 2001 terror attacks, then held for months before they were cleared of links to terrorism and deported.

New York Times, 3 April 2007

Four years in Guantánamo – the man who said no to MI5

Posted on by Bob Pitt

guantanamo-bayBritish resident Jamil el-Banna, 44, knew Abu Qatada, a cleric accused of being al-Qaida’s spiritual leader in Europe.

In 2002 Mr Banna, a father of five from London, was seized by the CIA and secretly flown to Guantánamo Bay, after MI5 wrongly told the Americans that his travelling companion was carrying bomb parts on a business trip to Gambia.

On Friday, his companion, Bisher al-Rawi, was released without charge after four years in the US detention camp, after it emerged that he had helped MI5 keep track of Qatada. But Mr Banna’s incarceration in Cuba continues.

It has now emerged that only days before Mr Banna’s arrest, MI5 visited him at his home and attempted to recruit him as an informer, with the lure of a new identity, relocation and money. The Guardian has obtained this MI5 document in which the intelligence officer details, in his own words, that encounter.

Guardian, 4 April 2007

US right wing smears Pelosi as ‘subservient’ for wearing headscarf

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Right-wing bloggers in the US have been sneering at Nancy Pelosi for wearing a headscarf during her visit to the Umayyad mosque in Damascus – “yielding to a misogynistic culture’s expectations”, “behold Pelosi queen of the dhimmis”, you know the sort of thing. However, as one critic points out, Little Green Footballs et al are being rather selective in their Islamophobia: “Apparently they never saw Laura Bush when she visited al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.”

Think Progress, 4 April 2007

Plan for Muslim prayer in Texas Senate angers Christian right

Posted on by Bob Pitt

AUSTIN – The first prayer ever by a Muslim cleric in the Texas Senate will be delivered today – outraging some conservatives because it is occurring just before Easter.

The invocation will be delivered by the Imam Yusuf Kavakci of the Dallas Central Mosque at the invitation of state Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano. Shapiro is Jewish. Shapiro spokeswoman Jennifer Ransom Rice said the invitation was extended to Kavakci because Wednesday is the Texas Muslims Legislative Day at the Capitol.

Harris County Republican Chairman Jared Woodfill said the timing of the Muslim prayer outraged him. “I’m shocked that the day before the Easter recess that a Muslim is leading the prayer,” Woodfill said. “They should be having a celebration about the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Woodfill said the invocation should be delivered by someone who represents Judeo-Christian values.

Houston & Texas News, 3 April 2007

See also World Net Daily, which manages to accuse Yusuf Kavakci of being both “pro-Khomeini” and a proponent of Wahhabism.

Steven Emerson’s disturbing track record

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Emerson is not a professional journalist but an agenda-driven demagogue on a mission. Masquerading as an Islam/terrorism expert, his apparent lifelong goal is to banish Muslim Americans from American civil life…. It is an unfortunate consequence of post 9/11 life in America, where fear-mongering is a reality, that notorious career Islamophobes, such as this individual, are subjected to little scrutiny and virtually no credibility tests.”

Ahmed Rehab of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) takes on anti-Muslim bigot Steven Emerson.

Media Monitors Network, 31 March 2007

Muslim worker threatened in South Carolina

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A prominent national Islamic civil rights and advocacy group today called on the FBI to investigate alleged threats against a Muslim worker in South Carolina as a possible hate crime.

The 66-year-old Muslim worker told the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) that fellow employees at a BMW Manufacturing Co. plant in Spartanburg, S.C., have repeatedly made Islamophobic comments such as, 1) “Muslims are no good. They should all be killed,” and 2) “We will f**k up your family, we’ll kill you all.” Other comments allegedly disparaged Islamic attire and suggested that Muslim women be raped. According to the Muslim employee, one of the abusive co-workers confronted him in a facility restroom on March 31st and put a box-cutter to his throat, saying: “I’ll slice your throat and kill you.”

The Muslim employee says company officials did not take appropriate action against the assailant when the incident was first reported.

CAIR news release, 2 April 2007