Category Archives: USA

The neocons’ lexicon

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Salim Muwakkil analyses the origins and meaning of the term “Islamofascism”:

“Many pundits trace the neologism to historian Malise Ruthven, who used it in a September 1990 article in the London Independent. But Ruthven used it to describe authoritarian Muslim states like Morocco, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Stephen Schwartz, the neocon author of Two Faces of Islam, insists that he is the first Westerner to use the term in the contemporary context.

“But the term gained its greatest currency in the lexicon of pro-war progressives Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman and Ron Rosenbaum, to name three. They argued that the totalitarian aspirations of theocratic groups like al-Qaeda threatened the libertarian freedoms that are the legacy of the Enlightenment.

“These polemicists were less concerned (at least, originally) with the geo-strategic issues that preoccupied the administration’s neocon warmongers, so their arguments had some resonance on the secular left. After all, how could progressives oppose the theocratic agenda of the religious right within the United States and not reject similar developments elsewhere?

“In Hitchens’ last column for The Nation, he wrote ‘the theocratic and absolutist side in this war hopes to win it by exporting it here, which in turn means that we have no expectation of staying out of the war, and no right to be neutral in it’.

“By framing the war on terror as a struggle between the liberal soldiers of the Enlightenment and the dark forces of theocracy, these progressives gave cover to warmongers with rationales much less lofty. In fact, one of the major ironies is that their support has aligned them with right wing religious groups with their own theocratic agendas.”

In These Times, 21 September 2006

Islam and European identity – Tariq Ramadan responds to the Pope

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tariq_RamadanTariq Ramadan argues that the problems with Pope Benedict’s recent controversial speech go deeper than the mere use of an offensive medieval quotation:

“…. the pope attempted to set out a European identity that would be Christian by faith and Greek by philosophical reason. Islam, which has apparently had no such relationship with reason, would thus be foreign to the European identity that has been built atop this heritage.

“A few years ago, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he set forth his opposition to the integration of Turkey into Europe on a similar basis. Muslim Turkey never was and never will be able to claim an authentically European culture. It is another thing; it is the Other.

“These are the messages that cry out for an answer, far more than talk of jihad. This profoundly European pope is inviting the peoples of the continent to become aware of the central, inescapable Christian character of their identity, which they risk losing. The message … is deeply troubling and potentially dangerous in its reductionism.

“This is what Muslims must, above all, respond to; they must challenge a reading of the history of European thought from which the role of Muslim rationalism is erased, in which the Arab-Muslim contribution would be reduced to mere translation of the great works of Greece and Rome.

“The selective memory that so easily forgets the decisive contributions of rationalist Muslim thinkers like al-Farabi (10th century), Avicenna (11th century), Averroes (12th century), al-Ghazali (12th century), Ash-Shatibi (13th century) and Ibn Khaldun (14th century) is reconstructing a Europe that practices self-deception about its own past. If they are to reappropriate their heritage, Muslims must demonstrate, in a manner that is both reasonable and free of emotional reactions, that they share the core values upon which Europe and the West are founded.

“Neither Europe nor the West can survive if we continue to attempt to define ourselves by excluding, and by distancing ourselves from, the Other – from Islam, from the Muslims – whom we fear.”

New York Times, 20 September 2006

Hirsi Ali arrives in the US

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Ayaan Hirsi AliThe Washington Post on Ayaan Hirsi Ali, newly arrived in the United States:

“Her story is told in a riveting new book, Murder in Amsterdam, by Ian Buruma, who is not alone in finding her – this ‘Enlightenment fundamentalist’ – somewhat unnerving and off-putting…. He is dismissive of the idea that she is a Voltaire against Islam: Voltaire, he says, offended the powerful Catholic Church, whereas she offends ‘only a minority that was already feeling vulnerable in the heart of Europe’.

“She, however, replies that this is hardly a normal minority. It is connected to Islam’s worldwide adherents. Living sullenly in European ‘dish cities’ – enclaves connected by satellite television and the Internet to the tribal societies they have not really left behind – many members of this minority are uninterested in assimilation into open societies…. Europe, she thinks, is invertebrate. After two generations without war, Europeans ‘have no idea what an enemy is’…. Clearly she is where she belongs, at last.”

Karen Armstrong – ‘the guardian of Islamic extremism’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch denounces the author of the influential Islam: A Short History as just another apologist for Islam, covering up its violent anti-western essence:

“The time for such disingenuousness is over, as is the time, if there ever was time, for the unseemly self-recrimination to which Armstrong is calling the West. The Muslim rage against the Pope’s call to eschew religious violence reveals an Islamic world in deep denial, as irrational as it is unable to take responsibility for its own actions. And in this it has Karen Armstrong and other Leftist haters of Western civilization and culture as willing accomplices.”

Front Page Magazine, 21 September 2006

Pope protests – part of Islamic plot to dominate West

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“… the Muslim uproar has a goal: to prohibit criticism of Islam by Christians and thereby to impose Shariah norms on the West. Should Westerners accept this central tenet of Islamic law, others will surely follow. Retaining free speech about Islam, therefore, represents a critical defense against the imposition of an Islamic order.”

Daniel Pipes offers his insights into the Pope Benedict controversy.

New York Sun, 19 September 2006

US Muslims say anti-Islam bias on rise

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Fox TVAn American Muslim rights group says the number of civil rights complaints made by Muslims in the US has increased by 30 per cent.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations’ (CAIR) said in the report published on Monday that there were 1,972 cases of anti-Muslim violence, discrimination and harassment in 2005, the highest number of civil rights cases ever recorded in the Washington-based group’s annual report.

The Struggle for Equality study said that was a 29.6 per cent increase from 2004’s 1,522 cases. Nine states accounted for almost 79 per cent of all civil rights complaints made to the civil rights group. California and Illinois recorded the highest number of all complaints with 19 and 13 per cent respectively, and New Jersey had the lowest with 4 per cent.

Arsalan Iftikhar, CAIR’s legal director, blamed the media. “We believe the biggest factor contributing to anti-Muslim feeling and the resulting acts of bias is the growth in Islamophobic rhetoric that has flooded the internet and talk radio in the post-9/11 era,” he said. “By all accounts, racial profiling, harassment, and discrimination of Muslim and Arab Americans have increased since 9/11.”

Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas congresswomen, said in response to the study: “We cannot allow xenophobia, prejudice, and bigotry to prevail, and eviscerate the constitution we are bound to protect.”

Al-Jazeera, 19 September 2006

Ministers preach against ‘evil’ new mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

POMPANO BEACH, Fla. — A coalition of ministers led by the Rev. O’Neal Dozier plan to distribute comic strip booklets about the Islam religion, which they believe “teaches evil and hatred,” in opposition to a zoning change that allows the Islamic Center of South Florida to begin construction on a new mosque in a predominantly black community.

The city council voted 3-2 in June to change the zoning of the proposed site from residential to commercial, allowing the Islamic Center to erect a larger mosque on undeveloped land on Northwest 16th Avenue.

Dozier, who is black, said he hopes the booklets he and his religious peers plan to distribute Saturday morning will “educate the public concerning the Islamic fascism.” Although the booklets are comic strips, the message they deliver is serious.

Altaf Ali, executive director of the Council of American Islamic Relations, called Dozier a “bigot” and “prejudiced.” “I think his information and knowledge of Islam is very limited,” Ali said.

Despite the ongoing protests, Islamic Center leaders said they hope to break ground on the new mosque within a year.

Click10.com, 19 September 2006

Muslims must submit to dominant Christian culture

Posted on by Bob Pitt

J. Peter Mulhern endorses Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus’s observation that “you will find things only evil and inhuman” in Islam, and draws the appropriate lessons:

“Almost nobody pauses to consider that Manuel might have something to teach us. Instead our conversation centers on whether the Pope is to blame for riling Muslims up and what he (and we) can do to mollify them.

“Our preoccupation with such trivial matters says something important about the chattering class – it is incapable of seeing our problem with Islam. Even the shock of September 11 failed to open many eyes, and the shock wore off long ago. Very few people who comment on public affairs for a living have the courage to face a long, bloody world war. Instead they pretend that our problem with Islam is vastly more manageable than it is.

“They pretend that terrorism is the work of a few demented individuals who have Hijacked a Great Religion for their own perverted purposes. That way they don’t have to deal with the grim reality that tens if not hundreds of millions of people want us all dead. Nor do they have to face the horrible truth that this urge to destroy us is as much a part of Islam as facing Mecca to pray….

“We are the heirs of a culture built on Christian foundations and we are not Muslim. Anything we do to placate our enemies will only make them bolder and more dangerous. Winning our war means nothing less than separating the Muslim world from one of the central tenets of its faith. We have to teach a proud culture a bitter lesson. We have to convince it that Islam can only survive in the modern world by adapting to the reality that the infidel calls the shots. Muslims have to accept that our culture is dominant over theirs.”

American Thinker, 19 September 2006

US right-winger backs Pope against Left/Islamofascist Nietzschean alliance

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Benedict’s speech is a work of enlightened genius. He has clearly laid out the differences between Christian culture and Islamic culture and the basis of the clash of civilizations we now experience as the War on Terror. His analysis also explains the underlying cause of the alliance between the western Left and the Islamofascist Right…. The Islamist reaction proves Manuel II’s 600-year-old point. The reaction is not one of anger but a calculated attempt to force the Pope to parrot the PC line on Islam….Islamists are not responding to any ‘offense’ to their non-existent morality. They are asserting the only ‘morality’ they have – the will to power. ‘Will to Power’ is a key element of Nietzsche’s philosophy – hence the root of the term, Islamofascist. Moreover the Western ‘Left’ is today guided far more by Nietzsche existentialist thought than by Marxist thought – hence the alliance between the Western ‘Left’ and the Islamofascist ‘Right’.”

Andrew Walden at Front Page Magazine, 18 September 2006