Category Archives: USA

A lone man’s stunt raises broader issues

Posted on by Bob Pitt

LEWISTON, Me. — On a hot July night, a few dozen Somali men were kneeling shoulder to shoulder in prayer at a storefront mosque here when the door opened and the frozen head of a pig, an animal considered unclean in Islam, rolled across the floor.

Men fled in fear. A child fainted. Some called the police and ran after the person who had rolled the head in. A suspect, Brent Matthews, was quickly apprehended and charged with desecrating a place of worship. Mr. Matthews, 33, said that the incident was a prank and that he did not know the significance of a pig’s head.

Now, weeks later, Somali leaders say the incident has left a scar on their community of about 3,000 immigrants.

While they admit the act was the work of one man, it has heightened simmering tensions in this overwhelmingly white, working-class city of 35,000, where Somali refugees started flocking about five years ago, after first settling in more urban areas of the United States. Many said they came here because housing was inexpensive and Lewiston seemed a safe place to raise their families.

While much of Lewiston has been welcoming, some Somalis here believe the head incident reveals an undercurrent of suspicion and lack of understanding about their culture. According to the Census Bureau, Maine is 96 percent white.

New York Times, 5 September 2006

Posted in USA

Massachusetts governor denounces Khatami visit to Harvard

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mitt RomneyGovernor Mitt Romney today ordered all Massachusetts state government agencies to decline support, if asked, for former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami’s September 10 visit to the Boston area, where he is scheduled to speak at Harvard University.

“State taxpayers should not be providing special treatment to an individual who supports violent jihad and the destruction of Israel,” said Romney.

Romney’s action means that Khatami will be denied an official police escort and other VIP treatment when he is in town.

Romney criticized Harvard for honoring Khatami by inviting him to speak, calling it “a disgrace to the memory of all Americans who have lost their lives at the hands of extremists, especially on the eve of the five-year anniversary of 9/11.”

Press release, 5 September 2006

But this doesn’t go far enough for Charles Johnson: “Unfortunately, Khatami’s security is already being provided by the same agency that authorized this outrage, the State Department, so Romney’s move is unlikely to make him forgo such a priceless opportunity to spread Islamic propaganda at one of America’s most prestigious schools.”

Little Green Footballs, 5 September 2006

The Clash of Civilizations doesn’t exist … yet

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“‘Seriousness’ has become the word of the day for the Islamophobic set. According to some of our more serious hawks, anyone who doesn’t buy that the liberal democracies of the West are engaged in a death-match with hordes of dusky Muslim fanatics is ‘unserious’ about America’s security and can’t be trusted. It’s the latest in a series of attempts to forestall any meaningful discussion of the causes of violent Islamist ideologies, much less how the United States should respond to them. It locks us into the global ‘war on terror’.

“Unfortunately, all too many otherwise sane people seem to accept the terms. But it’s hard to imagine anything more profoundly unserious than taking a dozen complex conflicts that originated in a dozen countries, stripping them of all historical and political context and lumping them together in an amorphous blob called the ‘Clash of Civilizations’. But that’s exactly what we’re talking about.”

Joshua Holland at AlterNet, 1 September 2006

Robert Fisk at the Chicago Muslim convention

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Daniel Pipes is a bête noire, as is Steven Emerson, a freelance journalist who grinds out article after article about the ‘American jihad’ for such august papers as The Wall Street Journal, which, by the way, more and more reads like The Jerusalem Post. Emerson and his work are taken apart by al-Marati and his colleagues in a widely circulated booklet entitled Counterproductive Terrorism: How Anti-Islamic Rhetoric is Impeding America’s Homeland Security. ‘Those representing pro-Israeli groups continue to intimidate and marginalise those who are critical of Israeli policies by claiming this is pro-terrorism’, al-Marati says with a mixture of anger and weariness. ‘This is to the detriment of America, to the detriment of countering terrorism’.”‘

Robert Fisk speaks to Salam al-Marati, director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, at the Chicago Muslim convention.

Independent on Sunday, 3 September 2006

US Muslims face growing suspicion

Posted on by Bob Pitt

American Muslims have blamed politicians and the media for the US public’s increasing hatred and fear of Islam in the five years since the September 11 attacks.

“The trends of Islamophobia unfortunately are worsening,” Abdul Malik Mujahid, chairman of the Council of Islamic Organisations of Greater Chicago, said at the start on the annual meeting of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) on Friday. “During the last five years the Muslim community has been scrutinized by almost all branches of the government and the media to the extent that more than half a million Muslims have been directly touched by this process.”

“They continue to face dehumanization and a great trend of Islamophobia,” Mujahid said. Mujahid cited George Bush’s recent remark that if terrorism is not beaten in Baghdad then Americans will have to fight it in their own streets as a remark that casts suspicions on Muslims in their own country.

Al-Jazeera, 1 September 2006

Bush backs off ‘Islamic fascists’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

bush legion speech“President Bush has toned down his war rhetoric after Muslim-rights groups complained his description of the enemy as ‘Islamic fascists’ unfairly equates Islam with terrorism. In his speech to the American Legion Thursday, Bush backed away from the term, defining the enemy simply as ‘fascists’ and ‘totalitarians’.

“He said the war on terror was an ‘ideological struggle’ with terrorists who ‘kill those who stand in the way of their totalitarian ideology,’ but he did not identify the source of the ideology. His only reference to Islam during the speech was in noting that the Muslim terrorists are distorting the tenets of the religion. ‘Free societies are a threat to their twisted view of Islam,’ he said….

“While the White House declined to comment officially about the dropping of the term ‘Islamic fascists,’ a White House insider explained that the president is sensitive to concerns raised by Muslim leaders. ‘The president never meant to imply we’re at war with Islam, but some took it that way,’ the official said. ‘It’s not a climb-down as much as a recognition of the concerns of the Muslim community.’ …  Washington officials have been careful during the war on terror to distinguish between Islam and the terrorists so as not to offend Muslims. The distinction has rankled many conservatives who see little difference.”

World Net Daily, 1 September 2006

Though it may have pissed off the neocons, it seems to me that Bush’s American Legion speech represented only a marginal shift in his rhetoric. True, he avoided using the precise phrase “Islamic fascists”, but the thrust of his argment was the same. He outlined the familiar claim that the US is not engaged in wars of imperialist conquest but rather in a global battle to defend freedom against Muslim totalitarians. According to Bush’s paranoid fantasy, groups as different as Hezbollah and al-Qaida form “a single movement – a worldwide network of radicals who use terror to kill those who stand in the way of their totalitarian ideology”. This is, Bush opined, “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century”.

‘Top 10 reasons Islam might not be a religion of peace’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“A passenger revolt occurred on a Malaga-Manchester flight. Vacationing Brits refused to fly with two Arabic-speaking men. This came in the wake of arrests of 21 British-born Muslims who were plotting to blow up as many as 11 trans-Atlantic flights. A spokesman for Britain’s opposition Tory party said the passengers panicked into ‘behaving irrationally’. Fancy that, not wanting to fly with members of a faith whose adherents keep trying to blow things up. Oh, how irrational!”

Don Feder at ChronWatch, 31 August 2006

Though, to be fair, Feder isn’t hostile to all Muslims: “Occasionally, we’ll hear from a Muslim not mired in the Dark Ages. Usually, they’re wondering where all of the other moderate Muslims are. One is Irshad Manji, a fellow at Yale University and the author of ‘The Trouble With Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith’. Ms Manji can author such a book while safely ensconced in New Haven. If she wrote a book suggesting – or even hinting – that Islam is less than perfection, while residing anywhere in the Muslim world, she’d be dead.”

‘Do we really need further convincing of the threat we face?’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Hezbollah’s black-clad legions goose-step and stiff-arm salute in parade, apparently eager to convey both the zeal and militarism of their religious fascism…. Meanwhile, we in the West who worry about all this are told to fret instead about being ‘Islamophobes’. Indeed, a debate rages over the very use of ‘Islamic fascism’ to describe the creed of terrorist killers – as if those authoritarians who call for a return of the ancient caliphate, who wish to impose 7th-century sharia law, promise death to the Western ‘crusader’ and ‘Jew’, and long to retreat into a mythical alternate universe of religious purity and harsh discipline, untainted by a ‘decadent’ liberal West, are not fascists.”

No, it’s not David T at Harry’s Place. It’s Victor Davis Hanson in the US neocon journal National Review.

NRO, 1 September 2006

‘Piggybacking on terror in Britain’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Pipes 9-11“Two days after British authorities broke up an alleged plot to blow up multiple aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean, the ‘moderate’ Muslim establishment in Britain published an aggressive open letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair.

“It suggested that Mr. Blair could better fight terrorism if he recognized that the current British government policy, especially on ‘the debacle of Iraq’, provides ‘ammunition to extremists’. The letter writers demanded that the prime minister change his foreign policy to ‘make us all safer’. One prominent signatory, the Labour member of Parliament Sadiq Khan, added that Mr. Blair’s reluctance to criticize Israel increased the pool of people whom terrorists can recruit.

“In other words, Islamists working within the system exploited the thwarted Islamist terror plot to pressure the British government to implement their joint wishes and reverse British policy in the Middle East. Lawful Islamists shamelessly leveraged the near death of thousands to forward their agenda.”

Daniel Pipes in the New York Sun, 29 August 2006

It’s only a few weeks since Pipes wrote, in response to the adoption of the term “Islamic fascists” by George W. Bush: “The use of Islamic fascists should be seen as part of a decades-long search for the right term to name a form of Islam that is recognizably political, extreme, and often violent…. While Islamic fascists beats terrorists, let’s hope that a better consensus term soon emerges. My vote is for Islamists.”

Front Page Magazine, 14 August 2006

So, according to Pipes’ warped reasoning, Sadiq Khan MP and the alleged plotters of terrorist atrocities are all proponents of “a form of Islam that is recognizably political, extreme, and often violent” – it’s just that Sadiq Khan pursues his objectives “within the system”.

The Muslim threat to Western universities

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), scene to a growing number of anti-Semitic incidents from an increasingly pro-Islamic campus, issued a threat to one of its Jewish students to cease his protests against anti-Semitism at the University. Gavin Gross, an American, had been leading a campaign against the deterioration of conditions for Jewish students at SOAS, which is part of the University of London. SOAS had witnessed an escalation of anti-Jewish activity, in both severity and frequency. At the beginning of the year, the Islamic Society screened a video which compared Judaism with Satanism.”

Front Page Magazine, 1 September 2006