Yes, says Yousseff Ibrahim.
Category Archives: USA
The Muslim presence in the racist mind
“In one of her last essays published in the United Kingdom, the late Susan Sontag compared the pictures of tortured Iraqi inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq with the photographs ‘of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880s and 1930s, which show smalltown Americans, no doubt most of them church-going, respectable citizens, grinning, beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree’. Sontag was amongst the few voices who opposed the collective transmutation of the transitory mood of anger after 11 September into hatred channeled primarily towards the Islamic worlds. She sensed the dangers of mobilising collective passions for political ends and the dichotomisation of the world into good and evil.
“It was that period, one remembers, that produced Anne Coulter’s demand that ‘[w]e should invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity’ and suggestion that, since ‘[t]here’s nothing like horrendous physical pain to quell angry fanatics’, ‘a couple of well-aimed nuclear weapons’ can transform ‘Islamic fanatics’ into ‘gentle little lambs’. Coulter was not the only one infusing public discourse with tightly packaged hate messages: Fred Ikle, for instance, alluded to a nuclear war that ‘might end up displacing Mecca and Medina with two large radioactive craters’; John Cooksey suggested that any airline passenger wearing a ‘diaper on his head’ should be ‘pulled over’; and Jerry Falwell asserted on 60 Minutes that ‘Muhammad was a terrorist’ and that he was ‘a violent man, a man of war’, a statement for which he later apologised. It was that period, in short, which made the Muslim Vogelfrei culturally and, to a certain extent, legally as well.”
Arshin Adib-Moghaddam in MRZine, 15 June 2006
Daniel Johnson on Forest Gate
Daniel Johnson offers his take on the Forest Gate police raid for the benefit of US readers:
“At a press conference on Tuesday, the two Muslim suspects [sic] were flanked by ‘civil liberties heavyweights’. They included Gareth Pierce, a left-wing lawyer who also represents Guantánamo detainees and sundry other extremists, and Asad Rehman, a former sidekick to George Galloway (founder of the Respect Party) and self-appointed spokesman for every anti-Western, anti-war, anti-capitalist cause. Looking slightly out of place among the shaven-headed, bushy-bearded Islamists was Canon Ann Easter, a dean of the Church of England. Canon Easter had turned her church into a television studio for the benefit of this leftist-Islamist media circus. Somehow, it does not surprise me that the local mosque had declined to do this. The Islamists disapprove of women priests, but they presumably see in Canon Easter what Lenin called a ‘useful idiot’ who can reassure the infidels. Unfortunately, Canon Easter is by no means untypical. England’s established church has a deplorable record of ‘internalizing the hatred of the West that defines the shared universe of radical Islamism and the revolutionary left’, as Melanie Phillips puts it in her book Londonistan.”
‘An insult to poodles’
With the lopsided 2003 US extradition treaty our judiciary became a rubber-stamping institution for Washington, Inayat Bunglawala argues.
New documentary denigrating Islam ready for release
A new documentary aimed at denigrating Islam and attempting to show that it is not a religion of peace but war and conflict is due to be released in three US cities on July 7. The documentary called “Islam: what the West needs to know” has been produced by a company with the improbable name of Quixotic Media and will be initially released in Washington, Atlanta and Chicago.
The 98-minutes film’s main idea, according to the producers, is that it is not correct that those who commit violence in the name of Islam misinterpret the religion’s teachings, because Islam is a “violent, expansionary ideology that seeks the destruction or subjugation of other faiths, cultures and systems of government”. The documentary consists of interviews, selected citations from Islamic texts and Islamic artwork, computer-animated maps, Islamic television broadcasts and footage featuring Western leaders. The producers claim that the film’s tone is “sober, methodical and compelling”.
Fallaci trial begins today in Italy
“Courtroom Jihad in Italy: the Fallaci trial begins today, no doubt with the mujahedin laughing behind their palms at the indignant compliant dhimmis.” Robert Spencer once again rallies to the defence of poor oppressed Oriana Fallaci.
Yes, that’s the same Oriana Fallaci who in a recent interview with the New Yorker threatened to blow up a mosque being built at Colle di Val d’Elsa, near Siena.
Observer boosts Ann Coulter
A correspondent writes: “Think it’s worth mentioning that the latest Observer‘s review section is basically a huge plug for Ann Coulter’s new book. Her visage dominates the front page and there’s a gushing two page interview inside. Her nauseating racism is presented as ‘controversial’ bravery, ever-so-witty, she’s-got-a-point-y’know – all the usual trashy excuses that petit-bourgeois fuckwits trundle out for bigotry. Seems to me that the paper has made a strategic editorial decision to line itself up with this kind of Liberal Islamophobia and is pushing it systematically. Hardly surprising given its Bomb The Darkies position over the war, but still worth noting.”
Quite right, we should have posted on this. See the Observer, 11 June 2006
Jihad Watch on Dr Bari
Newly elected general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, Mohammed Abdul Bari, has given an interview to the Daily Telegraph in which he puts over a characteristically restrained and moderate message. But this is just not good enough for our friend Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch. He takes it as evidence that Dr Bari “holds to the same goal as that of the Al-Ghurabaa types, but is just slicker about it”. As for Dr Bari’s suggestion that relations between the police and Muslim communities in London would be improved by the recruitment of 3,000 more Muslim policemen, Spencer comments sarcastically: “Foxes Guarding the Henhouse Alert.”
Guantánamo suicides a ‘PR move’
A top US official has described the suicides of three detainees at the US base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as a “good PR move to draw attention”. Colleen Graffy told the BBC the deaths were part of a strategy and “a tactic to further the jihadi cause”.
Ken Roth, head of Human Rights Watch in New York, told the BBC the men had probably been driven by despair. “These people are despairing because they are being held lawlessly,” he said. “There’s no end in sight. They’re not being brought before any independent judges. They’re not being charged and convicted for any crime.”
That view was supported by British Muslim Moazzam Begg who spent three years in Guantanamo. He said of the camp’s inmates: “They’re in a worse situation than convicted criminals and it’s an act of desperation.”
But earlier, the camp commander, Rear Adm Harris said he did not believe the men had killed themselves out of despair. “They are smart. They are creative, they are committed,” he said. “They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”
False prophets
“For a long time now, I have been meaning to take a cool, reflective look at Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji. The ordeal of keeping calm long enough to write about them and avoiding serious damage to my blood pressure at the same time was mainly what prevented me.”
Excellent post by Brian Whitaker at Comment is Free, 5 June 2006
See also the article by Laila Lalami that Whitaker recommends, in The Nation, 1 June 2006