Category Archives: USA

TV skewing Americans’ view of peaceful Islam, Muslim leaders say

Posted on by Bob Pitt

American Muslim leaders say they are facing an increasingly tough public relations battle as they fight to portray their faith as non-violent. Some Muslims say conveying a peaceful image of Islam is tougher now than it was after the Sept. 11 attacks, and they blame a daily barrage of negative media images.

Imam Hassan Qazwini heads the largest mosque in the USA, the Islamic Center of America, based in Dearborn, Mich. Qazwini said he and other imams have grown weary of being made to answer for every violent act committed in the name of Mohammed. “This has become a daily nightmare for Muslims,” Qazwini said. “We’re upset. We’re frustrated. We cannot control every Muslim. We cannot be held responsible for everything.”

Qazwini said he is confounded when Islam as a whole is blamed for the actions of individuals, while other religions are not. “How is it that when Pat Robertson calls for the murder of the president of a sovereign country that nobody said Christianity is promoting violence and murder?” Qazwini said, referring to Robertson’s call last August for the assassination Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

USA Today, 17 April 2006

Army report accuses Rumsfeld

Posted on by Bob Pitt

RumsfeldDonald Rumsfeld was directly linked to prisoner abuse for the first time yesterday, when it emerged he had been “personally involved” in a Guantánamo Bay interrogation found by military investigators to have been “degrading and abusive”.

Human Rights Watch last night called for a special prosecutor to be appointed to investigate whether the defence secretary could be criminally liable for the treatment of Mohamed al-Qahtani, a Saudi al-Qaida suspect forced to wear women’s underwear, stand naked in front of a woman interrogator, and to perform “dog tricks” on a leash, in late 2002 and early 2003. The US rights group said it had obtained a copy of the interrogation log, which showed he was also subjected to sleep deprivation and forced to maintain “stress” positions; it concluded that the treatment “amounted to torture”.

Guardian, 15 April 2006

See also Human Rights Watch news release, 14 April 2006

Negative American views about Islam ‘worrying’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Attitudes towards Arabs, Muslims and Islam in the US are troubling and have not been improving over the last few years, Arab-American academic Dr Samer S. Shehata has stated, quoting results of a number of opinion polls conducted in the US. “A high percentage of Americans hold negative attitudes toward Islam, and many Americans believe that Islam – more than other religions – encourages violence,” he told Gulf Times.

An Assistant Professor of Arab Politics at the Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies in the Edmund A Walsh School of Foreign Service (SFS) at Georgetown University, Washington DC, Dr Shehata had given a presentation on Thursday at the inaugural symposium of SFS in Qatar.

“Americans are generally more willing to impose extra security measures on Arab and Muslim-Americans and limit Arab and Muslim immigration into the US,” he explained.

The academic pointed out that although survey data about American attitudes towards Arabs, Muslims and Islam before September 11, 2001, is not readily available, one could reasonably assume that there has been a significant increase in negative feelings toward these groups and religion since 9/11.

According to the Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press, attitudes toward Islam have been holding relatively stable during the last three years with about 33-36% of respondents saying they hold unfavourable attitudes towards Islam compared with 38-40% who hold favourable attitudes toward the religion. Pew is a highly respected and non-partisan research organisation that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world.

Other polling has produced slightly more troubling findings. According to the Washington Post/ABC News polls, the percentage of Americans who hold unfavourable views of Islam has risen over the last three years.

Gulf Times, 15 April 2006

A useful summary of polls testing US opinion about Islam, though it omits this recent CBS poll, which found that 45% of Americans hold negative views of Islam, confirming the result of an ABC poll in March.

Posted in USA

Poll: sinking perceptions of Islam in US

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Although Americans believe they are better informed about Islam than they were five years ago, a new CBS News poll finds fewer than one in five say their impression of the religion is favorable.

Forty-five percent of respondents queried April 6-9 said they have an unfavorable view of Islam, a rise from 36 percent in February. And the public’s impression of Islam has diminished even more compared with four years ago. In February 2002 – less than six months after the terrorist attacks of September 11 – the country was evenly divided in its impression of Islam.

Americans today are also more likely than not to believe that Islam encourages violence, at least in comparison to other religions around the world.

CBS News, 13 April 2006

Posted in USA

‘Oriana Fallaci has enrolled in the Society of Jesus’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“… the Islamization of the West is neither a phantasm nor merely something feared: it is an intention and a fact that emerges from an objective examination of the evidence. Moderate Islam, properly so called, does not exist because there is no institutional and moderate form of Islamic theology. There are moderate Muslims, and some of them see things with a clear and long-term perspective. But Islam itself, or rather the institutional religious culture of the Muslims, has reacted in its encounter with modernity by entrenching itself in fundamentalist positions….

“There is, therefore, an objective convergence between the trend in Islamic theology and the ideology of the terrorists…. This is why it would not only be prudent, as cardinal Giacomo Biffi has suggested, to discourage Islamic immigration in Europe, it would be masochistic to encourage it without demanding reciprocation in terms of integration. Islam is not compatible with liberal democracies…. Unfortunately, open and liberal society becomes paralyzed when it encounters a closed and incompatible civilization…. in Islam, there is no foundation for tolerance in the broad sense that characterizes our secular societies.”

Two Jesuits assess Islam in a recent issue of the Italian Catholic journal Studium. Sandro Magister suggests that this is part of a shift (see for example here) towards a more aggressive approach to Islam on the part of the Vatican under Pope Benedict XVI.

Chiesa, 10 April 2006

Robert Spencer applauds this indication of “anti-dhimmitude and clear-eyed realism at the Vatican”.

Dhimmi Watch, 12 April 2006

EU lexicon to shun term ‘Islamic terrorism’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The European Union, tiptoeing through a minefield of religious and cultural sensitivities, is discreetly reviewing the language it uses to describe terrorists who claim to act in the name of Islam.

EU officials are working on what they call a “lexicon” for public communication on terrorism and Islam, designed to make clear that there is nothing in the religion to justify outrages like the September 11 attacks or the bombings of Madrid and London. The lexicon would set down guidelines for EU officials and politicians.

“Certainly ‘Islamic terrorism’ is something we will not use … we talk about ‘terrorists who abusively invoke Islam’,” an EU official told Reuters. Other terms being considered by the review include “Islamist”, “fundamentalist” and “jihad”.

The latter, for example, is often used by al Qaeda and some other groups to mean warfare against infidels, but for most Muslims indicates a spiritual struggle. “Jihad means something for you and me, it means something else for a Muslim. Jihad is a perfectly positive concept of trying to fight evil within yourself,” said the official, speaking anonymously because the review is an internal one that is not expected to be made public.

EU counter-terrorism chief Gijs de Vries told Reuters that terrorism was not inherent to any religion, and praised moderate Muslims for opposing attempts to hijack Islam.

“They have been increasingly active in isolating the radicals who abuse Islam for political purposes, and they deserve everyone’s support. And that includes the choice of language that makes clear that we are talking about a murderous fringe that is abusing a religion and does not represent it.”

Reuters, 11 April 2006

This is the sort of thing that reduces Robert Spencer to apoplexy.

Update:  Yes, predictably, Spencer is not pleased, particularly with the stuff about the concept of jihad encompassing spiritual struggle when, as he never ceases to tell us, “the word in the Qur’an is clear, and it means warfare”.

Dhimmi Watch, 11 April 2006

Giraldus Cambrensis also takes exception to the EU position on jihad: “I should here remind readers that the title of Hitler’s book Mein Kampf also meant ‘my struggle’.”

Western Resistance, 11 April 2006

Phyllis Chesler interview in Guardian

Posted on by Bob Pitt

phyllis chesler 2John Sutherland interviews US feminist Phyllis Chesler. “Chesler’s critics say the vehemence of her language points to Islamophobia. A piece she wrote last month for the controversial webzine Frontpagemag.com suggested that ‘a small but organised number of Muslim-Americans and Muslim immigrants … are currently seeking to begin the Islamisation of America’. It went on to compare the Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan to Hitler. The blog Islamophobia Watch suggested that this signalled ‘the point of total dementia’.”

Guardian, 4 April 2006

For our original post, see here.

For another recent piece on Chesler, see here.

Islamophobia – Deepa Kumar replies to critics

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Deepa KumarIn February, in response to the Danish cartoons crisis, Deepa Kumar published an excellent critique of the way in which a section of left and liberal opinion in the US had “accepted and internalized right-wing arguments like Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis which sees the West as a force for enlightenment and the East as barbaric”.

MRZine, 21 February 2006

She has just published “Fighting Islamophobia: A Response to Critics” in which she writes:

“I have received dozens of emails supportive of my argument that racism has no place on the left. Additionally, comments on the article posted on MRZine show that there are people willing to stand up against anti-Muslim bigotry. However, what is deeply troubling is that the majority of comments, presumably from progressives, are hostile to Islam and to Muslims.

“In what follows, I respond to these comments for reasons that should be obvious to any person of conscience: the wholesale demonization of Arabs and Muslims is racist and unacceptable, it serves to bolster US foreign policy goals in the Middle East, and giving even an inch to Islamophobia divides us and weakens our ability to build an effective opposition to the war in Iraq and the potential war on Iran.”

MRZine, 3 April 2006

Joe Kaufman’s anti-Muslim malice

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Kaufman’s malice leaves no Muslim out of its reach. He has condemned Muslims that any regular reader of their writings would know are peaceful people solely on the grounds that they articulate normative Muslim doctrine and participate in mainstream Muslim organisations. In some ways it is par for Front Page’s biased and often malicious course; much of its content consists of diatribes against Muslims and other immigrants, but Kaufman’s practice of flagrantly twisting people’s words, apparently not caring if his claims can be easily debunked, bring it to a new low.”

Yusuf Smith takes apart right-wing US blogger Joe Kaufman.

Indigo Jo Blogs, 4 April 2006