Category Archives: USA

Pope reaches out to Muslims after Mass snub

Posted on by Bob Pitt

One day after ignoring Islam and hailing the “great spiritual heritage” shared by Jews and Christians in his inaugural Mass, Pope Benedict XVI on Monday, April 25, welcomed progress in Christian-Muslim dialogue.

“I am particularly grateful for the presence in our midst of members of the Muslim community,” the pontiff said in a private audience with the leaders of other religions and Christian Churches, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

“I express my appreciation for the growth of dialogue between Muslims and Christians, both at the local and international level,” said the new leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

“I assure you that the Church wants to continue building bridges of friendship with the followers of all religions, in order to seek the true good of every person and of society as a whole,” added the 78-year-old pope.

In a homily marking his inauguration, Pope Benedict XVI paid homage to “my brothers and sisters” of the Jewish people, but failed to make any reference to Islam or Muslims.

Islam Online, 25 April 2005

Robert Spencer, who had anticipated a harder line on Islam from the new pontiff, is worried that this may be “a sign that this Pope will continue along a familiar path of dhimmitude”. He finds some reassurance in the thought that the Pope’s call on “those who profess to belong to religious traditions” to follow the path of peace “might have been a pointed declaration to his audience that they need to clean their own house”.

Dhimmi Watch, 25 April 2005

‘Washington finally gets it on radical Islam’ – Pipes is pleased

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Does the Bush administration really believe, as its leadership has kept repeating since right after 9/11, that Islam is a ‘religion of peace’ not connected to the problem of terrorism?” Daniel Pipes asks.

Front Page Magazine, 25 April 2005

Pipes takes comfort in the news that “America’s highest officials widely agree that the country’s ‘greatest ideological foe is a highly politicized form of radical Islam and that Washington and its allies cannot afford to stand by’ as it gains in strength. To fight this ideology, the U.S. government now promotes a non-radical interpretation of Islam.”

But Pipes is still not entirely convinced: “Working to change how Muslims understand their religion, of course, raises some difficult implications. It is one thing to want to help moderate Muslims and quite another to locate them.”

All the same, this marks a bit of a retreat from Pipes’ recent denunciations of the Bush administration for going soft on Islam. Is he perhaps angling for a reappointment to the USIP board?

US guards at Guantanamo tortured me, says UK man

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A British resident has claimed he was tortured by US guards at Guantanamo Bay, suffering violent sexual assaults, near drowning and an attack in which he was blinded. The Independent on Sunday has been given a detailed account from Omar Deghayes of repeated abuse by American and Pakistani interrogators over the past three years including electric shocks and sodomy by US guards.

The allegations, made by human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, have persuaded British ministers to take up Mr Deghayes’s case. In some of the most disturbing allegations to emerge from Guantanamo, Mr Deghayes also accuses US and Pakistani interrogators of beating him repeatedly since his arrest three years ago, smearing his face with human excrement, starving him of food, and withdrawing light and clothing.

Independent on Sunday, 24 April 2005

US Muslims sue government over border detentions

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Five US Muslims sued the US Department of Homeland Security, accusing the US border agents of rights violation and racial profiling.

The suit, filed in US District Court on Wednesday, April 20, named Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff among four defendants in what the New York Civil Liberties Union called a case of profiling, according to Reuters on Thursday, April 21.

The three men and two women said the agents who detained them as they returned from an Islamic conference in Canada violated their rights, held them, along with dozens of other US Muslims. They added that they were interrogated, photographed and fingerprinted against their will in December 2004.

The lawsuit alleges that the plaintiffs, who were later released without charge, were singled out after telling customs officials they had attended a “Reviving the Islamic Spirit” conference in Toronto.

The suit does not seek monetary damages, but asks for a declaration that the government action was unlawful, an injunction against further enforcement of such policies and practices and erasing from all federal databases of information obtained from the plaintiffs, Reuters reported.

Islam Online, 21 April 2005

See also alt.muslim, 22 April 2005

Islamophobes fall out

Posted on by Bob Pitt

When it comes to rabid anti-Muslim propaganda, you might imagine it couldn’t get much worse than Jihad Watch. But you’d be wrong. There’s a website where Robert Spencer and his chums are regarded as whingeing liberals who have succumbed to Islamophilia.

The site is at FaithFreedom.org and recently one of its main contributors, Ali Sina, submitted an article to Jihad Watch which argued: “In the 1300s, the most deadly plague, dubbed as Black Death swept through Europe killing more than 25 million people – one-forth [sic] of the continent’s population…. Today we are facing a not very different situation. Islam is like bubonic plague.” (See here)

Continue reading →

‘Europe’s mujahideen: mass immigration meets global terrorism’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“… in Western Europe, the two trends of mass immigration and global terrorism intersect visibly and dangerously. For more than a decade the region has formed a haven for Middle Eastern ‘dissidents’, often a.k.a. mujahideen, and for graduate students like Mohammed Atta. But these visitors or first generation immigrants are by no means the only source of concern. The murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by a Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent served notice for a new generation of mujahideen born and bred in Europe and the object of focused al Qaeda post-9-11 and post-Iraq recruitment.”

Robert S. Leiken, Center for Immigration Studies, April 2005

Robert Spencer applauds this “very informative piece”: Dhimmi Watch, 22 April 2005

CAIR calls for FBI probe of mosque vandalism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A prominent national Islamic civil rights and advocacy group today called on the FBI to investigate recent vandalism at a Colorado mosque as a possible hate crime.

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said a brick was thrown through a window of the Fort Collins Islamic Center on Sunday. Some community members say the attack is suspicious because it followed a forum Saturday to introduce a “Not In Our Town” chapter in that city. “Not In Our Town” is a group formed to fight hate groups. Police say surveillance cameras captured the crime. Local law enforcement authorities have not treated the vandalism as a hate crime because there was no message left at the scene by the perpetrators.

“It has been our experience that anti-Muslim bigots do not always leave a calling-card,” said CAIR Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper. “We urge the FBI to devote its considerable resources to assist local authorities in this case.”

CAIR news report, 20 April 2005

 

Pope Benedict XVI: Enemy of Jihad

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“In choosing Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to succeed Pope John Paul II as Pope Benedict XVI, the Catholic Church has cast a vote for the survival of Europe and the West. ‘Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century,’ historian Bernard Lewis predicted not long ago; however, judging from the writings of the new Pope, he is not likely to be sanguine about this transition. For one thing, the new Pope seems to be aware of the grave danger Europeans face: he has called upon Europe to recover its Christian roots ‘if it truly wants to survive’.”

Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch holds out hope that the new Pope may mark an improvement on his predecessor who “kissed the Qur’an and pursued a consistent line of conciliation toward the Islamic world”.

Front Page Magazine, 20 April 2005

Melanie Phillips welcomes this as “a typically informed and thoughtful piece by Robert Spencer”. She agrees that “it is only if Christianity manages to retake the lost continent of Europe and revive its abandoned faith that the moral relativism behind whose banner Europe is marching steadily towards the cultural precipice will be defeated – and with it the colonising ambitions of Islam to fill the void”.

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 20 April 2005

For Muslim concerns about the Pope’s vision of a “Christian Europe”, see Islam Online, 20 April 2005

This Pope is Catholic

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Powerline: The real beef with Ratzinger, then, isn’t that he’s a threat to liberal democracy; it’s the fact that he agrees with the substantive tenets of his religion, including those regarding controversial social issues, and takes them seriously. Like it or not, this Pope is Catholic.

Aardvark: The real beef with Qaradawi, then, isn’t that he’s a threat to liberal democracy; it’s the fact that he agrees with the substantive tenets of his religion, including those regarding controversial social issues, and takes them seriously. Like it or not, this Islamist is Muslim.

The ever-excellent Marc Lynch exposes Western double-think when it comes to Catholicism and Islam.

Abu Aardvark, 19 April 2005