Yesterday at City Hall, Mayor Bloomberg met with Ahmed Sharif, the cab driver who was stabbed by a drunken passenger because of his religion. Despite the harrowing experience, and the lingering trauma from the attack, Sharif affirmed his love for NYC: “I feel like I belong here. This is the city actually [for] all colors, races, religion, everyone. We live here side by side peacefully.”
Netherlands: Christian Democrat leader rejects Lubbers’ criticisms, insists on pursuing deal with Wilders
Division within the Netherlands’s Christian Democratic Appell (CDA) party over dealing with the far-right PVV party of anti-Islamist politician Geert Wilders deepened Friday with a top leader insisting talks with the PVV should continue.
CDA parliamentary faction leader Maxime Verhagen ruled out suspending talks with the PVV – rejecting a call made the day before by former premier Ruud Lubbers – on getting the PVV’s backing for a minority government.
Verhagen said any suspension of the talks was out of the question. The work towards forming a Wilders-approved minority cabinet was in full swing, he said. “I expect that we will achieve a good result with which we can convince Mr. Lubbers,” Verhagen said.
Update: See “Increasing pressure from senior CDA members”, Radio Netherlands, 28 August 2010
RUSI slammed over terrorists in prisons report
A Muslim who served 20 years behind bars has slammed a report that claims prisons are factories for hundreds of home-grown terrorists. Former prisoner Danny Afzal, who works as a researcher for the Prison Reform Trust, hit out at the Royal United Services Institute journal after it published a report warning that prisons are radicalising Muslims.
It stated that Britain has more to fear than any other Western country from home-grown terrorists. According to its estimates, one in 10 Muslim prisoners in high security jails across England and Wales are “successfully targeted” by radical jihadists.
“Perhaps 800 potentially violent radicals, not previously guilty of terrorism charges, will be back in society over the coming five to 10 years,” the journal said. It warned against British “public complacency” and stoked fears that the possibility of terrorist attacks hangs over all major sporting events including the London 2012 Olympic Games.
Mr Afzal rubbished the report and warned that it would create major tensions inside and out of prisons.
He said: “I’m very disappointed by this scaremongering report. All the hard work to improve faith relations inside and out of prison are severely jeopardised by reports such as this. When so-called experts publish these misleading figures they never think of the consequences for Muslims and their families, who will be isolated as a result.
“The report is based on unreliable secondary evidence. I’ve visited prisons first hand and spoken to enough Muslims there to know that the report’s ‘facts’ are unfounded.”
Tea Party email reveals motive behind campaign against ‘Ground Zero mosque’
Writing at the Huffington Post, Ahmed Rehab of CAIR reproduces a email circulated by the Tea Party opposing the Park51 development. As he points out, it demonstrates that the campaign against the “Ground Zero mosque” is “motivated by an ideological belief that ‘Islam is evil and must be stopped; America is Judeo-Christian'”.
The Tea Party email asserts that the principle of freedom of religion does not apply to Islam, as it is “a religion [that] can and does demand world domination by any means, including violence if necessary”. The email demands:
“Should the first amendment protect the practice of a religion which has a hostile political agenda wrapped in cleric’s robes? Should the U.S. Constitution protect a religion whose focus is converting the United States from a Democratic Republic into a Theocracy lead by religious cleric’s who are antithetical to what made this nation great and what keeps it great? …
“Should ‘We The People’ give haven to religions whose main purpose it to install a system of Theo-political colonization? Shall the American people welcome with open arms a religion having untold millions of members demanding the beheading of western infidels? Shall the People of America grant safe haven to those who cheerfully work for the day Israel, the United States and all other non-Islamic states are finally eradicated off the face of the earth?
“These bothersome questions are not ones of religious rights, but rather of the will of the people. Will the people tolerate everything? Will ‘blanket tolerance’ be the downfall of the Judaic/Christian basis of the American society?”
Via LoonWatch
More scaremongering over ‘radicalised’ Muslim prisoners
Britain faces a potential “new wave” of home-grown terrorist attacks as a result of an escalating rate of radicalisation of Muslims inside the prison system, according to a report published today by a leading defence and security thinktank.
The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) says that up to 800 “potentially violent radicals” who have not been convicted of terrorist offences could be released from prisons in England and Wales over the next five to 10 years and will pose a significant challenge to the security services to identify them.
The estimate rests upon “prison probation sources” saying that one in 10 of the 8,000 Muslim prisoners in high security jails in England and Wales could be successfully targeted.
However, the Ministry of Justice disputed the figures in the report. It said last night: “The prison and probation service does not recognise the figure of 800 ‘violent radicals’ referred to in the report, nor do we agree that jihadist radicalisation is taking place at a rapid rate.
“There are only 6,000 prisoners in the high security estate, most of whom are not Muslim. The figure of ‘one in 10 of the 8,000 Muslims’ in the high security estate is therefore unrecognisable.”
So the RUSI report’s figures, which are evidently based on nothing more substantial than the subjective opinion of unnamed individuals in the probation service, don’t add up. Or at any rate the report’s authors know so little about the subject that they are unable to distinguish between the general Muslim prison population and those in high security jails. Unsurprisingly, the right-wing press doesn’t see the need to highlight this point.
The Mail performs its usual trick of running a shock-horror headline (“Muslim inmates ‘turning to terror’ as think tank says convicted terrorists are radicalising fellow inmates”) while burying the Ministry of Justice’s rejection of the RUSI’s claim at the bottom of the article. The Sun (“800 fanatical Muslim lags ‘waiting to hit UK'”) and the Star (“Muslim radicals bred behind bars says think-tank”) do the same. And, just to show that the liberal press isn’t immune to this sort of thing either, so does the Independent (“Muslims ‘being turned into terrorists in jail'”).
Neither the Telegraph (“Britain faces new terror wave”) nor the Express (“Jailed Muslims ‘converted to terrorist cause'”) bother to quote the Ministry of Justice at all.
Predictably, it is the Telegraph version of the story that is reproduced by Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch.
Myths and ignorance about Sharia
Protesters of the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero waved signs there this past Sunday with a single word: Sharia.
Their reference to Islam’s guiding principles has become a rallying cry for those critical of Islam, who use it to conjure images of public stonings and other extreme forms of punishment in countries such as Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan and argue that those tenets are somehow gaining a foothold in the United States.
Blogs are proliferating with names like Creeping Sharia and Stop Sharia Now. A pamphlet for a “tea party” rally last weekend in Fort Walton Beach, Fla. asked: “Why do Muslims want to take over the world and place us under Shariah law?” Former GOP House speaker Newt Gingrich amplified that point in a much-publicized speech a few weeks ago exploring what he calls “the problem of creeping sharia.”
The fact that the word has become akin to a slur in some camps is an alarming development to many religious and political leaders.
Michelle Boorstein in the Washington Post, 25 August 2010
France’s ban on the veil has nothing to do with women’s emancipation
If there were any doubt about the motivation for the ban on Islamic face coverings passed by the French national assembly in July, the Sarkozy government’s actions in August have laid them to rest.
The issue isn’t women’s emancipation, for all the pious rhetoric we’ve heard about equality being a “primordial value” of the French nation. It isn’t the danger that terrorists and robbers will hide behind burqas in order to blow up buildings or rob banks – the exemptions in the law for motorcycle helmets, fencing and ski masks, and carnival costumes quickly dispel that argument. And it isn’t about enforcing openness and transparency as an aspect of French culture.
Outlawing what the French call “le voile intégral” is part of a campaign to purify and protect national identity, purging so-called foreign elements – although many of these “foreigners” are actually French citizens – from membership in the nation. It is part of a cynical bid by Sarkozy and his party to capture the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim animus that has brought electoral gains to the rightwing National Front party and to disarm the Socialist opposition, which has so far offered little resistance to the xenophobic campaign.
Joan Wallach Scott, author of that excellent book The Politics of the Veil, writes in the Guardian, 26 August 2010
NYT interviews organiser of ‘Burn a Koran Day’
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — If building an Islamic center near ground zero amounts to the epitome of Muslim insensitivity, as critics of the project have claimed, what should the world make of Terry Jones, the evangelical pastor here who plans to memorialize the Sept. 11 attacks with a bonfire of Korans?
Mr. Jones, 58, a former hotel manager with a red face and a white handlebar mustache, argues that as an American Christian he has a right to burn Islam’s sacred book because “it’s full of lies.” And in another era, he might have been easily ignored, as he was last year when he posted a sign at his church declaring “Islam is of the devil.”
But now the global spotlight has shifted. With the debate in New York putting religious tensions front and center, Mr. Jones has suddenly attracted thousands of fans and critics on Facebook, while around the world he is being presented as a symbol of American anti-Islamic sentiment.
“Can you imagine what this will do to our image around the world?” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington. “And the additional danger it will add whenever there is an American presence in Iraq or Afghanistan?”
Mr. Jones who seems to spend much of his time inside a dank, dark office with a poster from the movie “Braveheart” and a picture of former President George W. Bush, appears to be largely oblivious to the potential consequences of his plans. Speaking in short sentences with a matter-of-fact drawl, he said that he could not understand why other Christians, including the nation’s largest evangelical association, had called for him to cancel “International Burn a Koran Day.”
He acknowledged that it had brought in at least $1,000 in donations. But he said that the interviews he had done with around 150 news outlets all over the world were useful mainly because they had helped him “send a message to Islam and the pushers of Shariah law: that it is not what we want.”
New York Times, 25 August 2010
See also Mya Guarnieri’s piece at Comment is Free, 26 August 2010
New York: drunk invades mosque, urinates on prayer rugs, calls worshippers ‘terrorists’
A drunk barged into a Queens mosque last night and shouted anti-Muslim slurs as he urinated on prayer rugs, cops and witnesses said.
Evening prayers were disrupted at the Iman Mosque on Steinway Street in Astoria when the unhinged man “came in with a beer bottle in his hands, clearly very intoxicated,” said Mustapha Sadouki, who was attending services. “He fumbled over to our rugs where people were praying” and then committed the despicable desecration, Sadouki said.
The man, identified by cops as Omar Rivera, also allegedly shouted slurs, calling the worshippers “terrorists.”
Two men managed to subdue him. They put him a back room and called 911. Cops took him to a hospital and later charged him with criminal trespass.
“He stuck up his middle finger and cursed at everyone,” said Sadouki, 43. “No one can pray now because the rugs are completely soiled. It was disgusting. He calls us terrorists, yet he comes into our mosque and terrorizes other people. This is a true hate crime.”
Via LoonWatch
Germany: Social Democrat attacks Muslim immigration
Thilo Sarrazin has never been one to mince words. The German central bank board member and former senior city official in Berlin has long been a strident critic of German immigration policies, even going so far as to say in an interview last autumn that immigrants sponge off the state, are incapable of integrating themselves into German society and “constantly produce little girls in headscarves.”
In the interview, which appeared in the cultural magazine Lettre International, he also said that “a large number of Arabs and Turks in (Berlin) … have no productive function other than in the fruit and vegetable trade.” In the same interview, he claimed that the Turks were “conquering Germany … through a higher birthrate.”
This week, though, the Social Democrat (SPD) seems to have outdone himself. German media outlets, including SPIEGEL, have published excerpts of his soon-to-be-published book on Germany’s supposed demise. As Sarrazin makes abundantly clear, that demise comes as a result of immigration. The bluntness with which he presents his ideas has kicked off a debate in Germany, and within the center-left SPD, as to whether Sarrazin has crossed the line into racism and whether he should be censured.