Overcoming Islamophobia in U.S. Presidential Elections

inothernews:

Jon Stewart’s brilliant (as usual) take on the whole advertiser controversy around All-American Muslim.

If you can stomach it, here are several more. I bookmarked this sometime yesterday. I wasn’t going to post it here as I don’t particularly care for Buzzfeed, but these comments are vile and the deep-seeded racism and ignorance in this country needs to be pointed out, always.

thepoliticalnotebook:

This is from documents used at the FBI training base in Quantico. According to this chart, the more devout a Muslim  is (in contrast with how devout a Christian or Jew is) the more violent. Andrew Gelman points out the glaring historical inaccuracies in this chart on his blog (you’d think said inaccuracies wouldn’t need to be spelled out, but…). 

If you haven’t already, go read Spencer Ackerman’s pieces on the FBI’s training of counterterrorism agents and the descriptions and assertions made about Islam, violence, and terrorism. It’s some excellent journalism.

[Chart via]

newshour:

Voices From Egypt: ‘What Role Should Religion Play in the New Constitution?’

“Like many others, I was extremely surprised at the large numbers of Salafis that flowed into Tahrir Square in July. I know that they are not all extremists in thinking. Salafists are wide-ranging, but I don’t want this to be an Islamic state where we have to abide by strict rules. I am Muslim and I know Egypt has and always will have a Muslim identity. My fiancé wears the veil. However, I don’t believe that religion should impose on politics.”

Ahmed Hisham, Age 31, Electrical Engineer, From: Helwan, Cairo

FBI Teaches Agents: ‘Mainstream’ Muslims Are ‘Violent, Radical’

The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that “main stream” [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader”; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a “funding mechanism for combat.”

At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents are shown a chart contending that the more “devout” a Muslim, the more likely he is to be “violent.” Those destructive tendencies cannot be reversed, an FBI instructional presentation adds: “Any war against non-believers is justified” under Muslim law; a “moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.”

To be fair, Paul also dropped a few truth bombs that were met with boos.

kateoplis:

10 years after 9/11 | The Atlantic

The suggestion that Shariah threatens American security is disturbingly reminiscent of the accusation, in 19th-century Europe, that Jewish religious law was seditious. In 1807, Napoleon convened an assembly of rabbinic authorities to address the question of whether Jewish law prevented Jews from being loyal citizens of the republic. (They said that it did not.) Fear that Jewish law bred disloyalty was not limited to political elites; leading European philosophers also entertained the idea. Kant argued that the particularistic nature of “Jewish legislation” made Jews “hostile to all other peoples.” And Hegel contended that Jewish dietary rules and other Mosaic laws barred Jews from identifying with their fellow Prussians and called into question their ability to be civil servants.

Eliyahu Stern, Don’t Fear Islamic Law in America, a NY Times Op-Ed on the anti-Semitic forebears of contemporary Islamophobia. 

Gov. Christie Defends Appointing Muslim Judge

The Republican’s appointment of Muslim-American Sohail Mohammed to a state bench this week ruffled some feathers among some who fear the threat of Sharia Law, but when asked about those concerns, Gov. Christie made clear he had no patience for such “ignorance,” calling the complaints “crap.” 

“Ignorance is behind the criticism of Sohail Mohammed,” he told a reporter asking about the complaints that he may be inadequate to be a judge because he defended Muslim Americans who were wrongly arrested post-9/11. “He is an extraordinary American who is an outstanding lawyer and played an integral role in the post-September 11th period in building bridges between the Muslim American community in this state and law enforcement,” Gov. Christie argued, adding that he was “disgusted, candidly, by some of the questions he was asked… at the Senate judiciary committee.”

But it was a follow-up question on the fear of Sharia Law that set the governor off. “Sharia Law has nothing to do with this at all, it’s crazy!” he cried. “The guy is an American citizen!” He concluded that the “Sharia Law business is just crap… and I’m tried of dealing with the crazies,” adding with disgust and frustration that “it’s just unnecessary to be accusing this guy of things just because of his religious background.”

Juan Cole: When Extremism Learns to Blow Things Up

The revelation by CNN that Norwegian right wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik kept a diary in which he obsessed about the dangers of cultural Marxism, multiculturalism, and the “Islamification” of Europe will remind many Americans of the tactics of our own right wing (only these themes have been taken up by people much more mainstream in the US than Breivik is in Norway!) The movement to ban the shariah, the castigation of a progressive income tax as “Marxist,” the condemnation of multiculturalism as a threat to Western values, are all themes commonly heard in the US Tea Party and in the right wing of the Israel lobbies. […]

Breivik’s thinking is not new under the sun. Protestant Nativists of the “Native American” and later “Know-Nothing” (i.e. secret society) movement in the 1830s through 1850s in the United States felt exactly the same way about Catholic immigrants to the US. America wouldn’t be America if this went on. Their values were inherently incompatible with the Constitution. Their loyalties were to an anti-modern foreign court dedicated to reinforcement of political and intellectual tyranny. The hordes of them would take over the country before too long. The combination of black-and-white thinking and a conviction that undesirable change is coming very rapidly often provokes violence. […]

Catholic immigrants to the US, like Muslim immigrants to Europe, cannot in fact be characterized in a black and white way. Catholics in the contemporary US are politically and socially diverse, but on the whole are more socially liberal than evangelical Protestants. That is, if the Know-Nothings were afraid of an anti-Enlightenment religious movement, it would have been to their own, Protestant ranks, that they should have looked.

Likewise, making a black-and-white division between “Christian” Europe and “Islam” is frankly silly. The European continent is itself a fiction (it is geologically contiguous with North Africa, and there is no eastern geographical feature that divides it from Afro-Asia). Islam has been the religion of millions of Europeans over the past 1400 years, whether in Umayyad Spain, Arab Sicily, or Ottoman Eastern Europe, and Muslim contributions to European advances are widely acknowledged. 

As for contemporary Muslims in Europe, they are diverse. Overwhelmingly, e.g., Parisian Muslims say that they are loyal to France. About half of the Turks in Germany are from the Alevi sect, a kind of folk Shiism, and most of those are not very religious and politically are just social democrats (oh, the horror of Breivik’s nightmare– Muslim progressives in Europe!) That the few hundred thousand Muslims in Spain (pop. 45 mn.) , or the 4 million in Turkey (5 percent of the population) could effect a revolution in European affairs of the sort Breivik fears is frankly absurd, especially since Muslims are not a political bloc who agree with one another about politics and society. They are from different countries and traditions. Many do not have full citizenship or voting rights, most of the rest are apolitical. But even if they became a substantial proportion of the population, they would be unlikely to change Europe’s way of doing things that much. 

Worrying about the impact of immigration is not pernicious. Opposing leftist political ideas is everyone’s right in a democracy. Disagreeing over religion is natural. But when you hear people talking about lumping all these issues together; when you hear them obliterating distinctions and using black-and-white rhetoric; when you hear them talk of existential threats, and above all when you see that they are convinced that small movements that they hate are likely to have an immediate and revolutionary impact, then you should be afraid, be very afraid. That is when extremism learns to hate, and turns to violence.

Read on.

theatlantic:

Al Qaeda is targeting Muslim women with a brand new U.S.-style glossy magazine that offers home and beauty tips alongside testimonials from the wives of suicide bombers and female jihadists. The first 30-page issue ofAl-Shamikha was recently made available for purchase online by the Al Fajr Media Centre.

Al Qaeda’s New Women’s Magazine