Currently viewing the tag: “AntiMuslim”
There’s been an explosion of both state and federal money flowing into counterterrorism training for law enforcement in the years since Sept. 11. But it is becoming increasingly clear that some of the experts who are providing counterterrorism training for local law enforcement officers are sometimes not well vetted and have provided training which is based on bias against all Muslims and relies on falsehoods and exaggerations.
Meg Stalcup and Joshua Craze reported in Washington Monthly on the “self-styled experts” who have rushed into the void due to the lack of trained counterterrorism instructors and benefited from the tremendous amount of money and lack of universal oversight of such programs. The result is local law enforcement in some cases receiving training that is subpar at best, and dangerously misleading at worst.
A separate recent report from Political Research Associates (PRA) found that $ 1.67 billion in federal funds went to states in 2010 for the purpose of counter-terrorism training and that there was little oversight of the content of the training sessions. The report found there were “inadequate mechanisms to ensure quality and consistency in terrorism preparedness training provided by private vendors; public servants are regularly presented with misleading, inflammatory, and dangerous information about the nature of the terror threat through highly politicized seminars, industry conferences, trade publications, and electronic media.”
“In place of sound skills training and intelligence briefings, a vocal and influential sub-group of the private counterterrorism training industry markets conspiracy theories about secret jihadi campaigns to replace the U.S. Constitution with Sharia law, and effectively impugns all of Islam — a world religion with 1.3 billion adherents — as inherently violent and even terroristic,” according to the report.
One of the offices that gives out federal funds for some counterterrorism training is the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS). In an interview with TPM at his office in D.C. last week, COPS director Bernard Melekian said that the mechanisms for screening how the federal funds being sent to local police vary from office to office.
“I would imagine — and I don’t know this — that there’s going to be a review of exactly how instructors and curriculum are [vetted]. When I read that article, I was concerned about it. I would imagine there’s going to be a review,” Melekian said.
COPS is responsible for just a small part of the federal funds that go towards counterterrorism training sessions. Most of the training dollars that COPS dishes out for training purposes is routed through Regional Community Policing Institutes, Melekian said. The COPS office emphasizes the benefits that a community policing approach has for to counterterrorism efforts.
Melekian, who was the police chief for the City of Pasadena, Calif. for over 13 years before he was appointed to the COPS office by President Barack Obama in 2009, said that maintaining a close working relationship with Muslim communities was important in order for the U.S. to combat terrorism.
“Quite frankly, my role model was Sheriff Lee Baca of Los Angeles County, who probably more than anyone else, recognized that if not handled properly we could conceivably have recreated the experience of Japanese-Americans all over again,” Melekian said of Baca, who was the Democratic witness at Peter King’s Muslim radicalization hearing last week.
“To say that an American community — the entire community — is responsible for the actions of a select few, I find if it wasn’t so frightening it would be ridiculous,” Melekian said.
He said that from what he’s seen, a close relationship between law enforcement and the Muslim community can pay off.
“The only al-Qaeda cell that I know of for example in Southern California was rolled up behind the Torrance Police Department’s investigation into a series of gas station robberies,” Melekian said.
But training that emphasizes partnership, respect and communication with the Muslim community doesn’t appear to be the type of training that some local beat cops are getting. The Washington Monthly story centers on Sam Kharoba, who fell into counterterrorism teaching in 2002 when a Community Oriented Policing Services Program in Louisiana invited him to speak even though he “had no professional experience in law enforcement, no academic training in terrorism or national security, and is not himself a Muslim.”
Like Ramon Montijo, a counterterrorism trainer mentioned in a Washington Post story who claimed that most Muslims “want to make this world Islamic” and have an Islamic flag fly over the White House, the counterterrorism trainers interviewed for the Washington Monthly story see a “total, civilizational war — a conflict against Islam that involves everyone, without distinction between combatant and noncombatant, law enforcement and military.”
The PRA report specifically looks at International Counter-Terrorism Officers Association (ICTOA), Security Solutions International, LLC (SSI) and The Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies (CI Centre) and says that trainers “identify a range of constitutionally-protected activities, including religious practices and free speech, as the most dangerous threat.”
One of the speakers at SSI’s 2010 convention, according to the PRA report, was David Gaubatz, the man who had his son grow a beard and infiltrate the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). He claimed in his SSI speech that “CAIR is a terrorist organization” (a claim that seems to have been adopted by at least one member of Congress). Another trainer, ICTOA’s Walid Shoebat, suggests Islam is the fake religion of the “anti-Christ” and implies that Muslims bear the “Mark of the Beast” in various YouTube videos according to the PRA report.
The authors of the Washington Monthly story suggest that “a first step would be for the federal government to issue voluntary guidelines on how states can best reform their oversight of counterterrorism training.”
Fakhruddin Ahmed starts out well in this op-ed, explaining the genesis of “Islamophobia” with a greater degree of honesty than most Muslim spokesmen in the U.S. have ever displayed. But he soon enough resorts to the familiar Islamic supremacist tactic of evading responsibility, pointing fingers at non-Muslims who dare to point out how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism and to make recruits among peaceful Muslims. By the end of the piece he has run off the rails entirely, flinging wild charges of racism and bigotry, and blaming Pamela Geller and me for the fact that non-Muslims in America are looking at Islam and Muslims with open eyes, instead of buying into the full-blown campaign of deception, disinformation, and soothing lies that the mainstream media continues to pursue. He never connects up the first half of his piece with the second — in other words, he never explains why Islamic jihad terrorism and Islamic supremacism are real, and yet any resistance to them constitutes racism and hatred.
Yeah, sure, Fakhruddin — as if Pamela Geller and I inspired Khalid Aldawsari, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Lubbock, Texas, or Muhammad Hussain, the would-be jihad bomber in Baltimore, or Mohamed Mohamud, the would-be jihad bomber in Portland, or Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood jihad mass-murderer, or Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square jihad mass-murderer, or Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the Arkansas military recruiting station jihad murderer, or Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas airplane jihad bomber, or Muhammad Atta, Anjem Chaudary, Omar Bakri, Abu Hamza, Abu Bakar Bashir, Zawahiri, Zarqawi, bin Laden and all the rest.
The Times of Trenton should be ashamed to print such a farrago, but it isn’t really anything special — just another mainstream media outlet printing a deceptive, disingenuous piece claiming victim status for Muslims in order to deflect attention away from jihad terror and Islamic supremacism.
“Examining a painful history fraught with transgressions,” by Fakhruddin Ahmed in the Times of Trenton, March 12 (thanks to James):
There are cogent reasons why roughly half of Americans, according to polls, harbor an unfavorable opinion of Islam. Besides perpetrating the most horrendous crime on American soil on 9/11, Muslims have been responsible for some pretty ugly incidents lately.
The Ayatollah Khomeini challenged one of the West’s core values, freedom of speech, by issuing a “fatwa,” or religious decree, in 1989, for the murder of Salman Rushdie over his controversial book, “The Satanic Verses.”
The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were quickly followed by Muslim terror attacks in Bali, Indonesia (2002), Madrid (2004), London (2005) and Mumbai (2008). And when some Muslims went berserk, burning and boycotting in reaction to the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2006, the rest of the world held its collective breath in consternation.
Muslim terrorists’ attempts to blow up planes, airports, tunnels and subways in America were thwarted. And if Qur’ans had actually been burned by Pastor Terry Jones in Florida last fall, as he threatened to do, some Muslims would have reacted by creating mayhem. Clearly, there is a less-enlightened, fanatically violent underbelly at work in the name of Islam. Understandably, the Judeo-Christian polemic against Islam centers on terrorism.
Submerged in an all-encompassing anti-Muslim hysteria, when non-Muslim Americans see signs of increasing Muslim presence around them, they feel besieged by an intimidating culture. That America’s complexion is transforming from shades of white to brown is difficult for many Americans to stomach; when some of those brown faces belong to Muslims, the transformation becomes downright frightening.
With no prominent Muslim-American voice to assuage those apprehensions, fear begets fear, spawning more virulent anti-Muslim vitriol.
Are Muslims, their religion and their culture a mortal threat to America? Is this the vaunted “Clash of Civilizations” between the West and Islam, as Harvard’s Samuel Huntington had predicted in 1993?
Civilizational narratives are rarely one-dimensional. Western democracies, especially Britain and France, exploited and repressed most Muslim nations as colonial powers over the centuries, souring Muslim taste for democracy. Conceivably, America’s more recent interventions in the Islamic world are fueling Americaphobia. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, with the concomitant collateral death of thousands of civilians, have exacerbated Muslim-American relations, as have the al Qaeda-seeking drone attacks inside Pakistan that inadvertently kill civilians and whose legality stands on shaky grounds.
We may consider ourselves to be the “good guys” eliminating the “bad guys” before they attack us; but to the child of the civilian we kill in Afghanistan, we are the bad guys. He or she may vow to exact vengeance.
Quid pro quo is in vogue in international relations. America garnered the Muslim world’s gratitude when it rushed to bolster the Afghans after the Soviet invasion of 1979 (which led to Muslim participation in Gulf War I in 1991), and liberated the Bosnians (1995) and the Kosovars (1999) from the Serbs. Muslims were not thrilled, however, when America attacked Afghanistan in 2001 (and has occupied it since); the neoconservatives fabricated WMD “evidence” to facilitate President George W. Bush’s attack of Iraq in 2003; and America started waging an undeclared war inside Pakistan.
Excluded from the debate about them inside America, and reduced to passive observers, Muslim-Americans are chagrined at the spectacle unfolding right before their eyes. Right-wing Republicans see no downside to demonizing the Muslims. It energizes their base, carries no political penalty, and forces the Democrats to defend a progressively unpopular minority.
Democratic defense of Muslim-Americans has not been stellar either, perhaps because they, too, secretly covet the bigot vote. Deprecators realize that Muslim-Americans, who number only 7 million, cannot retaliate electorally, making Muslim-baiting a win-win proposition.
Sarah Palin tweeted last July, imploring “peaceful Muslims” to “refudiate” the proposed New York City mosque near Ground Zero. Other Republicans and some Democrats jumped on the bandwagon, attaching intellectual heft to an originally ignorant far-right-fringe viewpoint.
A “moderate” Muslim is being redefined as one who condemns on demand. Detractors are not interested in Muslim points of view; they want Muslim condemnation of Islam. For them, Islam-bashing is the new normal, the new acceptable form of racism. If any other ethnic or religious group was so maliciously mauled, the attackers would be branded incurable racists.
What astonishes Muslim-Americans is that those hurling imprecations at them on television, on the radio and in the blogosphere do not seem to care that Muslim-Americans are watching and listening. It’s as though Muslim-Americans are apparitions that do not really exist or have feelings. Muslims feel like screaming: “Hey, I am in the room. Stop backbiting!”
The virus incubated by right-wing bloggers Pam Geller and Robert Spencer has been spread so far and wide by Fox News that all of America is now infected with an anti-Muslim epidemic. It hurts Muslim-Americans to see their patriotism questioned, their faith defined, distorted and defiled beyond recognition by anti-Muslim bigots through blatant lies. It is un-American to attempt to sacrifice an entire America-loving community, already reeling under vicious attacks, at the altar of higher television ratings.
Fakhruddin Ahmed starts out well in this op-ed, explaining the genesis of “Islamophobia” with a greater degree of honesty than most Muslim spokesmen in the U.S. have ever displayed. But he soon enough resorts to the familiar Islamic supremacist tactic of evading responsibility, pointing fingers at non-Muslims who dare to point out how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism and to make recruits among peaceful Muslims. By the end of the piece he has run off the rails entirely, flinging wild charges of racism and bigotry, and blaming Pamela Geller and me for the fact that non-Muslims in America are looking at Islam and Muslims with open eyes, instead of buying into the full-blown campaign of deception, disinformation, and soothing lies that the mainstream media continues to pursue. He never connects up the first half of his piece with the second — in other words, he never explains why Islamic jihad terrorism and Islamic supremacism are real, and yet any resistance to them constitutes racism and hatred.
Yeah, sure, Fakhruddin — as if Pamela Geller and I inspired Khalid Aldawsari, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Lubbock, Texas, or Muhammad Hussain, the would-be jihad bomber in Baltimore, or Mohamed Mohamud, the would-be jihad bomber in Portland, or Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood jihad mass-murderer, or Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square jihad mass-murderer, or Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the Arkansas military recruiting station jihad murderer, or Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas airplane jihad bomber, or Muhammad Atta, Anjem Chaudary, Omar Bakri, Abu Hamza, Abu Bakar Bashir, Zawahiri, Zarqawi, bin Laden and all the rest.
The Times of Trenton should be ashamed to print such a farrago, but it isn’t really anything special — just another mainstream media outlet printing a deceptive, disingenuous piece claiming victim status for Muslims in order to deflect attention away from jihad terror and Islamic supremacism.
“Examining a painful history fraught with transgressions,” by Fakhruddin Ahmed in the Times of Trenton, March 12 (thanks to James):
There are cogent reasons why roughly half of Americans, according to polls, harbor an unfavorable opinion of Islam. Besides perpetrating the most horrendous crime on American soil on 9/11, Muslims have been responsible for some pretty ugly incidents lately.
The Ayatollah Khomeini challenged one of the West’s core values, freedom of speech, by issuing a “fatwa,” or religious decree, in 1989, for the murder of Salman Rushdie over his controversial book, “The Satanic Verses.”
The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were quickly followed by Muslim terror attacks in Bali, Indonesia (2002), Madrid (2004), London (2005) and Mumbai (2008). And when some Muslims went berserk, burning and boycotting in reaction to the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2006, the rest of the world held its collective breath in consternation.
Muslim terrorists’ attempts to blow up planes, airports, tunnels and subways in America were thwarted. And if Qur’ans had actually been burned by Pastor Terry Jones in Florida last fall, as he threatened to do, some Muslims would have reacted by creating mayhem. Clearly, there is a less-enlightened, fanatically violent underbelly at work in the name of Islam. Understandably, the Judeo-Christian polemic against Islam centers on terrorism.
Submerged in an all-encompassing anti-Muslim hysteria, when non-Muslim Americans see signs of increasing Muslim presence around them, they feel besieged by an intimidating culture. That America’s complexion is transforming from shades of white to brown is difficult for many Americans to stomach; when some of those brown faces belong to Muslims, the transformation becomes downright frightening.
With no prominent Muslim-American voice to assuage those apprehensions, fear begets fear, spawning more virulent anti-Muslim vitriol.
Are Muslims, their religion and their culture a mortal threat to America? Is this the vaunted “Clash of Civilizations” between the West and Islam, as Harvard’s Samuel Huntington had predicted in 1993?
Civilizational narratives are rarely one-dimensional. Western democracies, especially Britain and France, exploited and repressed most Muslim nations as colonial powers over the centuries, souring Muslim taste for democracy. Conceivably, America’s more recent interventions in the Islamic world are fueling Americaphobia. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, with the concomitant collateral death of thousands of civilians, have exacerbated Muslim-American relations, as have the al Qaeda-seeking drone attacks inside Pakistan that inadvertently kill civilians and whose legality stands on shaky grounds.
We may consider ourselves to be the “good guys” eliminating the “bad guys” before they attack us; but to the child of the civilian we kill in Afghanistan, we are the bad guys. He or she may vow to exact vengeance.
Quid pro quo is in vogue in international relations. America garnered the Muslim world’s gratitude when it rushed to bolster the Afghans after the Soviet invasion of 1979 (which led to Muslim participation in Gulf War I in 1991), and liberated the Bosnians (1995) and the Kosovars (1999) from the Serbs. Muslims were not thrilled, however, when America attacked Afghanistan in 2001 (and has occupied it since); the neoconservatives fabricated WMD “evidence” to facilitate President George W. Bush’s attack of Iraq in 2003; and America started waging an undeclared war inside Pakistan.
Excluded from the debate about them inside America, and reduced to passive observers, Muslim-Americans are chagrined at the spectacle unfolding right before their eyes. Right-wing Republicans see no downside to demonizing the Muslims. It energizes their base, carries no political penalty, and forces the Democrats to defend a progressively unpopular minority.
Democratic defense of Muslim-Americans has not been stellar either, perhaps because they, too, secretly covet the bigot vote. Deprecators realize that Muslim-Americans, who number only 7 million, cannot retaliate electorally, making Muslim-baiting a win-win proposition.
Sarah Palin tweeted last July, imploring “peaceful Muslims” to “refudiate” the proposed New York City mosque near Ground Zero. Other Republicans and some Democrats jumped on the bandwagon, attaching intellectual heft to an originally ignorant far-right-fringe viewpoint.
A “moderate” Muslim is being redefined as one who condemns on demand. Detractors are not interested in Muslim points of view; they want Muslim condemnation of Islam. For them, Islam-bashing is the new normal, the new acceptable form of racism. If any other ethnic or religious group was so maliciously mauled, the attackers would be branded incurable racists.
What astonishes Muslim-Americans is that those hurling imprecations at them on television, on the radio and in the blogosphere do not seem to care that Muslim-Americans are watching and listening. It’s as though Muslim-Americans are apparitions that do not really exist or have feelings. Muslims feel like screaming: “Hey, I am in the room. Stop backbiting!”
The virus incubated by right-wing bloggers Pam Geller and Robert Spencer has been spread so far and wide by Fox News that all of America is now infected with an anti-Muslim epidemic. It hurts Muslim-Americans to see their patriotism questioned, their faith defined, distorted and defiled beyond recognition by anti-Muslim bigots through blatant lies. It is un-American to attempt to sacrifice an entire America-loving community, already reeling under vicious attacks, at the altar of higher television ratings.
Here we go again: Muslims attempt to mass-murder non-Muslims — think of the jihad terror mass murder in Fort Hood; jihad mass-murder plots thwarted in Portland; Baltimore; Lubbock, Texas; North Carolina; Times Square; on an airplane over Detroit; and more — and that’s just the last few months. And in the mainstream media, Muslims turn out to be the victims. In a sane world, Laura Yuen would be writing about how the Muslim community in Minneapolis was working hard to prove its loyalty to American Constitutional values, and instituting programs to teach against the understanding of Islam manifested by Islamic jihadists. Instead, they’re the victims, as always.
Mainstream media journalists are drearily predictable in their readiness to retail this line. It is remarkable how it never seems to occur to any of them to ask even the most basic probing questions about what these poor victims actually intend to do on their side to try to prevent future jihad attacks, and thereby head off this frightening “backlash.”
“Minnesota Muslim leaders skeptical and disappointed after radicalization hearing,” by Laura Yuen for Minnesota Public Radio, March 11:
Minneapolis — Muslim leaders in Minnesota worry that a congressional hearing Thursday on homegrown Islamic radicalization will further divide them from the broader community and lead to a possible backlash.
Somali-Americans say they’re again in the uncomfortable position of being defined by the case of the two dozen young men accused of returning to their homeland to fight with the terrorist group al-Shabab.
Some activists and religious leaders also take umbrage with the Twin Cities Somali man who provided testimony about how he thinks his teen nephew was indoctrinated.
The hearing, convened by U.S. Rep. Peter King, R-New York, brought a dreadful sense of deja vu for some Somali Minnesotans.
Exactly two years ago, another congressional committee explored the disturbing phenomenon of young Minnesota men radicalized to fight in their native Somalia.
Minneapolis activist Abdirizak Bihi related their story Thursday to members of Congress — and to a national audience watching on C-SPAN.
Bihi’s teenage nephew who was among roughly two dozen Twin Cities men who left Minnesota to fight alongside al-Shabaab. He’s now believed dead. Bihi repeated criticisms against a Minneapolis mosque where his nephew and friends studied.
“What I ask you is to open an investigation as to what is happening in my community,” he said. “We are isolated by Islamic organizations and leaders who support them.”
Bihi also said that when families like his wanted to report their sons missing to authorities, leaders of the Abubakar As-Saddique mosque tried to bully the relatives into keeping quiet, saying they would end up in Guantanamo. He told U.S. Rep. Dan Lungren, R-California, that the mosque officials also warned the families of another consequence:
“If you do that, you’re gonna be responsible for the eradication of all mosques and all Islamic society in North America,” Bihi recalled being told. “And you will have eternal fire and hell.”
Lungren asked Bihi if he thought he and his family were targets of intimidation to stop him from cooperating with law enforcement.
“Yes, intimidation in its purest form,” Bihi replied.
But officials at the Abubakar mosque deny ever trying to silence the families. It’s true that back in 2008, many Somalis in Minnesota were skeptical that the missing men could have been recruited for jihad. Some were angered about Bihi’s accusations, which they considered reckless….
Zuhur Ahmed of Minneapolis watched as her representative wept, and paused to dab away her own tears. Ahmed, who hosts a Twin Cities Somali-language radio show, said violent extremism must be addressed. But she said it feels like Muslims are the only ones being singled out.
“As I was wiping my tears, she said, “I was thinking what is it about my faith that is not being accepted as an American? My faith? My scarf? My ethnicity?”…
None of the above, Ms. Ahmed. It’s the annoying tendency of your coreligionists to keep trying to blow things up and commit mass murder, and to assert the primacy of your oppressive legal system over American Constitutional freedoms.
Here we go again: Muslims attempt to mass-murder non-Muslims — think of the jihad terror mass murder in Fort Hood; jihad mass-murder plots thwarted in Portland; Baltimore; Lubbock, Texas; North Carolina; Times Square; on an airplane over Detroit; and more — and that’s just the last few months. And in the mainstream media, Muslims turn out to be the victims. In a sane world, Laura Yuen would be writing about how the Muslim community in Minneapolis was working hard to prove its loyalty to American Constitutional values, and instituting programs to teach against the understanding of Islam manifested by Islamic jihadists. Instead, they’re the victims, as always.
Mainstream media journalists are drearily predictable in their readiness to retail this line. It is remarkable how it never seems to occur to any of them to ask even the most basic probing questions about what these poor victims actually intend to do on their side to try to prevent future jihad attacks, and thereby head off this frightening “backlash.”
“Minnesota Muslim leaders skeptical and disappointed after radicalization hearing,” by Laura Yuen for Minnesota Public Radio, March 11:
Minneapolis — Muslim leaders in Minnesota worry that a congressional hearing Thursday on homegrown Islamic radicalization will further divide them from the broader community and lead to a possible backlash.
Somali-Americans say they’re again in the uncomfortable position of being defined by the case of the two dozen young men accused of returning to their homeland to fight with the terrorist group al-Shabab.
Some activists and religious leaders also take umbrage with the Twin Cities Somali man who provided testimony about how he thinks his teen nephew was indoctrinated.
The hearing, convened by U.S. Rep. Peter King, R-New York, brought a dreadful sense of deja vu for some Somali Minnesotans.
Exactly two years ago, another congressional committee explored the disturbing phenomenon of young Minnesota men radicalized to fight in their native Somalia.
Minneapolis activist Abdirizak Bihi related their story Thursday to members of Congress — and to a national audience watching on C-SPAN.
Bihi’s teenage nephew who was among roughly two dozen Twin Cities men who left Minnesota to fight alongside al-Shabaab. He’s now believed dead. Bihi repeated criticisms against a Minneapolis mosque where his nephew and friends studied.
“What I ask you is to open an investigation as to what is happening in my community,” he said. “We are isolated by Islamic organizations and leaders who support them.”
Bihi also said that when families like his wanted to report their sons missing to authorities, leaders of the Abubakar As-Saddique mosque tried to bully the relatives into keeping quiet, saying they would end up in Guantanamo. He told U.S. Rep. Dan Lungren, R-California, that the mosque officials also warned the families of another consequence:
“If you do that, you’re gonna be responsible for the eradication of all mosques and all Islamic society in North America,” Bihi recalled being told. “And you will have eternal fire and hell.”
Lungren asked Bihi if he thought he and his family were targets of intimidation to stop him from cooperating with law enforcement.
“Yes, intimidation in its purest form,” Bihi replied.
But officials at the Abubakar mosque deny ever trying to silence the families. It’s true that back in 2008, many Somalis in Minnesota were skeptical that the missing men could have been recruited for jihad. Some were angered about Bihi’s accusations, which they considered reckless….
Zuhur Ahmed of Minneapolis watched as her representative wept, and paused to dab away her own tears. Ahmed, who hosts a Twin Cities Somali-language radio show, said violent extremism must be addressed. But she said it feels like Muslims are the only ones being singled out.
“As I was wiping my tears, she said, “I was thinking what is it about my faith that is not being accepted as an American? My faith? My scarf? My ethnicity?”…
None of the above, Ms. Ahmed. It’s the annoying tendency of your coreligionists to keep trying to blow things up and commit mass murder, and to assert the primacy of your oppressive legal system over American Constitutional freedoms.
Today, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman began his “personal quest” to scrutinize the patriotism of American Muslims through his hearings on the radicalization in the U.S. Muslim community. King insists that his pursuit is “the logical response” to the “threat level” posed by the community, adding “it makes no sense to talk about other types of extremism, when the main threat to the United States today is talking about al Qaida.”
Not only are King’s assumptions incredibly inaccurate, a former Department of Defense official in the Bush Administration states that his crusade is helping homegrown terrorism. Jennifer Bryson, who spent a few years doing counter-terrorism work while working for the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2003 to 2008, pointed out that King’s fear-mongering is “dividing the world between Muslims and non-Muslims,” the “same tactic” used by Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda to recruit:
“King risks helping to promote precisely the narrative Osama bin Laden and his sympathizers try to promote, namely dividing the world between Muslims and non-Muslims,” said Jennifer Bryson, a former counterterrorism official at the Defense Department. Al-Qaeda has used the same tactic as a recruiting tool, she said.
While the issue merits attention by Congress, said Matthew Levitt, former deputy chief of the Treasury Department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, King’s approach is “semantically shaped to point a finger at an entire community.”
Matthew Levitt served as the Treasury Department’s deputy assistant secretary for intelligence and analysis under the Bush Administration. The American Muslim community’s practices and participation in mainstream society has not only served to successfully combat homegrown terrorism but to help eliminate the risk. For instance, the Center for Strategic and International Studies points out that families of the “Northern Virginia Five” extremists reached out to CAIR — the group that King paints as extremist — who then alerted the FBI, “cooperation” that “has proved vital in facilitating authorities’ initial investigation of the plot.”
Even the U.S. attorney general in a New York district not far from Ground Zero is “disturbed” by King’s hearings. He told the Daily Beast’s Jonathan Alter that the Muslim community there “routinely provide the FBI and prosecutors with valuable leads and evidence” but that now he must “spend valuable time reassuring local imams” who “are terribly worried about the stigma coming from King’s hearings” that the “U.S. government means them not harm.”
As Bryson indicates, by aggressively marginalizing Muslims in America, King actively complicates the vibrant cooperation between the Muslim community and law enforcement and disseminates stereotypes that foment the us-vs.-them mentality feeding homegrown terrorism in the first place. Doing so not only emboldens the small extremist minority within a community but tramples on the patriotism and humanity of the majority.
It’s not that King’s Muslim McCarthy-esque hearings are historic or “a first.” It’s that with the foundation of King’s anti-Muslim history and statements, which include the Cordoba House, King’s agenda has been clear from the start.
As Rep. Keith Ellison hinted today, this hearing could potentially put America in more danger and inspire more suicide bombers, and in a passionately emotional statement (seen at the end of the video above), Mr. Ellison proved the insanity and prejudice of Mr. King.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee pointing out that King’s agenda aids Al Qaeda caused a clash with the chairman, but it was a point well made.
Rep. King also denied requests for members to make opening statements, including Jackson, shutting down any discourse that takes his McCarthyism on. Then King allowed a conservative Republican from Virginia to speak instead. As did King, Rep. Frank Wolf was defensive about those Muslims who were law abiding, good Americans, then went on to reveal the fishing expedition King is on, suggesting that people don’t think extremism and “homegrown terrorism” could happen in the U.S.
If this country still had leaders of courage, Rep. King would have begun his Muslim McCarthyism today without a single member of the House beside him.
In his opening statement, Islamic radicalism was intoned just before Rep. Peter King invoked the coming ten-year anniversary of 9/11. However, he never once mentioned that the men involved were from Saudi Arabia, hatching their plot partially in Germany.
McCarthyism in the face of no evidence of a specific Islamist terrorist plot is no virtue.
Cenk Yugur of the Young Turks, along with Carl Bernstein, made powerful statements on MSNBC, with Cenk rejecting the hearings and calling them un-American, which can be found here in video. Cenk saying “my family’s Muslim” drawing attention to King’s wildly prejudicial focus.
Speaking second, after King said the trouble wasn’t neo-Nazism or any other group, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi reminded him that a white man was just charged yesterday in the attempted bombing during a parade on Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
Kevin William Harpham, who reportedly has links to a neo-Nazi group, was arrested by FBI agents and local law enforcement Wednesday morning at his home near Addy, a community of about 1,400 people roughly 55 miles northwest of Spokane. – Seattle Times
Peter King has shamed the House of Representatives and this country.
Would Mr. King look into the radically fanatical Right who hunt doctors providing women with legal reproductive services?
Would he dare investigate militias and the over 1,000 hate groups arming because of some dread of doom dancing in their heads?
It’s also as if the domestic terrorism tragedy of Tucson didn’t happen.
Using the same tactics as McCarthy, with our representatives’ defensiveness revealing their shame, King’s witchhunt reveals the ugly American that lives in fear of their own shadow.
Rep. King’s open history of association with the I.R.A., a terrorist organization, reveals what today is really about. Unconcerned about neo-Nazis or white supremacists, even Christian radicals who hunt doctors and put women in danger, King makes it clear that Christians aren’t the same as Muslims and that we need to be on alert, watching what Muslims do.
As the Middle East discovers freedom, King can only see fear. In the shadows of what is going on in the Mideast, Rep. King’s McCarthyism reveals a horribly paranoid and bigoted turn on to a dangerous path for this country.
That it’s being allowed to happen in what is traditionally called the people’s House reveals what Republican leadership represents today. Rep. King represents the worst of America, but unfortunately has too many people behind him from the Republican Party supporting his Muslim McCarthyism, so that he can preen self-righteous duty in the face of his driving prejudice.
Taylor Marsh is a political analyst, writer and commentator on national politics. A veteran national politics writer, Taylor’s been writing on the web since 1996. She has reported from the White House, been profiled in the Washington Post, The New Republic, and has been seen on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic, as well as on radio across the dial and on satellite, including the BBC. Marsh lives in the Washington, D.C. area. This column is cross posted from her blog, which includes updates.
The FBI has made an arrest in the MLK Day Spokane bombing. And the alleged culprit is-not surprisingly-a white supremacist.
An FBI source in Washington, D.C., said one man was arrested east of Spokane. Agents, including a bomb expert from Quantico, Va., were preparing to search a house where others associated with the suspect were living, the source said.
The suspects are apparently affiliated with white supremacists.
The source, who is familiar with the investigation but is not authorized to speak on the record, said that “good police work” led to the arrest and that forensic evidence taken from a backpack bomb was key to the case.
Eric Holder will have a press conference at 3PM.
Related posts:
Michael Yaki, a former member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights who is awaiting reappointment, tells TPM he’s planning to propose the federal body examine the rise of anti-Islam and anti-Arab discrimination in America once he rejoins the agency.
“As you may recall, this was a topic I have been concerned about for years and referenced the lack of attention to issues such as this in my denunciation of the amount of time and effort we spent on the New Black Panther investigation,” Yaki wrote in an e-mail. “Rep. King’s hearings have only increased, I believe, the importance of this topic, especially as we approach the 10th anniversary of 9/11.”
Yaki told TPM in an interview that he’s spoken to a number of his colleagues on the Commission about his plan, some of whom agree this would be an important and timely topic.
“I don’t believe that fighting the war on terror and protecting civil liberties should be conflicting or competing goals,” Yaki said. “I have a particular sensitivity to this as you might imagine because 70 years ago, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese American community on the West Coast — one of whom was my father — were condemned, uprooted and incarcerated in some of the bleakest parts of our country.”
“Now I don’t think that experience can or would be repeated today. But in that case the ethnic or in this case the religious identity of a particular group shouldn’t cast that entire group under suspicion, and that’s precisely what I believe Rep. King’s hearings are going to do.”
Michael Yaki, a former member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights who is awaiting reappointment, tells TPM he’s planning to propose the federal body examine the rise of anti-Islam and anti-Arab discrimination in America once he rejoins the agency.
“As you may recall, this was a topic I have been concerned about for years and referenced the lack of attention to issues such as this in my denunciation of the amount of time and effort we spent on the New Black Panther investigation,” Yaki wrote in an e-mail. “Rep. King’s hearings have only increased, I believe, the importance of this topic, especially as we approach the 10th anniversary of 9/11.”
Yaki told TPM in an interview that he’s spoken to a number of his colleagues on the Commission about his plan, some of whom agree this would be an important and timely topic.
“I don’t believe that fighting the war on terror and protecting civil liberties should be conflicting or competing goals,” Yaki said. “I have a particular sensitivity to this as you might imagine because 70 years ago, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese American community on the West Coast — one of whom was my father — were condemned, uprooted and incarcerated in some of the bleakest parts of our country.”
“Now I don’t think that experience can or would be repeated today. But in that case the ethnic or in this case the religious identity of a particular group shouldn’t cast that entire group under suspicion, and that’s precisely what I believe Rep. King’s hearings are going to do.”
It's a thin line between love and hate
It should be clear to anyone who has seen the video of the anti-Muslim hate rally in Yorba Linda that the organizers of the event are extremely dangerous and demented people. If their pathological racism was not apparent before the video surfaced, then it is confirmed now. So why is the Jewish Federation and a who’s who of established Jewish organizations, from Birthright Israel to the New Israel Fund to JDate (even Rock The Vote is involved somehow), hosting one of the hate rally’s key organizers this weekend at a major gathering in Las Vegas billed as “an entertaining, interactive and educational celebration that will draw over 1,500 Jewish young adults (ages 22-45) from across North America?”
Last week, Rabbi David Eliezrie of the Yorba Linda chapter of Chabad was among a mob of local extremists who screamed racial epithets at immigrant families. On Monday, however, the rabbi will lead a session at “Tribefest” on “the Kabbalah of Love.” “Love has always been a central theme in Jewish teachings,” the event description reads. “In an interactive experience we will explore the mystical and classical sources about love.” How touching.
Elizabeth Eckford walks to Little Rock Central High in 1957
While watching the unforgettably hideous (and now viral) footage of the recent anti-Muslim demonstration in Yorba Linda, California, I could not help but think of Elizabeth Eckford, the African-American student who was forced to walk through a phalanx of violent white racists chanting “Lynch her! Lynch her!” during the federal government’s first attempt to integrate Little Rock Central High School. This iconic image was immediately recalled by the video of Muslim-American children walking through a crowd of protesters calling them terrorists, threatening them, and chanting “Go home!” as they proceeded towards a local community center for a charity event. Eckford was badly scarred by her experience; the trauma affected her life for decades. I wonder how the children who had to be marched through the gauntlet of racists in Yorba Linda will remember their experience.
Billed as a “Patriotic Rally,” the anti-Muslim demonstration was organized by official hate group leader Pam Geller, Tea Party outfits including the North Orange County Conservative Coalition and We Surround Them OC 912; and Rabbi David Eliezrie of the Yorba Linda chapter of Chabad-Lubavitch, a messianic Orthodox Jewish group. Though Chabad does not make its political positions explicit, I have learned through first hand experience how extreme its leadership is, especially in Southern California.
In 2002, I took a Hebrew class with Rabbi Eyal Rav Noy (I wanted to improve my very poor reading at the time), leader of the West L.A. Chabad chapter and supposedly a renowned teacher of the Kabbalah. At some point, Rav Noy invited me and some other students over for a shabbat dinner which, given Chabad’s mission to proselytize within the Jewish community, would eventually lead to some form of pressure to join the organization. Rav Noy’s father, who was also a rabbi, led off dinner with a bold prediction: “Within five years, the Palestinians will be eliminated by nuclear energy!” I was shocked and did not know what to say. At first, I attempted to politely register my displeasure. But nothing would stop him. “Either we use nuclear energy or we transfer them all!” he said. No one at the table seemed to have any problem with these wishes for genocide. “So will you use cattle cars to transfer them?” I asked. “We can use camels. Whatever,” he responded. Several of the men at the table chuckled at this remark. I excused myself from dinner soon after and would never have contact with Chabad again.
Rabbi David Elriezie at the Yorba Linda hate rally
Chabad’s Rabbi Eliezrie appeared at the Yorba Linda hate rally with an Israeli flag in one hand and an American flag in the other. Other participants displayed the Israeli flag as well. In fact, the Israeli flag seemed to be peeking out from a cluster of American flags that formed the backdrop for speakers including Republican Rep’s Ed Royce and Gary Miller, who both railed against the Muslim presence in Orange County. At 4:06 in the video, the crowd can be seen hectoring a Muslim couple with the chant, “We support Israel!” As even Haaretz has noticed, the Israeli flag is becoming a key symbol for a trans-Atlantic neo-fascist axis that thrives on violent resentment towards Muslim and Arab immigrants. Given the ethnocratic basis of the Israeli state and the country’s settler-colonial ethos, the trend is not ironic or very surprising.
Back in 1957, in Little Rock Central High, an awkward, acne scarred boy sat behind Elizabeth Eckford every day in class, muttering in a low drone, “Nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger.” Harassment from him and scores of white students would eventually drive Eckford to attempt suicide several times. Fifty years later, that awkward student, whose name is Charles Sawrie, expressed deep contrition for what he had done. “It was all kind of stupid,” he told journalist David Margolick. “I just wanted to get a name for myself. I don’t remember anything about her except she was black and my job was to make it as rough for the blacks as I could.”
Demonstrators celebrate their intimidation of Muslim families
On the Facebook page of the North Orange County Conservative Coalition, adults who behaved just as Sawrie did as a high school student in the Jim Crow South are overflowing with pride. “This was a great opportunity to speak out against an oppressive threat to us all. The speakers were GREAT as were the Patriots who joined us,” remarked someone named Gibbs Carol. Another protester named Desare Ferraro commented: “Americans are finally waking up to the dangers of multi-culturalism and putting out the “NOT WELCOME” sign to terrorist supporting fundraisers in our communities.” “What a great rally yesterday in Yorba Linda!” said Neil O’Brien.
Below are two videos. The first is of the Arab American Institute’s congressional briefing on Rep. Peter King’s upcoming hearings on radicalization in the Muslim community, which will essentially function as a congressional legitimization of the anti-Muslim crusade. I speak at about 32:00 and describe the trans-Atlantic Islamophobic axis:
The second video contains my appearance on Viewpoint with Jim Zogby, where I discuss the Islamophobic axis in further detail with Maya Berry:
A group of anti-Sharia protestors who planned to counter-protest the planned pro-Sharia rally by the radical provocateur Anjem Choudary in front of the White House on Thursday found themselves without an opponent to debate.
The counter rally planned by Frank Gaffney in response to Choudary’s pro-Sharia demonstration was left without a raison d’etra after Choudary failed to show up as he’d previously announced (and promoted on Fox News). That left Gaffney and his group preaching to the choir so to speak as they denounced Sharia law to their followers as well as media and curious onlookers.
But just as the rally was dying out, a Muslim man who showed up to pray in front of the White House. He was quickly surrounded by a large group of protestors who shouted an array of insults at him: mocking him for drinking Starbucks coffee, telling him to go back to his country and even throwing tiny crosses at his feet as he prayed. I captured the scene in the video below.
He’s still worshipping as I write this, but the anti-Sharia crowd is beginning to thin out. A police officer on the scene told me the man showed up to pray at the White House every couple days.
I’ll have more on the counter protest this afternoon.
French journalist Eric Zemmour was just convicted this week of “inciting racism.”
American Thinker Blog
The American Conservative Union banned Frank Gaffney from speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference over the past two years because members of the board who looked into the charges he made against other board members found them to be baseless, a source close to the board tells TPM.
As first reported by Alex Seitz-Wald of Think Progress, the board decided not to invite Gaffney to speak, CPAC Chairman David Keene said.
Keene said in a statement that Gaffney “has become personally and tiresomely obsessed with his weird belief that anyone who doesn’t agree with him on everything all the time or treat him with the respect and deference he believes is his due, must be either ignorant of the dangers we face or, in extreme case, dupes of the nation’s enemies.”
Gaffney had charged that Suhail Khan and Grover Norquist were helping CPAC become infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
The ban came about, according to the person close to the board, because Gaffney “was making these accusations and several board members looking into them and found them to be false.”
One of the board members who reportedly looked into the charges was GOP super lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who is set to appear on the Sean Hannity radio show this afternoon to defend Khan and Norquist. (Mitchell, notably, is opposed to the participation of the conservative gay group GOProud in CPAC). She didn’t immediately respond to a phone call on Tuesday.
A representative for Gaffney said he was not immediately available on Tuesday and already had another interview lined up for 2 p.m.
