Rep. Peter King (R-NY), the incoming chair of the House committee on Homeland Security has announced that he will hold hearings into the ‘radicalization’ of American Muslims. This, despite the fact that the Muslim Americans are pillars of the US community–disproportionately well-educated and well integrated into the country, and even though a third of tips forestalling radical Muslim operations come from the community itself. And, despite the fact that most terrorism in the US is committed by white supremacists. King’s obscene gesture of Kristallnacht-by-hearing does not come out of the representative’s own eccentricities, but is part of an organized conspiracy to demonize and marginalize Muslim Americans and Arab Americans. (Ironically, as we will likely hear more of from the Wikileaks cables, the British government considers King little more than a terrorist himself, given his vocal support for the Irish Republican Army, which regularly blew up London from the 1970s through the early 1990s).
Max Blumenthal, writing at Tomdispatch.com, explores the crazed underground world of anti-Muslim hatemongers, fueled by secret funding from millionaire fanatics and the poison pens of professional propagandists, who have proved that they can push around Establishment institutions and successfully smear their innocent scapegoats. It is worth remembering that there have been three phases of the Ku Klux Klan. The second arose in the wake of the massive wave of immigration to the US from the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe 1880-1924, which provoked the KKK 2.0 to widen its sphere of hatred from emancipated African Americans to newer arrivals— Jews and Catholics. Now that Jews and Catholics have become ‘white,’ some of them have joined with evangelical Protestant nativists in a new sort of Ku Klux Klan targeting the latest immigrant group, the Muslim-Americans. The most prominent figures in this hate-mongering and in the fomenting of ‘media lynching’ of Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans have been fanatical backers of the Israel lobbies, some right wing Catholics such as Tom Tancredo and Rudy Giuliani, and evangelicals such as Mike Huckabee.
John Mearsheimer’s explanation of the march toward a US national security state and the decline of US democracy is persuasive. He says it is rooted in perpetual war and a foolish and self-destructive attempt by the US to be a global hegemon. I would add that both enterprises require a regimenting of the domestic public, which in turn requires fear-mongering to get them to surrender their rights. Since the wars are for resources in the resource-rich Muslim world, it is convenient to demonize Muslims across the board, including domestic ones. In essence, the military-industrial complex, in which Peter King is a key player, is busy reducing us to prison inmates, and convincing us that we are about to be raped by some large Muslim convict, and that we have no choice but to become the ‘bitches’ of people like King to avoid an even worse fate.
People like Peter king want to take the US from being the land of the free and of the First Amendment to being akin to the Spanish Inquisition of 1492, which forced all Muslims in Spain to convert to Christianity or leave the country.
Most propaganda and hate-mongering depends on ignorance. Those interested in the subject might check out the new paperback, revised edition of my book, Engaging the Muslim World
‘ The Domestic Crusaders focuses on a day in the life of a modern Muslim Pakistani-American family of six eclectic, unique members, who convene at the family house to celebrate the twenty-first birthday of the youngest child.
With a background of 9-11 and the scapegoating of Muslim Americans, the tensions and sparks fly among the three generations, culminating in an intense family battle as each “crusader” struggles to assert and impose their respective voices and opinions, while still attempting to maintain and understand that unifying thread that makes them part of the same family.’
On his indispensable television news magazine, GPS, Fareed Zakaria demolishes Glenn Beck’s mind-numbingly stupid assertion that ten percent of Muslims are terrorists. Zakaria’s courage in standing up to the hate-mongers should not be underestimated, and he is among those few now standing in the way of a Rupert Murdoch plot to foment physical attacks of a Ku Klux Klan sort on American Muslims, using his Fox Cable News to spread hate. Leaked memos over the years have repeatedly demonstrated that Fox is a propaganda organ where reporters are routinely instructed how to spin the news to favor the filthy rich and the US Republican Party (there, I’ve been redundant).
The problem is that, while the article on this matter is clear and largely accurate, the headline: “Pope wanted Muslim Turkey kept out of EU” is grossly incorrect.
In 2004, then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict) spoke out against allowing Turkey to join the European Union. This position was not that of the Church as a whole. Indeed, a cable from that year says that “Acting Vatican Foreign Minister equivalent Monsignor Pietro Parolin told Charge August 18 that the Holy See remained open to Turkish EU membership.”
Contrary to what The Guardian implied, then, it seems clear to me that until he became pope, Ratzinger’s views on Turkey were not reflective of Vatican policy, and after he became Pope his stance changed dramatically in Turkey’s favor.
One terrorist attack was carried out in 2009 in all Europe by persons of Muslim heritage (I do not say ‘by a Muslim’ because terrorism is forbidden in Islamic law).
That is right. Out of hundreds. Exactly one.
After all that nonsense spewed on the internet and Fox Cable News about the danger of Muslims to Europe, and all the ethnic profiling and other discrimination against Muslims, it turns out that not only is their religion not dangerous, even the persons who depart from it into extremism and terrorism are tiny in number. Now it would not be right to profile or generalize about Basques, the Real IRA, etc., either. But even by the lights of the bigoted, it would be a waste of time to obsess about Muslims on this evidence.
As for the European far left and far right, those it is all right to generalize about and to conclude that they are, like, very dangerous. Two words: Stalin and Hitler. Extremists of Muslim heritage have killed a few thousands of people over the past century. European political extremists have killed tens of millions.
(Some commenters brought up free speech! No one has a ‘right’ to be hired by NPR, so this is not a free speech issue.
Generalizing about entire ethnic groups in a negative manner is bigotry, of which Williams is guilty. The airwaves in the United States are technically a public good, like the water, which the government has licensed. We don’t use public goods for racist purposes in this country, and shouldn’t. The Muslim-American community has a right not to be characterized as being in general dangerous, since almost none of them is dangerous. Substitute any other American ethnic group for Muslim in what Williams said (“I get nervous when I see x on airplanes”) and it is easy to see how wrong it is. Think about all the airplane hijackings you’ve heard of and you’ll see that stray members of various ethnic groups have been involved, but no one would tar everyone in that group with a desire to take planes to Havana at gunpoint. If anyone cannot see how wrong it is to generalize from small numbers of deviants in a marked ethnic community to everyone in that community, they need ethics 101.)
German Chancellor Angela Merkel over the weekend declared “multiculturalism” dead in her country and demanded that labor immigrants be assimilated, through German language and German culture.
This sort of discourse has a long and ugly history in Germany and it derives from a set of mistaken premises. An important strand of modern German political philosophy has tended to see the state as weak and fragile, and as easily toppled by criticism, dissent, and difference. The opposite has tended to be true in the past two hundred years–governments most often are much stronger than society and are hard to challenge.
That the state must assert itself and must ensure a broad cultural consensus among its subjects lay behind the Kulturkampf or ‘cultural struggle’ of the 1870s, when the state in newly united Germany persecuted Catholic institutions seen as too different and too autonomous. Monks and nuns were forced out of the country, monasteries were closed, congregations deprived of priests, and half of the country’s bishops were jailed. (A Roman Catholic account is here). There was an emphasis on clothing as an unwelcome mark of difference, as with clerical garb. Some historians suggest that a concern with unassimilated Polish laborers was linked to the campaign.
In the end it was not difference, religion, Catholicism or Polish workers that threatened the state but rather the overweening military ambition of political leaders themselves.
(Nativist Protestants in the US also attacked Polish immigrants in the early 20th century, alleging that their first loyalty was to the Pope, and that they were too unintelligent and decadent ever to be proper Americans. It was all just bigotry, not well-founded social scientific analysis).
Just as Catholics and Catholic institutions were not the enemy of society in Germany during the 1870s, so Muslims are not today. Muslim laborers in Germany more resemble Mexican-Americans or Central American immigrants than Muslims in the US, who tend to be better off and better educated than most other Americans.
Merkel’s emphasis on ensuring that immigrant children have the opportunity to learn good German (she wants to hire more teachers of minority background) would be admirable if not for two objections. First, the main impediment to linguistic assimilation is neighborhood segregation. There are informal mechanisms that create immigrant labor slums, including the reluctance of realtors to show houses to minority members in neighborhoods dominated by the majority. Is she ready to push for a German equivalent to the Fair Housing Act? Second, one has the sinking feeling that her notion of assimilation involves, like that of Bismarck, the undermining of immigrant culture and institutions.
The View stars Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar walked out on Bill O’Reilly Thursday when the right wing pundit insisted on blaming all Muslims for the September 11 attacks. They pointed out that a small group of extremists carried them out, not “Muslims” as O’Reilly was insisting. When he kept repeating his smear of the whole religion (1.5 billion people), the two of them stood up and walked out.
Barbara Walters criticized her co-hosts for having departed but then took up their point and insisted to O’Reilly that he is wrong. She finally got him to back down and say he did not mean to blame all Muslims and to say that he had spoken ‘inartfully.’
Elizabeth Hasselback then intervened and blamed President Obama for the confusion, saying he had forbidden people to use the word “terrorst,” and and started talking about ‘Muslim extremists’ instead, and that it would have been better just to keep talking about terrorists because terrorists exist across all faiths.
Hasselback is right in the second part of her assertion, but is mistaken if she thinks that President Obama ever ‘forbade’ the use of the term “terrorism” or “terrorist” with reference to Muslim extremists.
Some of the confusion was deliberately sowed by O’Reilly, who used the phrase “Muslims attacked us.” If he had said “the Muslims attacked us,” it would have been clear that he meant all of them. By leaving off the definite article, he was able to imply that all Muslims attacked the US on September 11 but provided himself with plausible deniability.
I am filled with admiration for Goldberg and Behar, who responded exactly as all decent human beings should when face to face with what is essentially a blood libel. Here I disagree with Barbara Walters. There is some discourse that is inappropriate for reasoned discussion on the mass media.
If Walters had had a guest on who insisted that “Jews attacked us” in the USS Liberty incident of 1967, instead of specifying that it was only some Israeli military personnel, would she really have sat there and listened to it and broadcast it to millions of viewers.
Television is a hot medium, and given the passions running high in the election season, O’Reilly was shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.
Moreover, O’Reilly is an artificial pundit who is where he is because media billionaire Rupert Murdoch put him on the air. He is nobody on his own and has never had an interesting or original thought. He is moreover, a prominent stalker of a female staff member, and it is shocking that Walters should have him on The View to talk to an audience of women.
It should not be lost sight of that O’Reilly’s true target was not “Muslims” but President Obama, and what O’Reilly was attempting to imply was that Obama was insufficiently sensitive to the need to act in bigoted ways toward Muslims (e.g. denying them their constitutional rights on grounds of non-Muslim ‘sensitivities.’) White people’s feelings were hurt in the South for decades at the attempt of African-Americans to exercise their constitutional right to vote.
There is still a gender gap, with women more favorable to Democrats and the president, and O’Reilly’s effort was to address that constituency with his Islamophobic message, which in turn was a Republican message.
Goldberg and Behar have restored some decency to the US mass media when it comes to Muslim-baiting. Bravo!
Joy Behar discussed the matter further with former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura on her own show, in which she said she walked out because what O’Reilly said was in her view hate speech. Ventura is a mixed bag. On the one hand he made the correct point that if people have a constitutional right, that is the end of the story. You can’t take it away from them. On the other, he unfortunately brought up a ‘truther’ perspective that exonerated even radical Muslims. The evidence that al-Qaeda carried out 9/11 is overwhelming and it is disturbing to me when people try to let them off the hook. Here is the Behar video:
She also warned against the imposition of what she called Muslim sharia law on Americans and said they would never put up with it.
Give me a break. No one is working harder to impose a religious law code on Americans than Palin herself. Palin is one of those people who says she would like to forbid abortion even in cases of rape or danger to the mother’s life. Palin’s hostility to pro-choice positions derives from her belief in the supremacy of Christian law, which she wants to impose on all Americans. For more see my classic Salon essay on how many of Palin’s stances track with sharia or actually are more rigid.
Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, and says it does not want one and would not accept one. There is no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly certified that no nuclear material is being diverted to military purposes from Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment facilities in Natanz near Isfahan.
In contrast, the United States and Russia each has thousands of nuclear warheads, and smaller nuclear arsenals are possessed by Britain, France, China, and Israel.
It is difficult to see how Iran, a poor weak state with virtually no air force to speak of, and which is defenseless against a nuclear-armed superpower, could possibly cause an ‘Armageddon’ or show-down battle ushering in the Last Days
As for sharia, this allegation that Muslims are conspiring to impose their religious law on the United States is just propaganda from an American right wing that has destroyed the US economy and weakened the constitution, and has no one to blame for it but themselves. So they have nothing to run on but fear. They tried making Americans afraid of Latinos, but there are so many Latino voters that the tactic caused them to crash and burn. They needed a small group to position as threatening to middle America. They really miss the Communists. You could always run against the Communists, and there were hardly any in the US, so there was no down side.
So now they are coming after the some 6 million American Muslims.
Sharia does not have a fixed meaning. It is the living tradition of Muslim religious law. It is analogous to Roman Catholic canon law. What Palin is doing is similar to raising an alarm that the country’s 80 million Catholics have a secret plan to make canon law the law of the land and impose it on clueless Protestant Americans.
Ooops. The one place where attempts are being made to make the US conform to canon law is law around abortion, which is forbidden in Roman Catholic law but allowed in American law.
And guess what. Sarah Palin agrees with the imposition of canon law in that area of forbidding abortions.
US law already overlaps with Muslim sharia in the essentials. Sharia law forbids murder. It forbids theft. Etc.
Most of the elements of sharia to which Americans might object are traditional and are being reformed by Muslims themselves. Thus, sharia traditionally allowed a man to take up to four wives. But in many Muslim countries that practice has been curtailed. Or people think about harsh punishments such as stoning for adultery. But the Qur’an does not mention stoning anyone, and stoning adulterers is actually a feature of Jewish law or halakha that was probably brought into Islam by rabbi converts in the 8th or 9th century. Egypt has made the age of marriage 18, even though Muslim legal tradition allowed marriage at a much earlier age. But then Roman Catholic canon law in the medieval era set the marriage age at 12, as did Jewish religious law. All religious systems of law in the medieval period tended to allow marriage with the onset of puberty. Americans who get all high and mighty about sharia should remember that 18th century British law prescribed hanging for minor theft.
There is no mechanism whereby Muslim religious law could be imposed on Americans (it would have to be legislated by Congress, which is much more likely to make us live by Leviticus). The US Supreme Court has ruled that a law may not be passed if it does not have a secular purpose (that is why we can work on Sundays now; blue laws don’t have a secular purpose.
But since the United States has an Anglo-Saxon, common law legal system that privileges custom as a source of law, it is inevitable that judges will occasionally have to take sharia into account when adjudicating disputes among American Muslims. US judges can take precedents from anywhere, and have occasionally cited rulings of, e.g., the Indian Supreme Court. The only way to avoid this situation would be to adopt the Napoleonic code and give up on custom and precedent as contributors to law. That would be a much bigger break with American legal traditions than merely occasionally citing Muslim legal practice in settling disputes among Muslims.
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