Category Archives: Islamophobia

Islamophobia, Muslims, Racism

Federal-Size Ego of NYPD: Spying on and Entrapping Muslims across the Northeast…………….

 

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“The New York Police Department monitored Muslim college students far more broadly than previously known, at schools far beyond the city limits, including the Ivy League colleges of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, The Associated Press has learned. Police talked with local authorities about professors 300 miles away in Buffalo and even sent an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip, where he recorded students’ names and noted in police intelligence files how many times they prayed. Detectives trawled Muslim student websites every day and, although professors and students had not been accused of any wrongdoing, their names were recorded in reports prepared for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly…..…..”

The NYPD must have a federal-size budget, and a federal-size ego, to take on itself the task of spying on Muslim students outside its jurisdiction of New York City and across other states.
Cheers
mhg


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Culture, Europe, Islamophobia, Middle East Women, Muslims, Religion, Saudi Arabia, Somalia

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Reinvents the Islamic Wheel, the Holocaust and the Two Phobias………….

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“The media’s reticence on the subject no doubt has several sources. One may be fear of provoking additional violence. Another is most likely the influence of lobbying groups such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation—a kind of United Nations of Islam centered in Saudi Arabia—and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Over the past decade, these and similar groups have been remarkably successful in persuading leading public figures and journalists in the West to think of each and every example of perceived anti-Muslim discrimination as an expression ……… The Christophobia that has plagued Sudan for years takes a very different form. The authoritarian government of the Sunni Muslim north……..”

There are three people the Western media often resort to when they want “objective” opinion on Islamic-Western relations. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one. Not that I disagree with ‘everything’ she espouses: I probably agree with her on some points. Ali hasn’t been on television as much, mostly writings and ‘utterances’. Ali makes sure everyone knows she has nothing but contempt for Islam: all its aspects, not just how it treats women. She does not distinguish between the faith and the “faithful”: an easy shot, some would say a cheap shot. We all know the “faithful” do not all follow the faith. That applies equally to Muslims and Christians. Fair enough, that is her opinion. There is room enough for both Islamophobia (of which she has a severe case) and Christophobia.

Now Christians and the world-wide assault on Christianity is apparently the cause du jour, even in the ongoing Campaign 2012. She certainly is not missing that bandwagon. In these days of fundamentalist ascendancy in the Middle East (and America), the fate of Christians is a legitimate concern. Yet is it a tit-for-tat Fox News (dare I say Geert Wilders) type of approach she takes? The point is: the West is free and democratic, and the Muslim world is mostly dictatorial, that is a fact. It is silly to insinuate that the West should persecute Muslims simply because, for example, Saudi Arabia bans any kind of worship other than Islamic even in private. That is why the West is what it is and Saudi Arabia is not. Could she be angling for a speaker’s slate at the Tea Party Republican National Convention next summer?

I am eager to read her future writings on the Endlösung and how Christians killed 6 million Jewish civilians in gas chambers in a Europe that was nearly free of Muslims. And about the 40 million (or is it 50 million) people of all faiths that were killed in the last European war. No need to mention the mass rapes and the genocide and mass graves of Bosnia. Everybody has a house of glass, but some houses are more so.
There is also a Syrian dude whom the American right wing has been celebrating for years; he is their favorite “witness” in Muslim and Islamic hearings. I suspect if anyone, he will be the one to speak at Tampa (you see, Muslim men rule, even in the Tea Party).
Cheers
mhg


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9/11, Al-Qaeda, Iran, Islamophobia, Jihadis, Muslims, Terrorism, U.S. Politics, US Foreign Policy

NYPD Keystones Mixing Shi’as and Oranges: Borrowing the Bahrain Tactics………..

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“The New York Police Department recommended increasing surveillance of thousands of Shiite Muslims and their mosques, based solely on their religion, as a way to sweep the Northeast for signs of Iranian terrorists, according to interviews and a newly obtained secret police document. The document offers a rare glimpse into the thinking of NYPD intelligence officers and how, when looking for potential threats, they focused their spying efforts on mosques and Muslims. Police analysts listed a dozen mosques from central Connecticut to the Philadelphia suburbs. None has been linked to terrorism, either in the document or publicly by federal agencies. The Associated Press has reported for months that the NYPD infiltrated mosques, eavesdropped in cafes and monitored Muslim neighborhoods with plainclothes officers. Its spying operations were begun after the 2001 terror attacks with help from the CIA in a highly unusual partnership. The May 2006 NYPD intelligence report, entitled “US-Iran Conflict: The Threat to New York City,” made a series of recommendations, including: “Expand and focus intelligence collections at Shi’a mosques.” The NYPD is prohibited under its own guidelines and city law from basing its investigations on religion……………”After 1,400 years, the Shias are being targeted in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, everywhere,” Imam Malik Sakhawat Hussain said after being told that his mosque was in the NYPD document. “If U.S. authorities become suspicious of the Shias, I would say we are a very oppressed community of the world.”……… At the Masjid Al-Rahman, a prayer hall in the basement of a Brooklyn apartment building, manager Abo Maher was surprised to see his mosque on the NYPD’s list of Shiite locations. “This isn’t even Shia,” he said. “Their information is wrong” ……….”

That would be funny, about the “wrong” mosque. If it wasn’t so stupid and so typical and so nasty. We must all look alike to the Kestone Kops of the Big Apple. They get attacked, people are massacred, by Salafi Wahhabis. There are attempts at terrorism by Salafis from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Africa (admittedly some of them entrapped). Yet the geniuses of the NYPD seem obsessed that the Shi’as might be building a nuclear bomb in Brooklyn. They are apparently learning from the Bahrain regime agents. Maybe for a change it is New York that has sent their cops for training to Bahrain.



Of course increased surveillance of more mosques, be they Shi’a or Sunni or Episcopalian or Haredim, means more overtime pay for New York’s once finest, no?
Cheers
mhg


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CIA, Iran, Islamophobia, MEK, Mujahideen Khalq, Muslims, War on Iran

James Woolsey, a Muslim Adolf Hitler, and Bombing Bill Clinton……….

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“The United States should consider military strikes against not just Iran’s nuclear sites but the entire Iranian Revolutionary Guard infrastructure, argued former CIA director James Woolsey in a radio interview today. Comparing the Guards to Adolph Hitler’s blackshirts, Woolsey named several “fair game” Guard-related targets, including Iran’s space program, ballistic missile program, training facilities and the Guard’s substantial commercial interesta………. The ex-CIA director said the U.S. should consider these military options if Iran blocks the strategic Strait of Hormuz waterway or takes other significant aggressive action…………..”

I know someone is not worth taking seriously when they start comparing others to “Adolf Hitler” and his murderous groups. It is perceived as an easy and cheap way to make a point, except that it doesn’t. Idiotic and dishonest politicians use it a lot. They always compare some Arab or Muslim to Hitler, never a European (not even a fucking German or Austrian), never even an Asian or African. One has to be a Muslim Middle East leader to be compared to Hitler. Now, how stupid is that?


Mr. Woolsey has been advocating a new Middle East war ever since he started showing up on Fox News a few years ago, even at the peak of the war in Iraq. He never volunteers to join, though: they never do, these fattened and comfortable warmongers.
James Woolsey was director of the CIA under Bill Clinton, but briefly. Apparently Clinton was not impressed with Woolsey and stopped seeing him (or maybe he was too boring, probably both). Media reports said (alleged) that he tried desperately to make appointments with the president and that Clinton just refused to see him. There is a famous case in 1994 of a lone pilot who circled the White House and crash landed his airplane on its South Lawn. Some media reports initially claimed it was CIA chief James Woolsey, desperately trying to see Bill Clinton who still refused to grant him an audience.

Cheers
mhg


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Islamophobia, Muslims, Religion, U.S. Congress, U.S. Politics, US Foreign Policy

(2) Rick Santorum & the Middle East: “Mein Kampf gegen die Muslime und Araber”………

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“Santorum believes “it is the duty of each and every American citizen who abhors terrorism and supports freedom to stand up and say, ‘I support Israel.'” He has attacked Obama for putting “Israel’s very existence in more peril” and says Palestine’s statehood bid at the United Nations is a sign that the Palestinians “feel weakness — they feel it, they see it, they know it — and they’re going to exploit it.“………”

Like I said earlier: (Congressmen don’t get much in-depth foreign policy experience unless that sit on certain specialized committee or subcommittee. Just look at poor Rick Santorum, the subject of my next brief posting).

Oh well, Santorum was a one-term senator. He is a rust-belt gun-slinging (shoot the duck, shoot the duck) Catholic who talks the evangelical omni-phobic Bible-belt talk, and walks the unique Bible-belt walk. He too is betting the Middle East farm on the Rapture and mass conversion when the “moment is right”.
He’s got the Bible (Old and New Testaments) and his own wild fascist ideas. I’d offer him a copy of the Quran as well, in English, except he might charge me with harassment or of being some kind of Islamo-terrorist Jihadist Salafi motha.
He hasn’t yet published “Mein Kampf gegen die Muslime und Araber”. I doubt that he ever will: remember earlier this week I posted here quoting someone who likened his campaign to a person who is dead but he doesn’t know it, although everybody else does.
Cheers
mhg


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Iraq, Islamophobia, Israel, Middle East, Muslims, Palestine, U.S. Politics, US Foreign Policy

(1) Newt Gingrich and the Middle East: Calculated Muslim-Baiting…….

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“Gingrich’s faltering presidential campaign was completely resuscitated by a 5 million donation from Las Vegas casino king and super-Zionist Sheldon Adelson. (According to Wikipedia, Adelson is currently the 8th wealthiest American and 16th wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $23.3 billion.) Rising from the ashes, Gingrich now has won the South Carolina primary and has a decent chance of becoming the Republican presidential nominee…… Adelson and his Israeli-born wife, Miriam, have spent time and money lobbying for a bill to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Gingrich has promised that his first executive order as president would be the embassy move. Adelson is an ardent Zionist. Since 2007 the Adelson Family Foundation has made contributions totaling $100 million to Birthright Israel, which finances Jewish youth trips to Israel, Adelson is such a hard-line Zionist that he even stopped supporting AIPAC when it appeared to support a 2007 peace initiative championed by Olmert, President Bush, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In 2009, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), which is a hard-line Zionist group that wants Israel to retain the occupied territories and expand the Jewish settlements, presented Adelson its most distinguished and historic award, the Theodor Herzl Gold Medallion for outstanding achievement in Zionism. His wife received the Louis D. Brandeis Award. The couple now have their names on one of ZOA’s major awards, the Dr. Miriam & Sheldon Adelson Defender of Israel Award. Adelson is intimately involved in Israeli politics………..”

Newt Gingrich has promised to move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. That is a standard promise for most presidential candidates in the United States, and reneging on the promise afterwards is also standard procedure. The idea of where the embassy is located has no strategic implications, and I suspect that most Arab regimes will just do some posturing and then accept it. Unless it is moved to East Jerusalem.

Gingrich does not seem to believe that the Palestinians deserve their own state(-let) on the West Bank (and Gaza?). This may seem like a strongly pro-Israeli policy, but it is not necessarily so in the long-term. It means he prefers Israel to annex territory covering anywhere between 2 to 3 million more Palestinian Arabs (in addition to Arab Israelis who are less than 24% of the population). Yet what would they do with all these Arabs? Citizenship and voting rights mean a huge, nay a seismic, political shift. An apartheid-type policy is not an option in this day and age (even the Bahrain regime on the Gulf is having trouble keeping its apartheid policy intact). Besides, it would truly upset and turn off most Jewish-Americans who would not condone such policy (in comparison Jewish-Russians probably wouldn’t give a fig about it, nor would the “Christian” right).
Gingrich has also done some of the usual Republican Muslim-baiting. He made some appropriate (to the right wingers) noises about the dangers the Shri’a law presents to the United States. He knows there is no such danger because it won’t happen. He also was slated to share the speaking stage with Dutch Neo-Nazi politician and rabble-rouser Geert Wilders at an anti-Muslim rally a couple of years ago in New York, but he was smart enough to go AWOL on that day. His Muslim-baiting is calculated, unlike that of some other republicans: that only means he is smarter than his colleagues in the Party.

I have not posted anything recently about my earlier suggestion that Newt Gingrich take a hike, literally, on the Iraq-Iran border. That was meant to shore up his foreign policy credentials.  But that hike may be impossible now, given that overt American military presence in Iraq is limited to John McCain and Joe Lieberman camping in Falluja. (Congressmen don’t get much in-depth foreign policy experience unless that sit on certain specialized committee or subcommittee. Just look at poor Rick Santorum, the subject of my next brief posting).
Cheers
mhg


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Islamophobia, Muslims, Racism, U.S. Politics

The Brain and the Ass: a Republican Fear that America will turn Atheist and Muslim Fundamentalist……

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““I have two grandchildren: Maggie is 11; Robert is 9,” Gingrich said at Cornerstone Church here. “I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American ………..”

Newt Gingrich probably meant “what it once meant to be a white American”. So the “brain” of the GOP worries that the USA will turn into an atheist society that will be controlled by radical Muslims. Some people claim that he is, essentially, the “brain” of the new regional Republican Party. If that is the logic used by the “brain” of the GOP, I shudder to think what utterances its “ass” can makes. I am not talking about Beck and Limbaugh and the usual right-wing media gasbags. I mean mostly the others in the Republican race.
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, Culture, France, Human Right, Islamophobia, Muslims, Religion, Salafi

France’s Jeannette Bougrab: Why She May be Right about Islam and Christianity and Judaism and……………

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“La secrétaire d’Etat à la Jeunesse Jeannette Bougrab réagissait dans un entretien au journal Le Parisien aux succès électoraux des islamistes au Maroc, en Tunisie et en Egypte. Elle est elle-même d’origine algérienne, fille de harki, le nom donné aux supplétifs algériens de l’armée française pendant la guerre d’indépendance. “C’est très inquiétant”, a-t-elle déclaré. “Je ne connais pas d’islamisme modéré”. “Il n’y a pas de charia +light+. Je suis juriste et on peut faire toutes les interprétations théologiques, littérales ou fondamentales que l’on veut, mais le droit fondé sur la charia est nécessairement une restriction des libertés, notamment de la liberté de conscience“, a-t-elle ajouté………………”


She says there is no such thing as “Sharia-light”, that religious law leaves no room for freedoms. On some level she is right, of course: once you apply the religious laws, any religious laws, be they Muslim or Christian or Jewish, you are pushed to go ‘all the way’. Freedoms are inevitably restricted. Salafis and Muslim Brothers who say they will apply “limited” Shari’a are playing for time. Limited Shari’a is like limited ‘virginity’ or limited ‘death’: it doesn’t exist, doesn’t make sense (at least I don’t think so). Religion can be moderated on an individual level: you pray, you fast, you lead your life the way you want within the law. Once the state starts to apply the Shari’a, or the laws of the Old Testament, the Bible and the Talmud, then there is no moderation. This applies to Muslims and Christians and Jews. Americans, more than  all other Westerners, are still grappling with this now that Christianity has become part of Republican political platforms. Jews in Israel are trying to fend off an aggressive Jewish-Salafi onslaught on civic society.
In some places, Saudi Arabia and Iran, they are mixing up Caesar with God, usurping power, and in the Saudi case wealth, in the name of Allah. Caesar was deified after he died.
Cheers
mhg


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Islamophobia, Latin America, Muslims, Religion, U.S. Politics

Marabutin Avenge Quetzalcoatl: New Conquistadores, Muslims of Mexico, Tequila Sunset…………

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“Raised a Christian, Manuel Gomez now goes by Mohamed Chechev, and counts himself among a handful of Tzotzil Indians converted to Islam by Spaniards in southern Mexico. “I am Muslim. I know the truth. I pray five times a day, celebrate Ramadan and have traveled to Mecca,” Chechev said in rudimentary Spanish. He lives in a mainly Protestant community in Chiapas called Nueva Esperanza on the outskirts of San Cristobal de las Casas, where he shares a modest house with 19 relatives and sells vegetables he grows on a plot of land……….. In the interior courtyard of the home, Chechev’s wife Noora (born Juana) and his daughter-in-law Sharifa (Pascuala) swept and cleaned laundry. They wore long dresses and a veil covered their hair………… And Chechev followed in the footsteps of another indigenous leader, Domingo Lopes, who was an official at an Adventist church before converting to Islam, introduced to the region by the Marabutin movement which moved to Mexico from Spain in 1993 in a bid to create a self-sufficient community. The Marabutin sect is a hangover from the days when Spain was part of the Muslim empire for some seven centuries……………”

Oddly, the Mexicans have not rushed to pass laws against the Shari’a threatening their Agave Tequila. They have not, yet, taken a page from the worthies in Bible Belt Oklahoma which passed an anti-Shari’a law last year only to discover that it may apply to the Bible and the Ten Commandments as well. There was also something about Islamic danger in both Tennessee and Missouri.
Call it the revenge of the native Mexican deity Quetzalcoatl against the Catholic priests who forced his fans, with iron and fire, to abandon him. Even more ironic: those who concerted these handful of Mexicans came from Spain, presumably without the regulation Catholic mullahs. And not seeking “oro y plata”. 
Okay, before the good people of the great states of Tejas and Arizona panic: this “Muslim” conversion thing is far away in Chiapas. It is not going to go far, it will not spill across the border. Never fear, the drug cartels still rule supreme, and the Evangelicals, as they will for many years to come. There will be no “officially sanctioned” polygamy along the border, not as much as already exists in Texas.
Cheers
mhg


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Al-Qaeda, Islamophobia, Lebanon, Middle East, Muslims, Racism, Religion, WTF

United States of Paranoia? Imported Baggage, “Native” Baggage, Pakistani Beaver Hunters……………..

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“Ten years after the 9/11 attacks, America’s Muslims have become the country’s internal enemy. Conservative forces have seized upon the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” as a rallying point. Amid all the hate, Americans have lost sight of the real problem: the fact that their country has become paranoid………. Indeed, Gabriel, who emigrated to the US years ago from Lebanon, is America’s siren on all things Islamophobic……… Gabriel’s position can be summarized as follows: The US is suffering from terminal cancer and is infected with rampant Islamist cells that are eating away at the country, its liberties and its constitution. “Our enemy,” writes Gabriel, “is not an organization of people living overseas plotting to attack. Our enemies are the neighbors next door, the doctors practicing in our hospitals, and the workers who share our lunch break. Our enemies are terrorists driven by a dangerous ideology and clothed in deception who operate under cover and laugh about the advantages our sensitivity training, gullibility, and political correctness give them.” Some 300,000 copies of Gabriel’s first book, which contains these sentences, have been distributed. TV stations now set aside ample airtime for her and her ideas. She has been invited to give presentations to US Senate committees, the FBI, the US Special Operations Command, the Joint Forces Staff College, the Republican Party, the Tea Party movement and Christian conferences…………….”

This Lebanese right-wing chick represents the imported half of American paranoia. She arrives on these shores (well, lands at an airport) with more than one kind of baggage. We all do so, or most of us who arrive from our baggage-rich Middle East. We carry our racial, ethnic, sectarian, and historical prejudices and sometimes hatreds. Whether we come to settle, to study, to medicate, or just to visit. Most of us move on “into America”. Some of us hang on to the old baggage, urged on by ongoing events back home. You can see, hear, and read our baggage, our sectarian and confessional and ethnic prejudices, in our actions and our statements (and our blogs, like this one). That applies to many of us, to this lady and to me, but to different degrees. It seems she is re-fighting a lost Lebanese civil war, re-fighting a lost demographic war, living a Lebanon that did not exist for most Lebanese outside the capital region. But that was a war that also pitted Muslims against Muslims and Christians against Christians. It was a war of the warlords and before it ended it gave birth to Hezbollah.

Besides, there are many benefits to doing the right-wing talk and conference circuit: Sarah Palin isn’t doing bad on the circuit, nor is Glenn Beck and many others who peddle fear-mongering to simple worried folks. Fear-mongering is the gold rush of these people and they have discovered their own mother lode and are milking it for all its worth.

Remember
that old commercial for Salem cigarettes that said “You can take Salem out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of Salem”? We are like that Salem cigarette. Sometimes the baggage and the ghosts await a new generation to throw them in the dumpster.

(Okay,
 that was our excuse, but what is behind all these crazy native Americans going paranoid? And I don’t mean “real” native Americans; just the new arrivals of the past three centuries. It takes many born natives to create this mad frenzy and fear by millions of a few hundred ragtag shaggy mountain men, dare I say beaver trappers, in the allied states of Pakistan and Afghanistan.)
Cheers
mhg


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