Category Archives: Islamophobia

Anders Behring Breivik’s inexplicable crime

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Karl Ove Knausgaard writes: Norway is a small country. It is also relatively homogeneous and egalitarian. This means that the distance from top to bottom is short, and that great disasters affect the entire populace. For example, every Norwegian knows someone who knows someone who died when the Alexander Kielland drilling rig capsized, in 1980 — I recall that my brother had a schoolmate whose father died in the disaster — or when, a decade later, a ferry, the Scandinavian Star, burned and a hundred and fifty-eight of the passengers died. There is also something deeply sincere, almost innocent, about Norwegian culture. Practically every time something about Norway or one of its people appears in the foreign press, the Norwegian media mention this with pride. And every May 17th, National Constitution Day, people don their nicest clothes, whether these be bunads, suits, or dresses, retrieve their flags and ribbons with Norwegian colors, and spill onto the streets to watch children sing songs about Norway, while everyone shouts hurrah and waves flags in a show of patriotism that encompasses every layer of society and plays out in every part of the country. The celebration takes place without irony and is essentially unpolitical — both the left and the right are united in this sea of flags and children. This says something about the country’s egotism, but also about its harmlessness.

It was out of this world that the thirty-two-year-old Anders Behring Breivik stepped when, on the afternoon of July 22, 2011, he set out from his mother’s flat in Oslo’s West End, changed into a police uniform, parked a van containing a bomb, which he had spent the spring and summer making, outside Regjeringskvartalet, lit the fuse, and left the scene. While the catastrophic images of the attack, which killed eight people, were being broadcast across the world, Breivik headed to Utøya. That was where the Workers’ Youth League had its annual summer camp. There Breivik shot and killed sixty-nine people, in a massacre that lasted for more than an hour, right until the police arrived, when he immediately surrendered.

He wanted to save Norway. Just a few hours before detonating the bomb, Breivik e-mailed a fifteen-hundred-page manifesto to a thousand recipients, in which he said that we were at war with Muslims and multiculturalism and that the slaughter of the campers was meant to be a wake-up call. He also uploaded to YouTube a twelve-minute video that revealed, with propagandistic simplicity, what was about to happen in Europe: the Muslim invasion.

The shock in Norway was total. After the Second World War, the most serious political assault in the country had been the so-called Hadeland Murders, in 1981. Two young men, members of a small neo-Nazi underground movement, Norges Germanske Armé, were killed. Breivik’s crime was radically different. The television broadcasts of the scene were chaotic; the journalists and anchorpeople were just as affected by the events as the people they were interviewing; one read in their eyes and their body language incredulity, shock, confusion. The usual detachment with which news is delivered had collapsed. Indeed, at that moment it seemed as if the world stood open. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian extremist who killed 77 people in a bomb and gun rampage in 2011, lives in conditions that would seem luxurious by American incarceration standards: a three-room suite with windows that includes a treadmill, a fridge, a television with DVD player and even a Sony PlayStation.

But on Wednesday, a Norwegian court found that the government had violated his human rights, concluding that his long-term solitary confinement posed a threat to his mental health. Mr. Breivik has virtually no contact with other inmates and is subjected to frequent strip searches and searches of his cell. At a trial in March, he argued that his isolation amounted to torture.

Judge Helen Andenaes Sekulic of the Oslo District Court, who oversaw the trial, which was held at the prison for security reasons, found on Wednesday that prison officials had violated an article of the European Convention of Human Rights that prohibits “inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” She directed the government to reduce the extent of Mr. Breivik’s isolation — though she did not specify how — and ordered the government to pay Mr. Breivik’s legal fees of 331,000 kroner, or about $40,600. [Continue reading…]

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College student is removed from Southwest Airlines flight because he spoke Arabic

The New York Times reports: A college student who came to the United States as an Iraqi refugee was removed from a Southwest Airlines flight in California earlier this month after another passenger became alarmed when she heard him speaking Arabic.

The student, Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, a senior at the University of California, Berkeley, was taken off a flight from Los Angeles International Airport to Oakland on April 6 after he called an uncle in Baghdad to tell him about an event he attended that included a speech by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

“I was very excited about the event so I called my uncle to tell him about it,” he said.

He told his uncle about the chicken dinner they were served and the moment when he got to stand up and ask the secretary general a question about the Islamic State, he said. But the conversation seemed troubling to a nearby passenger, who told the crew she overheard him making “potentially threatening comments,” the airline said in a statement.

Mr. Makhzoomi, 26, knew something was wrong as soon as he finished his phone call and saw that a woman sitting in front of him had turned around in her seat to stare at him, he said. She headed for the airplane door soon after he told his uncle that he would call again when he landed, and qualified it with a common phrase in Arabic, “inshallah,” meaning “god willing.”

“That is when I thought, ‘Oh, I hope she is not reporting me,’ because it was so weird,” Mr. Makhzoomi said.

That is exactly what happened. An Arabic-speaking Southwest Airlines employee of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent came to his seat and escorted him off the plane a few minutes after his call ended, he said. The man introduced himself in Arabic and then switched to English to ask, “Why were you speaking Arabic in the plane?” [Continue reading…]

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Islamist radicals are a threat. But do you need to attack their religion?

Ishaan Tharoor writes: Islam is not a monolithic thing. It’s embraced by multitudes that speak different languages, think different thoughts and grapple with different challenges every day. It has no central, governing institution and no shortage of internal debates and schisms.

Some analysts point out that the attacks on Islam aren’t really about religion, per se. “Their ‘cultural racism’ portrays Muslims as an irremediable, jihadist fifth column,” writes journalist and critic Adam Shatz in an incisive essay about the Charlie Hebdo editorial and its boosters. “Their fear of Islam has less to do with the religion than with the people who practice it.”

That was very much on show in the face of Europe’s migrant crisis, when fears of a “jihadist fifth column” consumed a segment of the Western public and shaped the response to what aid groups and the United Nations desperately plead is, first and foremost, a humanitarian tragedy in the Middle East.

Given the violence in Brussels and Paris, these fears are understandable. But it’s a case of seeing a vast forest when there are only a few trees.

“Claiming that Europe faces a Muslim invasion has become standard fare for a range of politicians and political parties in Europe,” noted Nate Schenkkan, the project director behind a recent Freedom House report on the rise of illiberal politics in parts of the continent. “This kind of speech undermines democracy by rejecting one of its fundamental principles — equality before the law. There is a danger that this kind of hateful, paranoid speech will lead to violence against minorities and refugees.”

This “hateful, paranoid speech” has its obvious political uses, though. Fiery populists on both sides of the pond have pointed to the threat of Islam when campaigning, often with success, in recent local elections.

The trouble is that pinning the radicalization and criminality of a small minority on whole communities — a whole religion, even — obscures more than it reveals. It reduces to abstraction what are far more complicated and important problems to consider, such as lapses in security and intelligence as well as troubles over assimilation and integration.

And, as myriad experts on counterterrorism policy and the Middle East have argued, it trades in the same logic that is employed by Islamist organizations.

“Promoting a clash of civilizations and destroying the reality of productive coexistence between Muslims and non-Muslims was always at the heart of al-Qaeda’s strategy. The Islamic State has avowed the same goal of eliminating the ‘gray zones’ of toleration,” writes Marc Lynch, professor of international affairs at George Washington University. “With American political discourse these days, the prospects for escaping the iron logic of this strategy have never looked more dismal.” [Continue reading…]

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The strange history of secularism twists debate about British Muslim attitudes

By Humeira Iqtidar, King’s College London

Governments in Britain have tended to treat Muslim citizens much like colonial administrations treated their subjects. Intermediaries – tribal leaders or religious figures – are found to establish communication between the empire and its people. One positive thing about a recent ICM poll of British muslims is that it offers an alternative. The survey, carried out for a Channel 4 documentary, was never going to be able to reflect the complexity of British Muslim life accurately, but it does signal a shift by engaging directly with Muslim citizens.

How poll data is used is one way to test how colonialism’s legacy might linger on. The Daily Mail chose for its headline the quote: “Muslims are not like us and we should just accept that they will not integrate …” while Sky News highlighted that: “Half of British Muslims want homosexuality banned.”

Few media outlets rushed to use the headline that “86% of Muslims feel strong affiliation with UK, higher than the national average”, although this too is one of the findings from the survey. It is an “us and them” framework that fails to spark debate about who “we” might be and why “they”, with all their differences, might need greater integration with us, as the report has suggested.

We don’t have space here to discuss how the category Muslim may be broken up across class, regional or ethnic background. Nor will we get into comparisons with others: whether, for instance, British Catholics, or for that matter, members of the Conservative Party, might have similar sentiments towards homosexuality.

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Muslims used to love living in Tennessee — now it’s a nightmare

BuzzFeed reports: The fire department called before dawn. Daoud Abudiab and his 13-year-old daughter were already awake, so they got in the car quickly. From about a mile away, Abudiab saw a plume of black smoke rising above the low skyline and started getting nervous. He thought back to the arguments over whether to mark the Islamic Center of Columbia, Tennessee, the only mosque in the hundred-mile stretch between Nashville and Huntsville, with a large sign or a small, unassuming one. They had opted for a large one.

Abudiab and his daughter could feel the heat of the fire when they stood at the yellow police tape. A black swastika was spray-painted on the mosque’s facade. Flames pushed out from the burst windows and up through the collapsed roof. Abudiab’s wife arrived with the rest of the kids, followed by other congregants and their families.

Abudiab looked at the women and all he saw was headscarves. “Go home,” he pleaded. “Don’t go out. Don’t go to Walmart. Don’t go anywhere.”

The ringleader of the band of white supremacists who burned down the mosque with Molotov cocktails justified the act by saying, “What goes on in that building is illegal according to the Bible.” This was February 2008. The theory of Barack Obama’s crypto-Islamism was faint chatter on the fringes. But in the years after Obama’s election, Tennessee became a key battleground in a national anti-Muslim movement whose influence has culminated, for now, in the presidential campaigns of Republican frontrunners Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, both of whom are being advised by people whose views on Islam were once considered too extreme for mainstream politics. [Continue reading…]

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FBI’s ‘shared responsibility committees’ to identify ‘radicalized’ Muslims raise alarms

The Intercept reports: The FBI’s plan to enlist community leaders in “Shared Responsibility Committees” all across the country with the goal of identifying “radicalized” individuals is raising alarm among civil rights activists.

The Shared Responsibility Committees, known as SRCs, “are expanding the informant program under the guise of an intervention program, which it is not,” said Abed Ayoub, legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).

The FBI’s ideas is to have social service workers, teachers, mental health professionals, religious figures, and others interdict young people they believe are on a path towards radicalization. The program was first revealed last November, and while details remain scant, it is widely believed to have been developed along the lines of similar “anti-radicalization” programs in the United Kingdom.

The FBI did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Experts acknowledge the need to have options beyond sending young people to jail for making threatening statements. The committees purport to offer such an option, by allowing members to offer non-binding recommendations to law enforcement about whether certain individuals should be arrested or offered rehabilitation for their alleged radicalization.

But critics say that despite the FBI’s benign characterization of the SRCs, the proposal amounts to nothing more than an expansion of already existing FBI informant programs. The committees “would be doing the work of the FBI, gathering information. This initiative failed in the U.K., it’s not like this is a new idea,” said Ayoub.

The U.K. program called “Channel” has been widely blamed for alienating the communities it targeted while inflaming attitudes towards authorities. Arun Kundnani, an adjunct professor at New York University and expert on U.K. counterterrorism policy, said he worries that the U.S. program would “suffer from the same problems, such as drawing non-policing professionals into becoming the eyes and ears of counter-terrorism surveillance, and thereby undermining professional norms and relationships of trust among educators, health workers and others.” [Continue reading…]

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How French secularism became fundamentalist

Robert Zaretsky writes: For nearly a century, laïcité [which originally assured “the liberty of conscience” for all French citizens] worked well enough. It ensured public space for both those who believed — not just Catholics and Protestants, but Jews as well — and those who did not. But with the 1980s and 1990s came a growing number of immigrants, most of whom were Muslim, from North Africa. And so a different kind of conflict between the French state and established religion began to take shape.

Emblematic of this new tension was a series of battles over a simple strip of clothing. In 1989, a few Muslim girls were expelled from school when they refused to take off their hijabs, or headscarves, which the principal believed was an assault on the secular character of public schools. Shortly after, the French administrative court, the Conseil d’État, ordered them to be reinstated. But two years after 9/11, when similar incidents were repeated at other schools, the court reversed its original finding. While all “ostentatious” signs of religious faith — be they Jewish yarmulkes or Sikh turbans — were declared verboten in public schools, everyone knew that the principal target of the law was the hijab.

In the subsequent sound and fury, the banner of laïcité was unfurled in ways that would surely have been unrecognizable to the 19th-century statesmen like Jules Ferry and Aristide Briand, who helped write the original law. The once-straightforward guarantees of “freedom of conscience” and “free exercise of religious faiths” — rooted in and restricted to the constitutions of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Republics — were transformed under the forces of political passion and mounting existential anguish into the defining French values, and any form of retreat from a fundamentalist interpretation was a failure to defend the republic.

Today, public intellectuals like Alain Finkielkraut, Régis Debray, and Elisabeth Badinter, when discussing laïcité, invoke the very future of France. Badinter, a renowned feminist philosopher, as if in anticipation of the Charlie Hebdo editorial, declared in January that she was not afraid to be called an Islamophobe, arguing that accusations of racism are a weapon against secularism. In a recent essay on secularism, diversity, and national identity titled L’identité malheureuse (“Unhappy Identity”), Finkielkraut confounds myth with history when he declares his sympathy for those “who miss the good old days when native-born Frenchmen and women (Français de souche) mingled with their own kind and who are now shedding a tear over their sepia-colored France that has lost its homogeneity.”

The xenophobic and anti-immigration National Front, too, has weaponized laïcité, turning it into an ideological cudgel to be used against French Muslims. Last year, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the party’s rising star — and granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen — asserted that the National Front is “laïque,” or secular. Yet she then offered an interpretation of the state of religion in France that had very little to do with laïcité as most of the world understands it, exposing the cognitive dissonance shared by the extreme right and left: “If French Muslims wish to practice their faith, they need to accept the fact that they are doing so on soil that is culturally Christian. This means that they cannot have the same rank as the Christian religion.”

Then, last week, the minister for families, children, and women’s rights, Laurence Rossignol, lambasted fashion designers for offering lines of Islamic wear-inspired clothing, including the so-called “burkini,” a full-body bathing suit sold by Marks and Spencer. These brands, Rossignol declared, had “irresponsibly” lent their prestige to clothing designed to oppress women. As for those Muslim women who freely choose to wear religious garb, Rossignol shrugged her shoulders: “There were also American negroes who favored slavery.”

In a single phrase, Rossignol not only let drop a racial slur, but also let slip the implications of how she — a member of government — sees the meaning of laïcité today: No normal French woman, Rossignol seems to believe, would choose to wear Islamic dress as a sign of her religious faith. Tellingly, Rossignol’s use of the word “négre” sparked more outrage in the media than her claim that burkini-wearing women have no place in a truly secular society. [Continue reading…]

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How did we end up here?

Adam Shatz writes: In No Name in the Street, James Baldwin describes how, not long after he settled in France in 1948, he ‘had watched the police, one sunny afternoon, beat an old, one-armed Arab peanut vendor senseless in the streets, and I had watched the unconcerned faces of the French on the café terraces, and the congested faces of the Arabs.’ With a ‘generous smile’, Baldwin’s friends reassured him that he was different from the Arabs: ‘Le noir américain est très évolué, voyons!’ He found the response perplexing, given what he knew of French views about the United States, so he asked a ‘very cunning question’:

If so crude a nation as the United States could produce so gloriously civilised a creature as myself, how was it that the French, armed with centuries of civilised grace, had been unable to civilise the Arab?

The response was breathtakingly simple: ‘The Arabs did not wish to be civilised.’ They, the Arabs, had their own traditions, and ‘the Arab was always hiding something; you couldn’t guess what he was thinking and couldn’t trust what he was saying. And they had a different attitude toward women, they were very brutal with them, in a word they were rapists, and they stole, and they carried knives.’

Aside from ageing veterans of the French-Algerian war, no one in France talks about ‘the Arabs’ any longer. Instead they speak of ‘the Muslims’. But France’s Muslims are the descendants of that Arab peanut vendor – and, all too often, targets of the same racist intolerance. Like the racism Baldwin encountered among his Parisian friends, it often wears an ennobling mask: anti-terrorist, secular, feminist. [Continue reading…]

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French minister accused of Islamophobia over veil comments

Hajer M’tiri reports: “There are women who choose [to wear headscarves], there were also American negroes who were for slavery”. This sentence was said by a French government minister on Wednesday. As shocking and offensive as those words are, for people from around the globe, in particular the Muslim and Black communities in France, some activists say they are not surprised, as those words “are just a continuation of the French government’s hypocritical and openly racist policy”.

Speaking on French radio RMC on Wednesday about fashion houses commercializing accessories such as veils or headscarves, Laurence Rossignol, the French minister of families, children and women’s rights, compared women who choose to wear headscarves to the “American Negroes who were for slavery” and blasted the fashion houses.

It all started on her Twitter account, when Rossignol expressed her unhappiness with British brand Marks & Spencer announcing it would offer full-body “burqini” swimsuits in its online store.

Several international clothing and accessories brands recently launched lines for “Islamic modest wear”: the Swedish giant H&M last year used a Muslim hijabi model as their main face for its advertising campaign, while the Japanese brand Uniqlo earlier this month announced it would begin selling hijabs in its London stores.

Last year Zara, Tommy Hilfiger, Oscar de la Renta, and Mango all launched varyingly “modest” collections for Muslim women.

Luxury fashion brand Dolce & Gabbana last January launched a collection of hijabs and abayas targeting wealthy Muslim women in the Middle East.

Abdallah Zekri, president of the National Observatory against Islamophobia, told Anadolu Agency that Rossignol’s remarks “stigmatize Muslim women” and “violate France’s secularist principles.”

He accused Rossignol of not tackling serious and “real” problems such as unemployment and terrorism, and instead choosing to attack Muslim women.

“Instead of choosing the path of dialogue, she is stigmatizing Muslim women. She seems to be sliding a bit to the methods of Daesh recruiters,” Zekri said.

He continued: “It is as if she’s acting as a recruiting sergeant for Daesh with such remarks. You know, it is with these kinds of statements that Daesh recruiters brainwash their victims, saying, ‘Look, they don’t see you as citizens…’.” [Continue reading…]

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How much does it matter whether God exists?

Nathan Schneider writes: Two rooms, in two different cities, but pretty much the same scene: one man stands before a few dozen supporters, many of them middle-aged white males, plus a smaller, precocious cohort in early adulthood. As the man speaks, they interrupt him with good, earnest, detailed questions, which he ably answers more or less to their satisfaction. These crowds crave the intricacies of arguments and the upshots of science. The only thing that seems beyond their ken is how their counterparts in the other room could be convinced of something so wrong.

One of those rooms was in New York City, high in an office building overlooking the ruins that then still remained of the World Trade Center; the man was Richard Dawkins, the Oxford zoologist and ‘New Atheist’ polemicist. The man in the other room was his arch-rival, the evangelical Christian philosopher and debater William Lane Craig, speaking in a classroom on the sprawling campus of his megachurch in Marietta, Georgia. If one were to attend both events without understanding English, it would be hard to know the difference.

Whether such a thing as God exists is one of those questions that we use to mark our identities, choose our friends, and divide our families. But there are also moments when the question starts to seem suspect, or only partly useful. Once, backstage before a sold-out debate at the University of Notre Dame between Craig and Sam Harris, Dawkins’s fellow New Atheist, I heard an elderly Catholic theologian approach Harris and spit out: ‘I agree with you more than I do with that guy!’

During the heyday of the New Atheist movement, a few years after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, I was in the wake of a teenage conversion to Catholicism. One might think that my converts’ zeal would pit me squarely against the New Atheist camp. But it didn’t. Really, neither side of the does-God-exist debates seemed to represent me, and the arguments in question had little to do with my embrace of my new-found faith. I had been drawn by the loosey-goosey proposition that love can conquer hate and death, expressed concretely in the lives of monks I had briefly lived among and members of the Catholic Worker Movement who shared their homes with the homeless and abandoned. I actually agreed with most of what the New Atheists wrote about science and free enquiry; what I disagreed most sorely with them about was their hawkish support for military invasions in Muslim-majority countries. [Continue reading…]

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The war on terror has turned the whole world into a battlefield

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Arun Kundnani writes: When opinion polls find that most Muslims think Westerners are selfish, immoral and violent, we have no idea of the real causes. And so we assume such opinions must be an expression of their culture rather than our politics.

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have exploited these reactions with their appeals to Islamophobia. But most liberals also assume that religious extremism is the root cause of terrorism. President Obama, for example, has spoken of “a violent, radical, fanatical, nihilistic interpretation of Islam by a faction — a tiny faction — within the Muslim community that is our enemy, and that has to be defeated.”

Based on this assumption, think-tanks, intelligence agencies and academic departments linked to the national security apparatus have spent millions of dollars since 9/11 conducting research on radicalization. They hoped to find a correlation between having extremist religious ideas, however defined, and involvement in terrorism.

In fact, no such correlation exists, as empirical evidence demonstrates — witness the European Islamic State volunteers who arrive in Syria with copies of “Islam for Dummies” or the alleged leader of the November 2015 Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who was reported to have drunk whisky and smoked cannabis. But this has not stopped national security agencies, such as the FBI, from using radicalization models that assume devout religious beliefs are an indicator of potential terrorism.

The process of radicalization is easily understood if we imagine how we would respond to a foreign government dropping 22,000 bombs on us. Large numbers of patriots would be volunteering to fight the perpetrators. And nationalist and religious ideologies would compete with each other to lead that movement and give its adherents a sense of purpose.

Similarly, the Islamic State does not primarily recruit through theological arguments but through a militarized identity politics. It says there is a global war between the West and Islam, a heroic struggle, with truth and justice on one side and lies, depravity and corruption on the other. It shows images of innocents victimized and battles gloriously waged. In other words, it recruits in the same way that any other armed group recruits, including the U.S. military.

That means that when we also deploy our own militarized identity politics to narrate our response to terrorism, we inadvertently reinforce the Islamic State’s message to its potential recruits. When British Prime Minister David Cameron talks about a “generational struggle” between Western values and Islamic extremism, he is assisting the militants’ own propaganda. When French President François Hollande talks of “a war which will be pitiless,” he is doing the same.

What is distinctive about the Islamic State’s message is that it also offers a utopian and apocalyptic vision of an alternative society in the making. The reality of that alternative is, of course, oppression of women, enslavement of minorities and hatred of freedom.

But the message works, to some extent, because it claims to be an answer to real problems of poverty, authoritarian regimes and Western aggression. Significantly, it thrives in environments where other radical alternatives to a discredited status quo have been suppressed by government repression. What’s corrupting the Islamic State’s volunteers is not ideology but by the end of ideology: they have grown up in an era with no alternatives to capitalist globalization. The organization has gained support, in part, because the Arab revolutions of 2011 were defeated, in many cases by regimes allied with and funded by the U.S.

After 14 years of the “war on terror,” we are no closer to achieving peace. The fault does not lie with any one administration but with the assumption that war can defeat terrorism. The lesson of the Islamic State is that war creates terrorism. [Continue reading…]

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Following Brussels attacks, Ted Cruz says the U.S. should ‘patrol and secure’ its Muslim neighborhoods

Quartz reports: Apparently trying to one-up Donald Trump in aggressive rhetoric after attacks in Brussels today, March 22, that left at least 31 dead, Ted Cruz issued a statement calling for the US to “patrol and secure its Muslim neighborhoods.”

“For years, the West has tried to deny this enemy exists, out of a combination of political correctness and fear. We can no longer afford either. Our European allies are now seeing what comes of a toxic mix of migrants who have been infiltrated by terrorists and isolated, radical Muslim neighborhoods,” said the would-be Republican presidential nominee.

Cruz’s statement came after another one this morning, in which he simply vowed to fight “radical Islamic terrorism.” It also comes after his main rival Donald Trump went on a media blitz calling for the US to close its borders to Muslim immigration, describing Brussels as a “disaster city” and Belgium a “horror show.” “This all happened because frankly there’s no assimilation. They are not assimilating for whatever reason. They don’t want laws that we have, they want Sharia law, and you say to yourself, at what point, how much of this do you take?” Trump said. [Continue reading…]

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Ted Cruz’s new national security advisers include ‘one of America’s most notorious Islamophobes’

Huffington Post reports: A big part of Sen. Ted Cruz’s appeal is that he’s not Donald Trump, the openly bigoted billionaire currently leading the Republican Party’s presidential race.

But the notion that a Cruz presidency would be more palatable to those concerned about Trump’s anti-Muslim stance came into doubt on Thursday, when Cruz unveiled his own team of national security advisers. It includes Frank Gaffney, a man described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “one of America’s most notorious Islamophobes.”

Gaffney, who served in the Reagan-era Defense Department, now heads the Center for Security Policy. It’s a think tank of sorts well known for promoting conspiratorial theories about the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrating the U.S. government at high levels and the Sharia system replacing American democracy. [Continue reading…]

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Why Trump’s endorsements should scare your pants off

Matt Taibbi writes: Earlier this week, an African-American protester was sucker-punched by a 78-year-old man in a cowboy hat at a Trump rally in North Carolina. The video went viral, and reporters later tracked down John McGraw, the red-faced Trumpthusiast who’d thrown the punch. McGraw explained why he’d belted Rakeem Jones:

“Number one, we don’t know if he’s ISIS,” McGraw said.

One has to commend the Inside Edition reporter doing the interview for not bursting out laughing, or dropping to the ground in shock, at this moment. McGraw went on:

“The next time we see him, we might have to kill him,” he said. “We don’t know who he is. He might be with a terrorist organization.”

That same night, Trump told Anderson Cooper he wasn’t backing down from his plan to bar all Muslims from entering the country. “I think Islam hates us,” he said, adding, “It’s very hard to separate because you don’t know who is who. We have to be very vigilant.”

These episodes are like a child’s game of “telephone,” only played with bone-ignorant adults. The game starts when Trump personifies “Islam” under one label, apparently not realizing that this represents an awesomely diverse collection of people who collectively represent about a quarter of the world’s population. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s is the ugly face of a political insurgency that spans the Atlantic

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Philip Stephens writes: The terms of politics in many of the world’s advanced democracies had changed well before [Donald Trump] joined the Republican primary contest. If the party of Lincoln now risks being devoured by its own terrible creation, the European model of consensual centrism has been under threat for some time. Mr Trump’s flair, if you can call it that, has been in riding the wave.

Populists in Europe fume against the same supposed conspiracy of the elites that Mr Trump claims is doing down America’s middle classes. The binding threads of the shared populism are angry nationalism and state intervention. Europeans used to call it national socialism. Mr Trump wants to expel Mexicans and bar Muslims. In France, the National Front’s Marine Le Pen is bidding for the presidency on a platform of Islamophobia and state capitalism. Both are unabashed admirers of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

The other day a proudly neo-Nazi party — complete with sinister black uniforms and lightning flashes — won seats in the Slovakian parliament. In neighbouring Hungary, prime minister Viktor Orban presides over an authoritarian regime that is hostile to Muslims, permissive of anti-Semitism and blames foreign capital for the country’s economic ills. Poland’s politics have swung towards the xenophobic right. Nationalists are on the march in Scandinavia and Italy. And while populists on the far right rail against migrants, their cousins on the extreme left join them in blaming globalisation for economic ills.

Germany, hitherto a linchpin of the continent’s political stability, faces the beginnings of its own insurgency in the rise of the Eurosceptic and anti-migrant Alternative für Deutschland party. In Britain, the movement to take Britain out of the EU has its own populist hue. Mr Trump promises to make America great again by throwing up the barricades. Boris Johnson, the ambitious mayor of London, pledges that Brexit would see Britons “take back control” of the nation’s borders. [Continue reading…]

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How AIPAC mainstreams anti-Muslim hate

Ali Gharib writes:  ast year, Investigative Project on Terrorism head Steven Emerson quietly pulled out of the annual conference of Washington’s most influential pro-Israel lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). He pinned the withdrawal on “an unexpected medical problem that required my immediate attention,” but it was impossible not to notice that it came amid reverberations of criticism for the latest of Emerson’s Islamophobic outbursts.

A couple months before the AIPAC summit, Emerson had taken to the airwaves of Fox News to expound on so-called no-go zones in Europe, purported Muslim enclaves where governments dared not go. But there was a problem: “They don’t exist,” David Graham wrote in The Atlantic. And yet Emerson took the myth even farther. In the United Kingdom, he reported on Fox, “There are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims simply don’t go in!”

The Birmingham comment elicited ridicule from across the spectrum — “This guy is clearly a complete idiot,” British Prime Minister David Cameron said in an interview — and eventually Emerson and, perhaps more improbably, Fox News itself apologized. A few weeks later, Emerson was out at AIPAC.

Now, Emerson is back. His name appears on a list of confirmed speakers published by AIPAC ahead of its Washington, DC, conference later this month. [Continue reading…]

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