The Associated Press reports: The search for those behind the provocative, anti-Muslim film implicated in violent protests in Egypt and Libya led Wednesday to a California Coptic Christian convicted of financial crimes who acknowledged his role in managing and providing logistics for the production.

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, told The Associated Press in an interview outside Los Angeles that he was manager for the company that produced “Innocence of Muslims,” which mocked Muslims and the prophet Muhammad and may have caused inflamed mobs that attacked U.S. missions in Egypt and Libya. He provided the first details about a shadowy production group behind the film.

Nakoula denied he directed the film and said he knew the self-described filmmaker, Sam Bacile. But the cellphone number that AP contacted Tuesday to reach the filmmaker who identified himself as Sam Bacile traced to the same address near Los Angeles where AP found Nakoula. Federal court papers said Nakoula’s aliases included Nicola Bacily, Erwin Salameh and others.

Nakoula told the AP that he was a Coptic Christian and said the film’s director supported the concerns of Christian Copts about their treatment by Muslims.

Nakoula denied he had posed as Bacile. During a conversation outside his home, he offered his driver’s license to show his identity but kept his thumb over his middle name, Basseley. Records checks by the AP subsequently found it and other connections to the Bacile persona.

The AP located Bacile after obtaining his cell phone number from Morris Sadek, a conservative Coptic Christian in the U.S. who had promoted the anti-Muslim film in recent days on his website. Egypt’s Christian Coptic population has long decried what they describe as a history of discrimination and occasional violence from the country’s Arab majority.

Pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville, Fla., who burned Qurans on the ninth anniversary of 9/11, said he spoke with the movie’s director on the phone Wednesday and prayed for him. He said he has not met the filmmaker in person, but the man contacted him a few weeks ago about promoting the movie.

“I have not met him. Sam Bacile, that is not his real name,” Jones said. “I just talked to him on the phone. He is definitely in hiding and does not reveal his identity. He was quite honestly fairly shook up concerning the events and what is happening. A lot of people are not supporting him. He was generally a little shook up concerning this situation.” [Continue reading…]

Max Blumenthal reports: The US Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and three US diplomats were killed in attacks and rioting provoked by an obscure, low-budget anti-Muslim film called “The Innocence of Muslims.” The producer of the film is a real estate developer supposedly named “Sam Bacile” who claims to be an Israeli Jew. Bacile told the AP the film was made with $5 million raised from “100 Jewish donors.” He said he was motivated to help his native country, Israel, by exposing the evils of Islam.

While Bacile claims to be in hiding, and his identity remains murky, another character who has been publicly listed as a consultant on the film is a known anti-Muslim activist with ties to the extreme Christian right and the militia movement. He is Steve Klein, a Hemet, California based insurance salesman who claims to have led a “hunter-killer team” in Vietnam.”

Klein is a right-wing extremist who emerged from the same axis of Islamophobia that produced Anders Behring Breivik and which takes inspiration from the writings of Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, and Daniel Pipes. [Continue reading…]

Sarah Abdurrahman writes: One thing that is immediately evident from watching the nearly 14-minute long trailer for the film is how low the production quality is. I mean really, it is unbelievable that this movie could have cost anywhere near the reported $5 million that it took to make it. Because the production value is so atrociously low, the terrible audio and dubbing just seems par for the course. But on further inspection I noticed something: seemingly every reference to the religion of Islam in the trailer is dubbed over in post production.

If you watch closely, you can see that when the actors are reading parts of the script that do not contain Islam-specific language, the audio from the sound stage is used (the audio that was recorded as the actors were simultaneously being filmed). But anytime the actors are referring to something specific to the religion (the Prophet Muhammed, the Quran, etc.) the audio recorded during filming is replaced with a poorly executed post-production dub. And if you look EVEN closer, you can see that the actors’ mouths are saying something other than what the dub is saying.

Gawker reports: Cindy Lee Garcia, an actress from Bakersfield, Calif., has a small role in the Muhammed movie as a woman whose young daughter is given to Muhammed to marry. But in a phone interview this afternoon, Garcia told us she had no idea she was participating in an offensive spoof on the life of Muhammed when she answered a casting call through an agency last summer and got the part.

The script she was given was titled simply Desert Warriors.

“It was going to be a film based on how things were 2,000 years ago,” Garcia said. “It wasn’t based on anything to do with religion, it was just on how things were run in Egypt. There wasn’t anything about Muhammed or Muslims or anything.”

In the script and during the shooting, nothing indicated the controversial nature of the final product. Muhammed wasn’t even called Muhammed; he was “Master George,” Garcia said. The words Muhammed were dubbed over in post-production, as were essentially all other offensive references to Islam and Muhammed.

For example, at 9:03 in the trailer, Garcia berates her husband, who wants to send their daughter to Muhammed: “Is your Muhammed a child molester?” she says in the final product. But the words are dubbed over what she actually said. The line in the script—and the line Garcia gave during filming—was, “is your God a child molester,” Garcia told us today.

Garcia was horrified when she saw the end product, and when protesters in Libya killed four U.S. Embassy employee.

“I had nothing to do really with anything. Now we have people dead because of a movie I was in. It makes me sick.”

According to Garica, her three days on set last July were unremarkable. The film’s mysterious pseudonymous writer and director, “Sam Bacile,” has claimed to be an Israeli real estate mogul. But Garcia said Bacile told her he was Egyptian on set. Bacile had white hair and spoke Arabic to a number of “dark-skinned” men who hung around the set, she said. (A Bacile associate also told The Atlantic he wasn’t Israeli or Jewish.)

CNN reports: A statement released on the behalf of the 80 cast and crew members of “Innocence of Muslims,” a film that reportedly prompted Tuesday protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, indicates that they are not happy with the film and were misled by the producer.

“The entire cast and crew are extremely upset and feel taken advantage of by the producer. We are 100% not behind this film and were grossly misled about its intent and purpose,” the statement says. “We are shocked by the drastic re-writes of the script and lies that were told to all involved. We are deeply saddened by the tragedies that have occurred.”

The connection between an atrociously made anti-Islamic video and the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi remains open to question. Still, Julian Borger fills in a number of the missing links.

The long fuse that led to the explosion of violence that ultimately killed Stevens was lit last summer in California, where someone calling himself Sam Bacile set about making what is likely to be remembered as one of the most notorious films in recent history. It is far from clear who Bacile is. He described himself in telephone interviews this week with the Wall Street Journal and AP as an Israeli-American property developer, but neither the Israeli authorities nor the California realtors association had heard his name.

In July, a clip from Bacile’s film, called Innocence of Muslims, a bizarre and amateurish attack on the prophet Muhammad, appeared on the internet. The subject is religion but the style, production values and acting are reminiscent of gonzo, low-budget porn, a vast industry in southern California, where this movie seems to have been made. Rarely has the porn industry produced anything as intentionally offensive as the Bacile film.

Steve Klein, a militant Christian activist credited as a consultant on the film, told The Atlantic online: “He’s not Israeli … His name is a pseudonym. All these Middle Eastern folks I work with have pseudonyms. I doubt he’s Jewish. I would suspect this is a disinformation campaign.”

The man calling himself Bacile said he had raised a budget of $5m from 100 “Jewish donors”, whom he declined to name, to make the film, which he wrote and directed himself with the aim of demonstrating his belief, as he described it to the Wall Street Journal, that “Islam is a cancer”.

To that end, Bacile got his amateur cast to depict the prophet Muhammad as a feckless philanderer who approved of child abuse. It took three months, 59 actors and about 45 crew. The result was two hours of stumbling dialogue and wooden acting among flimsy sets, and a stream of gratuitous insults aimed at Muslims. It was screened in an almost empty cinema in Hollywood earlier this year. In another age, that would probably have been the end of the story. In the YouTube era, however, it was a bomb primed for detonation.

Bacile posted a 13-minute English-language trailer on YouTube in early July but it was only in the past week that it appears to have caught on of the online sectarian culture wars.

A Florida pastor, Terry Jones, who had triggered protests in the Islamic world for burning the Qur’an and his campaign to stop the construction of a mosque at the site of the 9/11 attacks, promoted the film on his website and announced his intention to broadcast the trailer at his Gainesville church this week.

The film clip was also promoted last week by Morris Sadik, the Egyptian Coptic Christian also based in California, who runs a small, virulently Islamophobic group called the National American Coptic Assembly. It was later denounced by mainstream Copts in Egypt, but it was too late to stop it going viral.

At some point over the summer, a version of the YouTube trailer surfaced with the dialogue dubbed in Egyptian Arabic and the translated clip was picked up by a firebrand Cairo television host, Sheikh Khaled Abdallah, with a record of focusing on perceived threats to Islam. He aired clips from the video on his television show on Saturday, and the same video clips were posted to YouTube on Monday.

As the audience for Innocence of Muslims grew exponentially, militant Islamists called for a mass protest at the US embassy in Cairo. The organisers said they began planning it last week when Sadik began promoting the trailers, but support for the demonstration snowballed after the Sheikh Abdallah programme.

A crowd of some 2,000 is reported to have gathered outside the embassy walls in Cairo on Tuesday. The security services appear to have been caught flat-footed even though the protest had been announced. Most of the diplomats and local staff had left early and a few dozen of the demonstrators were able to scale a wall, take down the stars and stripes and replace it with a black flag. The Egyptian police only managed to evict them in the late evening.

By that time, however, the spark had jumped westwards to the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi. According to al-Jazeera, an extremist militia called Ansar al-Sharia, one of many such armed groups staking out fiefdoms in Libya in the aftermath of Muammar Gaddafi’s fall, heard about the storming of the Cairo embassy and the American film.

Stevens had the misfortune to be making a short visit to Benghazi, and, according to US officials quoted on Wednesday, was probably not the intended target.

In his soon-to-be-released book, The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims, Nathan Lean writes: As is the case with any industry, advertising is paramount to the success of a product. One need look no further than the Super Bowl to understand the advertising industry’s sheer obsession with reaching a massive number of people; each year, the highest bidders are offered short slots to disseminate catchy clips of their goods, be they Coca-Cola, Nike shoes, or other high-rolling, multi-million-dollar enterprises.

The Islamophobia industry also goes to great lengths to sell its message to the public. The difference, though, is that in many cases the very networks that spread their product are themselves participants in the ruse to whip up public fear of Muslims. This is not a relationship of buyer and seller, where various characters that peddle panic purchase slots on major television networks to plug their merchandise. Rather, it is a relationship of mutual benefit, where ideologies and political proclivities converge to advance the same agenda.

Fox News, the American television station that brands itself as “fair and balanced,” is the epitome of this relationship. It has been, for the better part of the last decade, at the heart of the public scare-mongering about Islam, and has become the home for a slew of right-wing activists who regularly inhabit its airwaves to distort the truth to push stereotypes about Muslims. It was little surprise, then, that a Brookings Institution poll on American values conducted in September 2011 found that approximately two-thirds of Republicans, Americans who identify with the Tea Party movement, and Americans who most trusted Fox agreed that the values of Islam are at odds with the values of the United States. Additionally, nearly six in 10 Republicans who say they trust Fox also say that they believe that American Muslims are trying to establish Islamic law in America. In contrast, the attitudes of Republicans who view other news networks fall in line with the general population.

In December 2009, Fox News host Laura Ingraham interviewed Daisy Khan, the wife of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who was leading the initial push for the Park51 Islamic community center. At that time, there was little controversy over plans for the proposed building to be located near the ground zero site — so little that Ingraham even admitted that she liked what Khan and her husband were doing. “I can’t find many people who really have a problem with it,” she admitted on air. “I know your group takes a moderate approach to Americanizing people, assimilating people, which I applaud. I think that’s fantastic.”

Soon, though, it would not be fantastic. At least not to Laura Ingraham who, in an about-face move, suddenly latched onto the anger and rage being ginned up by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. “I say the terrorists have won with the way this has gone down,” she sneered during an interview with ABC News in August 2010. “Six hundred feet from where thousands of our fellow Americans were incinerated in the name of political Islam, and we’re supposed to be — we’re supposed to be considered intolerant if we’re not cheering this?”

Little more than eight months had passed. That summer, though, had been dominated by the rise of a radical bunch of bloggers who had fashioned a controversy where one did not exist. Pamela Geller’s snarling write-up about the “Ground Zero Mosque” in early May 2010 was picked up by Andrea Peyser of the New York Post, a conservative newspaper owned by the man at the top of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch. Peyser’s regurgitation of Geller’s outrage reached hundreds of thousands of people, turning what was once a conspiracy theory of some unknown right-wing Internet prowlers into a major new story.

Fox News’ Sean Hannity had read Peyser’s piece. He was familiar with Pamela Geller too, and on May 13, 2010, just days after the story made national news, he invited Geller on his show to talk about it. “There is a giant mosque being planned to be built in an area right adjacent to ground zero,” he said. Of course, the Park51 community center’s 13 stories were relatively small compared to the towering skyscrapers that hovered over the streets in midtown Manhattan. But the word “giant” had a certain frightening ring that Hannity and Geller sought to sell. “Andrea Peyser wrote about it in the New York Post today,” he said. “Atlas Shrugs’s Pamela Geller, a blogger and columnist, is hosting a ‘No 9/11 Mosque’ rally at Ground Zero on June 6 to protest the construction and she now joins us on our newsmaker line.”

Media Matters reports that from May 13, 2010, until August 12, 2010 — a period of 91 days — Fox News shows hosted at least 47 different guests to discuss the project, 75 percent of whom opposed it. Nexis transcripts of Fox newscasts during that 13-week period were reviewed showing that just nine out of the 47 guests who appeared during that time favored the center. In some cases, guests expressed their personal opposition to the center but rejected the idea that it could be somehow prevented. Juan Williams, a former reporter for National Public Radio, was one of them. Appearing on Hannity’s show, he said, “I happen to agree with you about the idea that they shouldn’t build the mosque,” he told the Fox host. “But that doesn’t mean that we, as Americans, can say to him [Rauf] ‘No, you can’t build here.’ That’s wrong.” Williams stated his opinion plainly. It was something he did regularly — and something that two months later would cost him his job.

* * *

On Oct. 18, 2010, Williams was a guest at Fox News again. This time, instead of appearing on Sean Hannity’s show, he chatted with Bill O’Reilly. The conversation settled on Park51. As an analyst for NPR, it was familiar turf for Williams. He had navigated the prickliness of political issues before, careful not to reveal his personal opinions. But Fox News and Bill O’Reilly clearly had an agenda and after having ignited a small blaze of controversy earlier in the year by saying “Muslims attacked us on 9/11,” it was clear that O’Reilly was looking for someone to back him up.

“Political correctness can lead to some kind of paralysis where you don’t address reality,” Williams said. “I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

The remark did not seem to faze O’Reilly. In fact, it fit precisely into the narrative he was spinning: Muslims are people to be feared, especially Muslims in airplanes. Over at NPR, however, news of the comments was unsettling. As a political analyst, it was not Williams’ responsibility to offer his opinions on such issues. In fact, he was not being paid to offer his opinions at all. And to blatantly level a broad-brush blow at the Muslim community because he felt suspicious of them was not within the keeping of NPR’s journalistic standards. Williams was terminated from his position soon thereafter. Despite his initial shock over his firing, there was some good news for him. The stereotypical remarks were worth a cool $2 million — the amount of money that Fox News offered Williams for an extended three-year contract with its network. “In one arrogant move the NPR exposed itself for the leftist thought police they really are,” read one user’s comment on the radio network’s website. Maybe that was so — but Fox News had, by offering Williams an expanded role, encouraged and even financed Islamophobia. [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: Demonstrators attacked a U.S. consulate in Libya, killing one American, and breached the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, mounting angry protests over a film by a U.S. producer that portrays the Prophet Muhammad as a womanizer, pedophile and fraud.

The movie, “Innocence of Muslims,” was directed and produced by an Israeli-American real-estate developer who characterized it as a political effort to call attention to the hypocrisies of Islam. It has been promoted by Terry Jones, the Florida pastor whose burning of Qurans previously sparked deadly riots around the world.

In Benghazi, Libya, several dozen gunmen from an Islamist group, Ansar al Sharia, attacked the consulate with rocket-propelled grenades to protest the film, a deputy interior minister for the Benghazi region told the Al-Jazeera network. A government brigade evacuated the consulate, after which militants set it on fire, said the minister, Wanees Sharef.

One State Department officer was killed in the attack in Benghazi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday night.

Mrs. Clinton said the State Department was working with Libyans to secure the compound and protect Americans in Libya.

To the east, in Cairo, a crowd of some 2,000 people gathered at the Embassy to protest the video. Some of them climbed the embassy walls late Tuesday, pulling down and burning an American flag.

Hours after nightfall, dozens of young men remained standing on top of the embassy walls, shouting into megaphones. One of the youths climbed up the flagpole to hoist a black banner emblazoned with the Muslim profession of faith in white letters—”There is no God but God and Muhammad is His Messenger”—a standard used by hardline Islamist groups throughout the world.

At the Cairo Embassy, Egyptian police had removed demonstrators from the grounds, the State Department said. The Egyptian foreign ministry said that the government bears full responsibility for the protection of foreign embassies on Egyptian soil.

The flashpoint appeared to be the film about the Prophet Muhammad, portions of which in recent days have been circulating on the Internet. Contravening the Islamic prohibition of portraying the prophet, clips from the film show him not only as flesh and blood—but as a homosexual son of undetermined patrimony, who rises to advocate child slavery and extramarital sex, for himself, in the name of religion.

The film’s 52-year-old writer, director and producer, Sam Bacile, said that he wanted to showcase his view of Islam as a hateful religion. “Islam is a cancer,” he said in a telephone interview from his home. “The movie is a political movie. It’s not a religious movie.”

Mr. Bacile said he raised $5 million from about 100 Jewish donors, who he declined to identify. Working with about 60 actors and 45 crew members, he said he made the two-hour movie in three months last year in California.

The film has been promoted by Dr. Jones, who said Tuesday that he planned to show a 13-minute trailer that night at his church in Gainesville, Fla.

Reuters reports: Anti-Islam groups in America have provided financial support to Dutch politician Geert Wilders, an anti-immigration campaigner who is seeking re-election to the Dutch parliament this week.

While this is not illegal in the Netherlands, it sheds light on the international connections of Wilders, whose Freedom Party is the least transparent Dutch parliamentary group and a rallying point for Europe’s far right.

Wilders’ party is self-funded, unlike other Dutch parties that are subsidized by the government. It does not, therefore, have to meet the same disclosure requirements.

Groups in America seeking to counter Islamic influence in the West say they funded police protection and paid legal costs for Wilders whose party is polling in fourth place before the Sept 12 election.

Wilders’ ideas – calling for a total halt to non-Western immigration and bans on Muslim headscarfs and the construction of mosques – have struck a chord in mainstream politics beyond the Netherlands. France banned clothing that covers the face in April 2011 and Belgium followed suit in July of the same year. Switzerland barred the construction of new minarets following a referendum in 2009.

The Middle East Forum, a pro-Israeli think tank based in Philadelphia, funded Wilders’ legal defense in 2010 and 2011 against Dutch charges of inciting racial hatred, its director Daniel Pipes said. The Middle East Forum has a stated goal, according to its website, of protecting the “freedom of public speech of anti-Islamist authors, promoting American interests in the Middle East and protecting the constitutional order from Middle Eastern threats”. It sent money directly to Wilders’ lawyer via its Legal Project, Pipes said.

Represented by Dutch criminal lawyer Bram Moscowitz, Wilders successfully defended himself against the charges, which were brought by prosecutors in Amsterdam on behalf of groups representing minorities from Turkey, Morocco and other countries with Muslim populations. The case heard in October 2010 was filed in response to Wilders’ comments in the Dutch media about Muslims and his film “Fitna”, which interlays images of terrorist attacks with quotations from the Koran and prompted protests by Muslims in Islamic countries worldwide. The court found he had stayed within the limits of free speech.

Pipes declined to say how much his group paid for Wilders’ defense.

Moscowitz declined to discuss payments for Wilder’s defense citing client confidentiality.

Wilders said in an emailed statement that his legal expenses were paid for with the help of voluntary donations from defenders of freedom of speech. “I do not answer questions of who they are and what they have paid. This could jeopardize their safety,” Wilders said.

Wilders, 49, became a member of Dutch parliament in 2006, campaigning against Islam, which he calls a threat to Dutch culture and Western values. He called Islam a violent political ideology and vowed never to enter a mosque, “not in 100,000 years”. His’ party gained 24 seats in the 150-seat lower house in June 2010.

He has been under 24-hour security for eight years after receiving death threats from radical Muslim groups in the Netherlands and abroad. Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik cited anti-Islamic comments by Wilders in an online manifesto that sought to justify his crimes. Wilders has denounced Breivik and his actions.

David Horowitz, who runs a network of Los Angeles-based conservative groups and a website called FrontPage magazine, said he paid Wilders fees for making two speeches, security costs during student protests and overnight accommodation for his Dutch bodyguards during a 2009 U.S. trip. [Continue reading…]

CNN reports: A tide of anti-Islam sentiment has been swelling across America in recent months, strong enough to prompt one imam to wish for the days immediately after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks when President George W. Bush declared that Muslims were not our enemies; that the war on terror was against a select few who acted upon their hate for America.

“In the 11 years since, we have retreated,” says Abdullah Antepli, the Muslim chaplain at Duke University who likes to call himself the Blue Devil Imam.

Muslims make up less than 1% of the U.S. population. Yet, say Muslim advocates, they are a community besieged.

Hate crimes against Muslims spiked 50% in 2010, the last year for which FBI statistics are available. That was in a year marked by Muslim-bashing speech over the Islamic center near ground zero in Manhattan and Florida Pastor Terry Jones’ threats to burn Qurans.

Antepli likens the current climate to McCarthyism. Left unchecked, he says, anti-Muslim fervor, like racism and anti-Semitism, has the potential to evolve into something dangerous.

This year’s holy month of Ramadan, which ended August 19, was marred by a spate of violence at U.S. Islamic centers that included a fire, a homemade bomb and pig parts. The incidents were unprecedented in scale and scope, says the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

At least seven mosques and one cemetery were attacked in the United States during Ramadan, according to the council and other groups that track such incidents.

Particularly visible on the anti-Muslim radar has been the state of Tennessee, where a mosque opened during Ramadan after two years of controversy. The new Islamic center in Murfreesboro opened a few weeks ago after delays caused by legal wrangling, community protests and vandalism.

Also in Tennessee, incumbent congresswoman Diane Black found herself publicly opposing Sharia after her opponent Lou Ann Zelenik made it a campaign issue.

State senatorial candidate Woody Degan’s website also mentions Sharia:

“VOTE CONSERVATIVE! VOTE Anti-Sharia, VOTE Against Internet Taxes, Vote FOR Gun Carry Rights! VOTE for your PERSONAL RIGHTS!”

And Gov. Bill Haslam recently came under fire for hiring lawyer Samar Ali, a Muslim woman from Tennessee, to work in the international division of the state’s economic development department.

Ali’s critics called her Sharia-compliant and a website called Bill H(Islam) attacked the governor for pursuing “a policy that promotes the interest of Islamist (sic) and their radical ideology.”

The website links to another that discusses, among other things, Islamic infiltration of public schools.

“I cannot stress enough the seriousness of their push to spread their religion to all non-Muslims throughout our country,” says website author Cathy Hinners, another speaker at next Tuesday’s 9/11 event in Franklin.

“Why? Why are Muslims so adamant that we accept their religion? The answer is simple. The answer is in black and white. The answer is in the Muslim brotherhoods “Strategic Goal for North America.” It’s called a global caliphate. One religion, one government, one law… called Sharia.”

In November 2010, more than 70% of voters in Oklahoma approved a ballot initiative to amend the state’s constitution that banned courts from looking at “legal precepts of other nations or cultures. Specifically, the courts shall not consider international law or Sharia law.”

The amendment died after a federal court ruled it discriminatory.

“That was very explicitly anti-Islamic,” says Glenn Hendrix, an Atlanta lawyer who specializes in international law. “It specifically referenced Sharia.”

This year, 33 anti-Sharia or international law bills were introduced in 20 states, making it a key issue. Six states – Louisiana, South Dakota, Kansas, Arizona, Louisiana and Tennessee – adopted such laws prior to 2012.

Two Tennessee lawmakers attempted to pass a bill this year that would have made it a felony to practice Sharia, but it failed.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations says the anti-Sharia bills are based on draft legislation promoted by David Yerushalmi, an anti-Islamic lawyer from New York. [Continue reading…]

Richard Millet

Time magazine reports: Richard Millet is an accomplished figure in French literature. His le Sentiment du Langue (The Feeling of Language) won the Académie Française’s 1994 essay award. His work as an editor for celebrated publisher Gallimard, meanwhile, helped produce two recent Goncourt winners—including the 2006 novel les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) by American author Jonathan Littell. Now, however, Millet is getting attention of an entirely different kind with a new work attacking immigration and multi-culturalism, and describing the acts of convicted Norwegian multi-murderer Anders Behring Breivik as “formal perfection…in their literary dimension.”

That bookish qualifier, says newsweekly l’Express in its critique of Millet’s new essay, Eloge Littéraire d’Anders Breivik (Literary Elegy of Anders Breivik), is a “gratuitous façade” for an otherwise “vindictive text” and thesis. Indeed, though Millet states he does not approve of Breivik’s murderous action July 22, 2011 that left 77 innocent people dead, he does write the slaughter was “without doubt what Norway deserved.” The reason? Norway, Millet contends, allowed immigration, multi-culturalism, and the domination of foreign customs, language, and religion to become such dominant influences that a self-designated defender of traditional society felt compelled to take decisive action.

“Multi-culturalism as it has been imported from the United States is the worst thing possible for Europe…and creates a mosaic of ghettoes in which the [host] nation no longer exists,” Millet told France Info radio Aug. 27. “Breivik, I believe, perceived that, and responded to that question with the most monstrous reply.”

Little wonder that such views — published just as Breivik was being sentenced Aug. 24 — have sparked controversy in France. As word of Millet’s writing spreads, so, too, may the objections it has inspired.

If so, that may only serve to reinforce Millet’s accusations that most of Europe — and indeed the West — is dominated by the same attitudes that motivated Breivik’s attack. Breivik, Millet writes, is “an exemplary product of Western decadence,” and a “child of the ideologico-racial fracture that extra-European immigration has introduced in Europe.” Because he sees the resulting “loss of national identity” and “Islamization of Europe” decaying “Christian roots” everywhere, Millet appears to believe acts similar to Breivik’s may be replicated outside Norway as well. [Continue reading…]

Harvey Morris writes: The smirk on Anders Behring Breivik’s face was an indication that the Norwegian mass murderer got the verdict he wanted. By sentencing him to 21 years in jail, an Oslo court judged he was sane when he killed 77 people in a bomb and gun rampage a year ago.

It raises the alarming question of how many other sane people might be out there, prepared to murder and maim in pursuit of their far-right extremist beliefs.

Far-right groups and individuals in Europe, including those cited as sources of inspiration in Mr. Breivik’s manifesto, ran for cover in the wake of the Norway killings, distancing themselves from his murderous response to multiculturalism, if not from his ideas.

But the shock felt in Norway and elsewhere when Mr. Breivik struck appears to have done little to reverse the growth of the far-right groups in Europe, where their activities are seen as posing an enduring threat to the Continent’s democratic societies.

A day before the Norwegian verdict, the German police launched raids across the state of North Rhine-Westphalia that were aimed at breaking up a network of far-right extremists, as my colleague Melissa Eddy reported from Berlin.

“These groups are dangerous,” Burkhard Freier, the head of the state’s domestic intelligence agency, said. “We have noticed they are attracting ever more young people to their ideals.”

The rise of the far right has been variously cited to explain Europe’s harsh economic climate and on an Islamophobic response to fundamentalist Islamist terrorism that post-dates the Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Matthew Goodwin, a British expert on the far right, challenged those assumptions in an academic paper last September that noted populist extremist parties continued to rally large and durable levels of support and had even joined coalition governments.

“They emerged before the terrorist attacks on 11 Sept. 2001 and the recent financial crisis,” Dr. Goodwin wrote. “They have rallied support in some of the most economically secure and highly educated regions of Europe.”

He said supporters of all these groups shared one core feature: their profound hostility towards immigration, multiculturalism and rising cultural and ethnic diversity. “Contrary to the conventional wisdom that these citizens are motivated by feelings of economic competition from immigrants and minority groups, feelings of cultural threat are the most important driver of their support.” [Continue reading…]

For some of those of us who grew up taking the inclusive, pluralistic, internationalist, and egalitarian values of the Left for granted, it’s hard to fathom that bigotry fueled by post 9/11 fear-mongering would not only have empowered men like Wade Michael Page, but that it would have also fostered the development of the Left’s own peace-loving, anti-imperialist Islamophobes.

Fear of Islam might seem subtler on the Left than the Right yet it has the crudeness of any other form of bigotry in the ease with which people can be stereotyped and dehumanized. If a man with a beard has a gun and can be heard shouting “Allahu Akbar,” then it goes without question — so the thinking goes — he must be a terrorist.

No doubt those who might feel like I’m pointing an accusatory finger at them will now feel duly outraged. But look around your ranks. Look at the comment threads where you find yourself among the like-minded. Are there many or any Muslims? Are there many or any Syrians or Libyans? I know you are convinced you know exactly what is going on inside each of those countries, but do you ever pause to consider why your views are not being articulated and amplified even more forcefully by the very people you presume to speak for?

Louis Proyect writes about the issue of Islamophobia on the Left and does so while employing a delicious amount of irony. I post his observations here, not in the hope of provoking debate with those who will now feel under attack. I have engaged in enough of those debates myself and found them to be fruitless. No matter how varied and nuanced the input might be, ideological robots have the irksome habit of endlessly repeating the same talking points.

What’s the point of trying to speak with those who cannot hear?

There are others however, who might find this exploration useful, having already observed a strange contradiction evident among some in their midst who one minute are champions of the revolutionary Occupy Movement and yet the next display transparently counter-revolutionary tendencies when it comes Libya and Syria, and whose views are colored by a measured skepticism about the Arab Spring in general.

In his brilliant analysis of leftist hostility to the revolutions in Libya and Syria titled Blanket Thinkers, Robin Yassin-Kassab described the way that the Syrian rebels are viewed in those quarters:

They are also depicted as wild Muslims, bearded and hijabbed, who do not deserve democracy or rights because they are too backward to use them properly. Give them democracy and they’ll vote for the Muslim Brotherhood, and slaughter the Alawis and drive the Christians to Beirut.

Exactly.

This has been on my radar screen ever since the struggle against Qaddafi got off the ground, but Yassin-Kassab’s article persuaded me to investigate a bit further. Basically what seems to be taking place is a hatred for Islamism that is reminiscent of what we heard from Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman during the heights of the war in Iraq, but deployed on behalf of an “anti-imperialist” narrative.

Perhaps the most prominent exponent of left Islamophobia is Asia Times’s Pepe Escobar. In an article on Libya titled How al-Qaeda got to rule in Tripoli, Abdelhakim Belhaj became an object of hate:

Abdelhakim Belhaj, aka Abu Abdallah al-Sadek, is a Libyan jihadi. Born in May 1966, he honed his skills with the mujahideen in the 1980s anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan.

He’s the founder of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and its de facto emir – with Khaled Chrif and Sami Saadi as his deputies. After the Taliban took power in Kabul in 1996, the LIFG kept two training camps in Afghanistan; one of them, 30 kilometers north of Kabul – run by Abu Yahya – was strictly for al-Qaeda-linked jihadis.

After 9/11, Belhaj moved to Pakistan and also to Iraq, where he befriended none other than ultra-nasty Abu Musab al-Zarqawi – all this before al-Qaeda in Iraq pledged its allegiance to Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and turbo-charged its gruesome practices.

(For what it is worth, Escobar’s article contains an ad for the Central Intelligence Agency. Talk about crowning ironies.)

Escobar adds that “In Iraq, Libyans happened to be the largest foreign Sunni jihadi contingent, only losing to the Saudis.” Well, how despicable, Libyans going to Iraq to fight against the American occupation. He also considers Belhaj a rather shifty sort, “not remotely interested in relinquishing control just to please NATO’s whims.” What an ingrate.

Not long after the overthrow of Qaddafi, left Islamophobes held up a magnifying glass to detect any evidence of Jihadist influence in the new Libya. Last November word went out that the al-Qaeda flag was flying over the Benghazi courthouse. Not surprisingly, this became a cause celebre for the rightwing but the vanguard of the “anti-imperialist” left got just as worked up. Voltairenet.org, a website devoted to 9/11 conspiracy-mongering and the defense of Qaddafi and al-Assad, alerted its readers through an article that included a graphic of the flag:

Mustafa Abdul Jalil, the former Justice Minister of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya who became chairman of the National Transitional Council, announced the rebels’ intention to turn Libya into an Islamic state and implement Sharia as the only law.

For some odd reason, the Libyan people were never clued in that they were about to willingly accept such a state of affairs. As it turned out, the vote for the Libyan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood was a paltry 130,000 nationally, just 21.3%. Today’s Australian explained the low total:

But another reason for the strong “liberal” turnout is the “blood” factor. “I am not giving my family’s votes to the MB. Two of my cousins died because of them,” Mohamed Abdul Hakim, a voter from Benghazi, told me. He agrees that Islam should be the source for legislation, and his wife wears a niqab. Nonetheless, he voted liberal: his cousins were killed in a confrontation in the 1990s, most likely between the Martyrs Movement (a small jihadist group operating in his neighborhood at the time) and Gaddafi’s forces.

But many average Libyans, including Hakim, do not distinguish between Islamist organisations and their histories. For them, all Islamists are “Ikhwan” (MB). The “stain” of direct involvement in armed action, coupled with fear of Taliban-like laws or a civil war like Algeria’s in the 1990′s harmed Islamists of all brands.

A third reason for the Islamists’ defeat had to do with their campaign rhetoric. “It is offensive to tell me that I have to vote for an Islamic party,” Jamila Marzouki, an Islamic studies graduate, told me. Marzouki voted liberal, despite believing that Islam should be the ultimate reference for Libyan laws. “In Libya, we are Muslims. They can’t take away my identity and claim that it’s only theirs.”

So much for Libya turning into a Taliban state.

Without skipping a beat, the dreadful Pepe Escobar now has Syria in his sights, using the same hackneyed analysis:

Syria, the new Libya

A Kalashnikov in Iraq, until recently, sold for US$100. Now it’s at least $1,000, and most probably $1,500 (those were the days when Sunnis joining the resistance in 2003 could buy a fake Kalashnikov made in Romenia [sic] for $20).

Destination of choice of the $1,500 Kalashnikov in 2012: Syria. Network: al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers, also known as AQI. Recipients: infiltrated jihadis operating side-by-side with the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

Also shuttling between Syria and Iraq is car bombing and suicide bombing, as in two recent bombings in the suburbs of Damascus and the suicide bombing last Friday in Aleppo.

Who would have thought that what the House of Saud wants in Syria – an Islamist regime – is exactly what al-Qaeda wants in Syria?

Christopher Hitchens couldn’t have put it better.

For left Islamophobes, the idea of a secular, nationalistic and populist Syria serves as a kind of rallying point in the same way that “existing socialism” in the USSR once was for a gullible left, whether or not either proposition was true.

Syria Freedom Forever, an antidote to the stupidity found in Escobar’s columns, Global Research, MRZine, Voltairenet.com et al (Counterpunch fortunately never bought into this junk for the most part), had an article titled Understand the Syrian regime and the dialectics of the Syrian revolutionary process that is most useful for separating the truth from bullshit. [Continue reading…]

Is there much chance that America will own its latest mass murderer?

I doubt it.

When a white man picks up a gun and slaughters a bunch of fellow Americans, the most predictable feature of the subsequent process through which everyone else tries to come to terms with what happened is that it will be seen as an isolated event. We will look at it through the narrow prism of the personal history of the gunman and his idiosyncratic pathology and refuse to acknowledge that the killing might also have been shaped by some of the darker contours of the surrounding culture.

In the case of Wade Michael Page, the suspect in the Sikh temple shootings that took place in Wisconsin yesterday, there are already a few indications that this time some cultural context becomes inescapable.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has already pointed out some of the white supremacist connections that surely say a great deal about why Page chose his targets.

The man who allegedly murdered six people at a Sikh temple in suburban Milwaukee yesterday, identified in media reports as Wade Michael Page, was a frustrated neo-Nazi who had been the leader of a racist white-power band.

In 2010, Page, then the leader of the band End Apathy, gave an interview to the white supremacist website Label 56. He said that when he started the band in 2005, its name reflected his wish to “figure out how to end people’s apathetic ways” and start “moving forward.” “I was willing to point out some of my faults on how I was holding myself back,” Page said. Later, he added, “The inspiration was based on frustration that we have the potential to accomplish so much more as individuals and a society in whole.” He did not discuss violence in the interview.

Page told the website that he had been a part of the white power music scene since 2000, when he left his native Colorado on a motorcycle. He attended white power concerts in Georgia, North Carolina, West Virginia and Colorado. At various times, he said, he also played in the hate rock bands Youngland (2001-2003), Celtic Warrior, Radikahl, Max Resist, Intimidation One, Aggressive Force and Blue Eyed Devils. End Apathy, he said, included “Brent” on bass and “Ozzie” on drums; the men were former members of Definite Hate and another band, 13 Knots.

In 2000, the Southern Poverty Law Center has found that Page also attempted to purchase goods from the neo-Nazi National Alliance, then America’s most important hate group.

The fact that many (most?) Americans are too ignorant to know the difference between a Sikh and a Muslim is reason, some observers infer, to think that Page wrongly believed the people he was killing were Muslims. But given the other indications of his racist xenophobia, it seems quite likely that Page bore equal animosity towards everyone who in his eyes did not look like an ‘American.’

If American xenophobia does not frequently express itself through mass murder on American soil, the tentacles of racism — particularly fear and hatred of Muslims — nevertheless spread far and wide.

Pastor John Hagee, Pastor Terry Jones, Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Sam Harris, Frank Gafney, David Yerushalmi, Daniel Pipes, Steven Emerson, Geert Wilders, Michael Savage — all would no doubt disavow Page’s action, yet they share a kind of spiritual kinship. At one end of the spectrum are those who can apply varying degrees of intellectual sophistication to soften the edges of their fear of Islam and to dampen the flames of hatred with what appears like cool rationality. Yet the underlying message they promote is that Islam is a pathogen and individual Muslims are infecting America.

Once in a while this message gets translated into physical action as individuals such as Wade Michael Page take it upon themselves to engage in a barbaric act of ‘cultural defense.’ And at such moments all attention turns to the brutality on display while very little goes to the tendrils of the mycelium through which the fungus of hatred permeates this society.

Where pluralism has demanded that Americans broaden their knowledge of the world, instead political correctness has provided effective tools through which hatred can be kept alive, yet largely out of sight.

American racists have found it much easier to change the way they talk than change the way they think. And while Page most likely, in his actions, speaks for far too many, unlike him, most of them will continue to harbor their hatred in silence.

Doug Saunders writes: The attacks on two of the most prominent Muslims in American public life last week seemed to have come out of the blue. It appeared as if five Republican Representatives had arbitrarily chosen this moment to lash out at Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin and Representative Keith Ellison for no reason other than their religion, in a bid to discredit the entire concept of Muslims taking part in national politics and government.

A sequence of letters and public denunciations, led by Rep. Michele Bachman and backed by four other Representatives, accused the two of being somehow indirectly affiliated with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. The charges were so devoid of substance that senior Republican leaders and many members of Congress were quick to condemn them as bizarre and inappropriate. Still, even though they came from a marginal corner of Congress (albeit one representing millions of Americans), the language of the attacks was drawn from an increasingly mainstream set of claims about Muslims in the West. The letters from the Representatives argued that Muslims in the U.S. government are part of a wide plot involving numerous ordinary Muslim-Americans to “impose shariah worldwide,” to “undermine the U.S. Constitution,” and to advocate “that Muslims not integrate into the cultures of non-Muslim countries.” For a surprising number of Americans, these phrases represent commonsense thought about the Muslims in their midst.

These myths are strikingly similar to the set of charges that were commonly directed toward Roman Catholic and East European Jewish immigrants between the 1890s and the 1960s – that these groups are disloyal, supportive of violence, unwilling to integrate into Western values, driven by a religion that is actually an ideology of conquest, and poised to swamp our society through high reproduction rates. The people who hold these ideas, then as now, are not simply racists or xenophobes but often liberals who have come to believe – – based on misleading or distorted information – – that religious-minority outsiders are a threat to their freedoms and liberties.

In the years after the Sept. 11 attacks, these ideas came to be applied to Muslims in the West in a sequence of bestselling books, YouTube videos, websites, op-eds and activist campaigns organized by a small circle of anti-immigration authors and activists, increasingly often with funding from conservative foundations. The notion of a “Muslim tide” penetrated the American imagination. The millions of people who bought their books and watched their videos may not have subscribed to the movement’s full idea of an Islamic plot to take over Western civilization through immigration. In many cases they were simply trying to understand the different and sometimes strange-looking newcomers in their midst, and the simultaneous emergence of Islamic terrorism – – but the effect has been to popularize an interlocking set of myths about Muslim immigration.

In my book The Myth of the Muslim Tide, I explain the history of these ideas and trace their emergence in twenty-first century popular and political thought, and provide a detailed, research-based examination of the realities behind them. Luckily, the past five years have seen a number of very large-scale international studies and surveys that have revolutionized our understanding of the beliefs, views, behaviours and loyalties of Muslim immigrants and their offspring. What emerges is a picture of a set of communities undergoing the classic experience of immigration and integration – – with the same difficulties and challenges experienced by poor Catholics and Jews in their time – but burdened with a set of popular myths that are leading them increasingly to be rejected and marginalized by the wider population.

I have identified three nested groups of myths that together have created a widespread misunderstanding of Muslims in the West and poisoned our political environment. [Continue reading…]

Owen Jones writes: To be a prominent Muslim means suffering a daily diet of bigotry and even outright hatred. This week, Mehdi Hasan – who, other than my colleague Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, is Britain’s only prominent Muslim journalist – wrote of how, every day, he is attacked as a “jihadist” and a “terrorist”. He has been described as a “dangerous Muslim shithead”, a “moderate cockroach”, and worse. The message from his critics is clear: Muslims have no legitimate place in public life.

Mehdi Hasan was right to speak out, but it must not be left to Muslims alone to take on this bigotry. A tide of Islamophobia has swept Europe for many years, and – shamefully – all too few have taken a stand. Even many who regard themselves as “progressives” have either remained silent or even indulged anti-Muslim prejudice. It’s time for Muslims and non-Muslims alike to join forces against the most widespread – and most acceptable – form of bigotry of our times.

Think I’m exaggerating? Consider that the far-right’s main target of choice is no longer Jews or black people: it’s Muslims. The BNP portrays itself as a crusade against the “Islamification” of Britain; in the 2010 election, it launched a “Campaign Against Islam”. Its leader, Nick Griffin, describes Islam as “wicked” and a “cancer”, and has blamed Muslims for problems such as drugs and rape. The English Defence League stages frequent – and often intimidating – street rallies protesting against Muslims.

But anti-Muslim prejudice isn’t simply confined to the far-right fringes. I attended a Stockport sixth form with a large Muslim student population. The reality of their lives is all but airbrushed out of existence. When they appear at all, it’s generally as fanatics, extremists or a community somehow “harbouring” dangerous extremists. (When do Britain’s whites face the absurdity of being called on to crack down on far-right fanatics supposedly in their ranks?) One study took a selection of newspapers in a single week: 91 per cent of reports featuring Muslims were negative.

One of my Muslim fellow students was Dr Leon Moosavi, fast becoming a national authority on Islamophobia. He battles against the widespread denial that anti-Muslim prejudice is a problem. But consider that, in one poll conducted by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, 45 per cent of Britons agreed that “there are too many Muslims” in Britain. Imagine if nearly half the population admitted to believing that “there are too many Jews” in Britain: how loud would our alarm be? [Continue reading…]

Deepa Kumar writes: When the New York Times ran its story on Obama’s “kill list,” showing the president poring over names of people to potentially assassinate in drone strikes, it sparked a controversy. The content of that controversy was not over this extraordinary revelation about Obama’s use of power but rather over the leaking of state secrets, which Republicans accused him of doing to bolster his re-election campaign. Some liberal commentators (at Salon, The Nation etc.) were rightfully horrified and condemned such activity. But the Democrats – and much of the liberal establishment — remained silent.

Deep in the Times article, another shocking revelation that hasn’t received as much attention as the “kill list” is the Obama administration’s effort to erase the deaths of some innocent victims by categorizing “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.” This excludes them from the civilian casualties count, allowing the administration to claim that civilian casualties have been minimal. All Muslim men in “combat zones” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen have been presumed to be terrorists, and therefore worthy of death, simply for being of “military age.”

How did we get to a place where innocent Muslim men can be killed with impunity around the world with little public outcry? The short answer is that Muslims have been long been constructed as “terrorists” upon whom righteous terror can be rained. The image of the Muslim enemy in the US is not new. While Hollywood and television play a key role in conveying that image to the public, they did not create it. The “Muslim enemy” is inextricably tied to a long history of US imperialism. [Continue reading…]

Moustafa Bayoumi writes: Something’s gone terribly wrong.
 
In August 2007 the New York Police Department released a report called “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat,” claiming that the looming danger to the United States was from “unremarkable” Muslim men under 35 who visit “extremist incubators.” The language sounds ominous, conjuring up Clockwork Orange–style laboratories of human reprogramming, twisting average Muslims into instruments of evil. And yet what are these “incubators”? The report states that they are mosques, “cafes, cab driver hangouts, flophouses, prisons, student associations, non-governmental organizations, hookah (water pipe) bars, butcher shops and book stores”—in other words, precisely the places where ordinary life happens.

But the report wasn’t based on any independent social science research, and actual studies clearly refuted the very claims made by the NYPD. The Rand Corporation found that the number of homegrown radicals here is “tiny.” “There are more than 3 million Muslims in the United States, and few more than 100 have joined jihad—about one out of every 30,000—suggesting an American Muslim population that remains hostile to jihadist ideology and its exhortations to violence,” Rand’s 2010 report found. “A mistrust of American Muslims by other Americans seems misplaced,” it concluded. This year, an analysis by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security also described the number of American Muslims involved in domestic terrorism since 2001 as “tiny.” “This study’s findings challenge Americans to be vigilant against the threat of homegrown terrorism while maintaining a responsible sense of proportion,” it said. And a 2011 Gallup survey found that American Muslims were the least likely of any major US religious group to consider attacks on civilians justified.

Every group has its loonies. And yet the idea that American Muslim communities are foul nests of hatred, where dark-skinned men plot Arabic violence while combing one another’s beards, persists. In fact, it’s worse than that. In the past few years, another narrative about American Muslims has come along, which sows a different kind of paranoia. While the old story revolves around security, portraying American Muslims as potential terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, the new narrative operates more along the axis of culture. Simple acts of religious or cultural expression and the straightforward activities of Muslim daily life have become suspicious. Building a mosque in Lower Manhattan or in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, or in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, becomes an act of “stealth jihad.” Muslims filing for divorce invokes the bizarre charge of “creeping Sharia.” A dual-language Arabic-English high school in New York is demonized as a “madrassa.” The State Board of Education in Texas determines that reading about Islam is not education but indoctrination. Changing your Muslim-sounding name to one with a more Anglophone tenor triggers an NYPD investigation, according to the Associated Press. Even the fact that some Butterball turkeys are “halal” was enough to fire up the bigotry last Thanksgiving, the most American of holidays.

What happens when ordinary life becomes grounds for suspicion without a hint of wrongdoing; when law enforcement premises its work on spying on the quotidian and policing the unremarkable; and when the everyday affairs of American Muslim life can so easily be transformed into nefarious intent? Something has gone terribly wrong for American Muslims when, more than a decade after the terrorist attacks of September 11, anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States continues to grow. [Continue reading…]