Wednesday 3 October 2012

Islamophobia


On the other Side of Fear  - Javed Anand

On freedom of speech and muslim rage-

"Nothing can justify violence. So the “Muslim rage” must be unequivocally condemned and freedom of expression defended, never mind the motive behind the making of the 14-minute film and its pathetic cinematic quality.
That there can be no democracy without fundamental freedoms we already know. What’s novel is the reiteration now by a growing number of Muslim scholars that Islam too rests on the freedom bedrock and the very notion of blasphemy is “un-Islamic”. That this is not a mainstream Muslim position is evident in the demand being raised by many Muslim religious and political leaders for a global consensus on limits to free speech and punishment for blasphemy."
On First Amendment  and are Muslims new Jews?
"Perhaps we should look the other way too, at the phenomenon of recurring denigration and demonisation of Islam and its prophet in recent years. In the name of free speech, even hate speech is considered sacrosanct.
Is the freedom of speech absolute? Denying the Holocaust is a serious criminal offence in many European countries but not in the land of the First Amendment. But what about the 1919 verdict of the US Supreme Court: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting ‘fire’ in a theatre and causing panic.”
Last month, the California state assembly passed a resolution asking the University of California and the California State University “to take additional actions to confront anti-Semitism on its campuses”. Since anti-Semitism is reported to be raising its ugly head once again, the resolution is most welcome.
Now consider this: in 2001, polls by the well-known Pew Research Centre two months after 9/11 showed that 59 per cent of Americans had a favourable opinion of Muslims. But in 2010, ABC and The Washington Post reported that only 37 per cent of Americans held the same view. How is one to explain the paradox that post 9/11 American antipathy to Muslims is growing, and at an alarming rate? The answer lies in the exponential growth of Islamophobia in the US and throughout Europe.
So, how about state assemblies and the US Congress passing resolutions asking government agencies and educational institutions to “confront” growing Islamophobia? To this writer’s knowledge no such resolution is even under contemplation. Meanwhile, according to Nathan Lean, author of The Islamophobia Industry: How the right manufactures fear of Muslims, “23 states have (already) presented anti-Sharia legislation of some type”. You might find the very idea of Sharia rule in the US hilarious. But for very many highly influential Americans today, the “danger” is real.
The meteoric rise of Islamophobia in the last few years, Lean argues, has little to do with what Muslims do or do not do. Rather, it is the cumulative product of the committed labour of “a tight-knit and interconnected confederation of right-wing fear merchants”, especially since 9/11. Engaged in America’s lucrative “fear factory” are individual bloggers, talk show anchors (Fox TV), “experts on Islam”, the evangelical Christian Right, Republican politicians, FBI officials, army generals and generous funders, many of whom are hardline supporters of right-wing Zionism and Israel.
Lean is not postulating a hypothesis: his arguments are backed with meticulously researched facts and figures. Nor is he a conspiracy theorist. Not everyone who chooses to take a shot at Islam need be a paid member of some coalition. But the “interconnected confederation” is quick to pounce on every scrap of information, every “favourable” incident for its anti-Islam arsenal.
The scariest part, Lean argues, is that the methods and tactics of the fear factory are no different from those once deployed in the mainstreaming of anti-Semitism. You hate the enemy you fear. Are Muslims being made the “new Jews” in post-Holocaust West?"
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The Islamophobia Industry Strikes in Kansas -Nathan Lean


Just like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, Republican Governor Sam Brownback had a feeling he was not in Kansas anymore. At least not the Kansas that he once knew. His Sunflower State was teeming with unfamiliar creatures and though not tin-men or scarecrows or wicked witches, they were nonetheless outsiders and were apparently so unsettling that a law was required to prevent their influence: They were Muslims.

Last Friday, Brownback signed a bill prohibiting local courts from relying on sharia, or Islamic law, as well as other non-U.S. laws when making decisions. The fact that such a thing had never occurred in the Midwestern wheat capital did not matter. The bill was approved in a landslide vote: 33-1 in the Senate and 120-0 in the House.

Like other similar bills in 20 states, including recently enacted laws in Arizona, Louisiana and Tennessee, the blueprint for the controversial Kansas legislation comes from a familiar and influential source: a growing right-wing network of anti-Muslim fear mongers. They are the Islamophobia industry and laws such as this are hallmark achievements in their quest to frighten the American population about a minority group they view with great suspicion and scorn.

The deluge of anti-Muslim legislation that has unnecessarily clogged the corridors of power (and the minds of otherwise rational politicians) can be traced back to David Yerushalmi, a 57-year-old Hasidic Jew with a library's worth of controversial statements about African Americans, fellow Jews and immigrants. A shadow agent of this fear industry, Yerushalmi has worked behind the scenes since 2001 to ratchet up an image of Islam and Muslims that is heavy on sensationalism and gore and short on context and fact. It was his organization, the Society of Americans for National Existence (with the ironic acronym SANE) that once suggested that the U.S government should declare a war on the Muslim community, that Muslims should not be granted entry visas to the U.S., and that practicing Islam should be a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

The Kansas law, and the majority of the bills that were brought before state congresses, are based on a single piece of blueprint legislation crafted by Yerushalmi titled "American Laws for American Courts." Along with former Reagan official Frank Gaffney, who is famous for suggesting that Barack Obama is a secret member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Yerushalmi marketed the plan to lawmakers throughout the country, tapping into Tea Party bases and Republican activist groups such as ACT For America that welcomed the opportunity to institutionalize discrimination in their respective states.

In drumming up support for Kansas's ban, bloggers Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller spread the word to their online bases through "Action Alerts" that warned of "Islamic supremacists" who were "seeking to impose the Sharia on non-Muslims." They urged their supporters to "flood [Brownback's] Twitter" and "jam his phones" with strong support for the bill.

Spencer and Geller co-founded Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA) in 2010, an American offshoot of Stop the Islamization of Europe (SIOE), a hate group that the European Union calls a "neo-Nazi organization." They also led the protests in 2010 to the Park51 Community Center (remember the Ground Zero Mosque?) in New York City. Yerushalmi and Gaffney serve as their legal counsel. When the Kansas bill was signed, Geller reacted with her usual flamboyance: "U Da Best," she wrote. "What a disaster defeat for Hamas-CAIR," she added.

Supporters of the Kansas law point to the fact that it does not explicitly mention sharia and that it only refers to "foreign legal codes." But it is clear from the people who are behind this newest manifestation of state-sanctioned Islamophobia that the statute is hardly intended to be an equal opportunity regulator. In fact, after court's ruled last year that Oklahoma's sharia ban violated the establishment clause of the Constitution's First Amendment, Yerushalmi took note of the bill's language and wiped out language that could be interpreted as targeting Muslims specifically. This growing network operates on slyness and persistence.

The Islamophobia industry is a dangerous and influential group. They have successfully attached anti-Muslim sentiment to the banner of right-wing populism and it is fast becoming identical to anti-Semitism and other such structural racisms that have the potential to spill out into the ghastly displays of violence. The Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, for example, listed Spencer, Geller and Gaffney multiple times in the manifesto that served as a guidebook for his massacre in July 2011. This network clings to the notion that foreign is bad and that Muslims are not a natural part of America's national fabric. They believe that they must not only be chastised and harassed but that local government's should discriminate against them on the basis of their religion and foreign systems of order that the everyday, law-abiding, peace-loving Muslims of America don't even follow to begin with.

There is no sharia law in Kansas. There is no sharia law anywhere in the United States. What there is, though, is a hateful band of anti-pluralists who take great joy (and make great money) in cleaving society into various fragments that war with one another. It is time to shine a bright and damning light on the Islamophobia industry.

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