Islam in American Law and Politics

Conversations with Andy Sullivan

2011-02-23T23:16:00.001-08:00

You may know Andy Sullivan as the Hard Hat guy. The blue collar corner guy who continues to argue against the building of a masjid near ground zero. Although mainstream republicans have dropped the issue, (in fact, CPAC refused to recognize a talk on the issue as an official part of their event) Andy keeps fightin'! I have no idea how he plans on fighting. No one pays any attention to the issue anymore and there is nothing he can do politically or legally.

Well, I like to keep my eye on Andy and guess what? He went to the recent CPAC convention and debated the masjid issue with Joe Klein (a columnist for Time magazine). I couldn't help but chyme in and guess what? Andy replied! below is a copy of the comments he and I have made back and forth so far. Enjoy!

I am proud to be born and bread in America because I can practice Islam better here than I can in a lot of Muslim countries! Freedom of religion is as American as apple pie and we can't let them take that away from us.

Al Qaida loves nothing more than to hear idiots on tv go on about how Islam is evil and Islam is the enemy because they take those clips to every day Muslims in the MIddle East and say "See? I told you they hate you! Join our cause!" We need to stick to the moral high ground.

amilsarfraz 5 days ago

I'm proud of my country and will not tolerate its dismantling. I never impeded on anyones right to pray as a matter of fact after 911 me and my fellow workers use to walk all the arabic workers to their cars for fear of them being attacked. I just think to knock down the Burlington coat Factory building would be destroying a piece of our history. That was the first strike of the 911 Attacks AND the highest concentration of DNA discovered there.It should of been landmarked.

andybluecollar 5 days ago

Building a mosque will not lead to the dismantling of America. The Republican Party is an outgrowth of the "Know Nothing" Party: a political party that was dedicated to keeping Irish Catholics out of politics and out of America. They said the same thing you are saying: "they're going to destroy America." Thank God they didn't succeed because Catholics add to American culture. So do Muslims. Don't blame a 1400 year old faith and a billion people around the world for what a handful of idiots did.

amilsarfraz 4 days ago

I am happy you can practice your faith freely but the reason you can is because we protect our freedoms unlike the 57 muslim nations. I'm sure you are aware that Islam is a political ideology that tells you what to do from the moment you wake up till you go to sleep. Religion is but a slither of the system. I know a great deal more about this system then you think. Shariah is a state and that's one too many here. We live our lives by the Constitution BTW your welcome andybluecollar 19 hours ago

I can practice my faith in American better than in some Muslim states b/c our government has a history of supporting oppressive dictators in those countries that hate religion (Shah of Iran, Saddham Hussain, Hosne Mubarak, etc.). Islam is a 1400 year old faith that teaches people how to worship the One God. The One God that guided Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Ishmail (both of them!), Jesus, and Muhammad (May God's peace and blessings be upon them all). (whyislam . org) I'm sure you know that.

amilsarfraz 12 minutes ago

I failed to mention also that it was in fact the Muslim nation of Morocco that was the first country to even recognize the United States as a sovereign nation. (You're welcome.) Don't lose sight of the main issue: fighting the construction of a mosque near ground zero is equivalent to fighting against what makes us a great nation. The biggest middle finger we can give to Al Qaida is to support the mosque. That tells them "we will not change our values b/c of anything you do."

amilsarfraz 4 minutes ago

US to transfer extra $150m aid to Palestinians

2010-11-10T16:11:00.000-08:00

I'll be honest, I never thought this would happen, especially before President Obama's second term. Usually, it seems that most presidents (I could be wrong) don't really do anything with the Israel/Palestine until the end of their presidency.

Taken from here.

The US is to transfer an additional $150m (£93m) in aid to the Palestinian Authority and called on other donor nations to increase aid.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made the announcement in a video call with Palestinian PM Salam Fayyad.

Ms Clinton said that despite deadlock, a "positive outcome" was still possible in the Middle East peace talks.

But Israel's plan for more settlement building in the West Bank was counterproductive, she added.

The funding was described as an effort to shore up the Palestinian Authority's budget.

The announcement came after Israel said it planned to build more than 1,300 new homes for Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem.

The US has rejected Israeli claims the new homes would not affect the peace process.

Mrs Clinton is to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin in New York on Thursday, and is expected to raise the issue of the settlements.

Oklahoma Shariah Ban

2010-11-04T19:23:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

By JESS BRAVIN

A Muslim activist in Oklahoma City filed a lawsuit Thursday challenging a voter-approved measure that bars Oklahoma state judges from considering Shariah, the Islamic religious code based on the Koran and the Prophet Mohammed's teachings, in formulating rulings.

State Question 755, which passed Tuesday with 70% of the vote, declares "the legal precepts of other nations or cultures" off-limits to Oklahoma courts. "Specifically, the courts shall not consider international law or Sharia Law," it reads.

The suit, filed by Muneer Awad, director of the state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, asks the federal district court to block officials from certifying the referendum. Mr. Awad says the measure violates the First Amendment, which protects "free exercise" of religion and prohibits official "establishment of religion." A hearing was set for Monday.

The complaint alleges Oklahoma has singled out Islam for "profound stigma," consigning Muslims such as Mr. Awad "to an ineffectual position within the political community."

Oklahoma's Legislature voted overwhelmingly to place the Save Our State Amendment before voters. A co-sponsor, state Sen. Anthony Sykes, denied it sought to stigmatize Muslims. "We're not trying to send any sort of message here," said Mr. Sykes, a Republican.

Rather, he said, Oklahomans wanted to insulate their judiciary from un-American influences. While no Oklahoma court ever has cited Shariah law, "we are on a slippery slope," he said.

Democratic Sen. Richard Lerblance, one of two state senators to vote against the measure, called it "a scare tactic."

"They call it 'Save Our State.' I don't know what we're saving it from," he said. "We have yet to have any court do anything based on Shariah law."

Several states have adopted rules that restrict judges from making decisions that take into account foreign or international legal materials, said William Raferty, a research analyst with the National Center for State Courts in Williamsburg, Va. Only Oklahoma's measure singles out a particular religious tradition, he said, though a proposal in Arizona lists Shariah along with canon law, Jewish law and karma, a conception of fate in Hindu and Buddhist traditions.

Mr. Sykes and other conservatives who perceive a threat from Islamic law cite a 2009 case in which a New Jersey judge declined to issue a restraining order against a Moroccan man who forced sex on his unwilling wife.

Among other reasons, the judge said the husband's belief that his wife must submit to sex "was consistent with his [religious] practices." An appeals court reversed the judge and ordered that a restraining order be issued, citing a Supreme Court decision rejecting a Mormon's claim that his faith exempted him from an anti-bigamy statute.

"To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself," Chief Justice Morrison Waite wrote.

Decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court are binding on all state and federal courts, and no justice of the Supreme Court ever has asserted he or she is bound by any authority other than the U.S. Constitution.

However, beginning in 1791, when Chief Justice John Jay adopted English rules for the new U.S. Supreme Court, American judges occasionally have examined how foreign courts address similar legal problems.

For instance, in a 1997 decision concerning Washington state's ban on assisted suicide, Chief Justice William Rehnquist cited court decisions from Australia, Britain, Canada, Colombia and New Zealand.

Mr. Sykes said he wanted to protect the Oklahoma judiciary from the influence of "Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan and, I'm sure, Sonia Sotomayor, given her political leanings," who he believed were inclined to rely on international law.

Justice Ginsburg responded to similar criticism in a July speech to the International Academy of Comparative Law, at American University. She said foreign opinions "are not authoritative; they set no binding precedent for the U.S. judge. But they can add to the store of knowledge relevant to the solution of trying questions."

She cited Justice Robert Jackson's 1952 concurrence that the president lacked authority to seize steel mills during wartime. Justice Jackson "pointed to features of the Weimar Constitution in Germany that allowed Adolf Hitler to assume dictatorial powers. Even in wartime, Jackson concluded, the U.S. president could not seize private property."

University of Oklahoma law professor Joseph Thai said that earlier this year, the state legislature commissioned "a monument to the laws of another religion"--the Ten Commandments--for the state Capitol.

"Oklahoma's apparent approval of the legal traditions of a majority religion and attempt to suppress the legal traditions of a minority religion" may conflict with the Constitution's requirement that government treat all religions equally, Mr. Thai said.

He said the new state law may forbid Oklahoma judges from citing the Ten Commandments, because they are "international in origin."

Write to Jess Bravin at jess.bravin@wsj.com

The myth of Muslim support for terror

2010-10-25T13:33:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

WASHINGTON
Those who think that Muslim countries and pro-terrorist attitudes go hand-in-hand might be shocked by new polling research: Americans are more approving of terrorist attacks against civilians than any major Muslim country except for Nigeria.

The survey, conducted in December 2006 by the University of Maryland's prestigious Program on International Public Attitudes, shows that only 46 percent of Americans think that "bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians" are "never justified," while 24 percent believe these attacks are "often or sometimes justified."

Contrast those numbers with 2006 polling results from the world's most-populous Muslim countries – Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria. Terror Free Tomorrow, the organization I lead, found that 74 percent of respondents in Indonesia agreed that terrorist attacks are "never justified"; in Pakistan, that figure was 86 percent; in Bangladesh, 81 percent.

Do these findings mean that Americans are closet terrorist sympathizers?

Hardly. Yet, far too often, Americans and other Westerners seem willing to draw that conclusion about Muslims. Public opinion surveys in the United States and Europe show that nearly half of Westerners associate Islam with violence and Muslims with terrorists. Given the many radicals who commit violence in the name of Islam around the world, that's an understandable polling result.

But these stereotypes, affirmed by simplistic media coverage and many radicals themselves, are not supported by the facts – and they are detrimental to the war on terror. When the West wrongly attributes radical views to all of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims, it perpetuates a myth that has the very real effect of marginalizing critical allies in the war on terror.

Indeed, the far-too-frequent stereotyping of Muslims serves only to reinforce the radical appeal of the small minority of Muslims who peddle hatred of the West and others as authentic religious practice.

Terror Free Tomorrow's 20-plus surveys of Muslim countries in the past two years reveal another surprise: Even among the minority who indicated support for terrorist attacks and Osama bin Laden, most overwhelmingly approved of specific American actions in their own countries. For example, 71 percent of bin Laden supporters in Indonesia and 79 percent in Pakistan said they thought more favorably of the United States as a result of American humanitarian assistance in their countries – not exactly the profile of hard-core terrorist sympathizers. For most people, their professed support of terrorism/bin Laden can be more accurately characterized as a kind of "protest vote" against current US foreign policies, not as a deeply held religious conviction or even an inherently anti- American or anti-Western view.

In truth, the common enemy is violence and terrorism, not Muslims any more than Christians or Jews. Whether recruits to violent causes join gangs in Los Angeles or terrorist cells in Lahore, the enemy is the violence they exalt.

Our surveys show that not only do Muslims reject terrorism as much if not more than Americans, but even those who are sympathetic to radical ideology can be won over by positive American actions that promote goodwill and offer real hope.

America's goal, in partnership with Muslim public opinion, should be to defeat terrorists by isolating them from their own societies. The most effective policies to achieve that goal are the ones that build on our common humanity. And we can start by recognizing that Muslims throughout the world want peace as much as Americans do.

• Kenneth Ballen is founder and president of Terror Free Tomorrow, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to finding effective policies that win popular support away from global terrorists.

NPR Ends Williams' Contract After Muslim Remarks

2010-10-22T13:29:00.000-07:00

NPR News has terminated the contract of longtime news analyst Juan Williams after remarks he made on the Fox News Channel about Muslims.

Williams appeared Monday on The O'Reilly Factor, and host Bill O'Reilly asked him to comment on the idea that the U.S. is facing a dilemma with Muslims.

O'Reilly has been looking for support for his own remarks on a recent episode of ABC's The View in which he directly blamed Muslims for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Co-hosts Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg walked off the set in the middle of his appearance.

Williams responded: "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."

Williams also warned O'Reilly against blaming all Muslims for "extremists," saying Christians shouldn't be blamed for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

But strong criticism followed Williams' comments.

Late Wednesday night, NPR issued a statement praising Williams as a valuable contributor but saying it had given him notice that it is severing his contract. "His remarks on The O'Reilly Factor this past Monday were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR," the statement read.

Williams' presence on the largely conservative and often contentious prime-time talk shows of Fox News has long been a sore point with NPR News executives.

His status was earlier shifted from staff correspondent to analyst after he took clear-cut positions about public policy on television and in newspaper opinion pieces.

Reached late Wednesday night, Williams said he wasn't ready to comment and was conferring with his wife about the episode.

Suspect in NYC Muslim cabbie stabbing out on bond

2010-10-20T08:32:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

NEW YORK (AP) - A college student charged with a hate-fueled attack on a Muslim taxi driver was freed on bail Tuesday, staying silent about a stabbing that helped heighten concerns about tolerance in the weeks before the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

An impassive Michael Enright said nothing as he left court, arm-in-arm with his mother and surrounded by about a half-dozen supporters. His mother, Cathy, declined to comment.

Enright, 21, had been jailed since his Aug. 24 arrest. Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Richard Carruthers set his bail last week at $500,000; Enright's family put up a suburban home and other assets to free him. He's due back in court Dec. 8.

Enright asked cab driver Ahmed Sharif whether he was Muslim, uttered an Arabic greeting and told him to "consider this a checkpoint" before slashing him in the neck, authorities said. The Bangladeshi driver survived.

Enright initially told police that Sharif tried to rob him and he'd defended himself, prosecutors said. The film student later declared to police that he was "a patriot," according to prosecutors.

Enright has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and assault, both charged as hate crimes. His lawyer, Lawrence Fisher, has said the film student was beset by alcoholism and by post-traumatic stress disorder from a trip to Afghanistan.

Enright went there last spring to shoot a documentary and was briefly embedded with troops. He was profoundly disturbed by his experiences, according to his lawyer. Enright was held for a time in a psychiatric ward, though prosecutors have questioned whether he has serious psychiatric problems.

When arrested, Enright was carrying notebooks describing his Afghanistan experiences - as well as an empty bottle of scotch, authorities said. He told police he had downed a pint of it.

While free on bail, he'll have to get alcohol-abuse treatment and mental-health care, avoid bars or clubs that serve alcohol, wear an electronic monitor that tracks his whereabouts and comply with an 8 p.m. curfew at his home in Brewster, N.Y., about 60 miles north of Manhattan.

Enright's arrest came at a fraught moment in relations between Muslims and others in the U.S. As the Sept. 11 anniversary neared, an emotional debate over a planned Islamic center and mosque two blocks from ground zero grew into a political flashpoint, figuring in campaigns and commentary around the country and spurring protests and counterprotests.

Opponents say a mosque doesn't belong so near the site of a terror attack carried out by Islamic extremists. Supporters say the plan speaks to religious freedom.

In a nod to the contentious context surrounding the Sharif's stabbing, Mayor Michael Bloomberg appeared with the driver and called for people to "understand that we can have a discourse."

Obama's pro-Israel chief of staff quits

2010-10-12T17:37:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

WASHINGTON // Barack Obama yesterday announced the resignation of his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, a staunch supporter of Israel, in the highest-profile change yet in the US president’s nearly two-year administration.

Mr Emanuel, who is quitting to run for Chicago mayor, will be replaced, at least in the interim period, by the administration insider and Obama confidant Pete Rouse. The change will mark a shift in tone in the White House. Mr Rouse is seen as a quiet and conciliatory figure in stark contrast to Mr Emanuel, who is known to supporters and detractors alike as "Rhambo" for his pugilistic and brusque manner.

The news may also be met with some relief in the Middle East where Mr Emanuel's appointment, one of the first by Mr Obama after taking office, was greeted with near unanimous disappointment. Mr Emanuel volunteered for the Israeli army during the 1991 Gulf war and has long advocated that a militarily strong Israel is a strategic US interest. When he was appointed to the Obama administration, Ma'ariv, an Israeli newspaper, even ran a story about him headlined, "Our man in the White House".

Fiercely partisan, he has rarely voted against his own Democratic Party, but did so to support the position of George W Bush, the former US president, on democratisation in the Middle East. He was also a vocal opponent of plans to allow Dubai Ports World to manage operations at six US ports in 2006, plans that would eventually founder on intense congressional opposition. It was Mr Emanuel who was tasked with smoothing over tensions with Israel when Washington and the Israeli government clashed over the timing of a large settlement tender in occupied East Jerusalem earlier this year.

Nevertheless, it is not clear if his resignation will have much consequence for US Middle East policy. While his original appointment might have been designed partly to allay fears among pro-Israel groups in the US about the Obama administration's Middle East policy, Mr Emanuel was mostly concerned during his time in the White House with pushing through the administration's legislative agenda in congress, not least on healthcare reform.

And when he did get involved with the Middle East, there are suggestions that he clashed, sometimes fiercely, with Israeli government officials, including Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who is reported to have called him a "self-hating Jew". His resignation after two years is also part of a traditional turnover of officials as mid-term elections loom and the administration's focus shifts from pushing through legislation to consolidating positions.

The cultural damage of the 'war on terror'

2010-10-10T17:14:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

Manan Ahmed discusses Amitava Kumar's new book, among other things, in The National:

It is among the accomplishments of Amitava Kumar’s new book, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb (Duke University Press, Dh80), that it refuses to separate the cultural and the political means by which the War on Terror has been waged. Kumar’s slim volume begins in India, with the wrongful arrest of terror suspects – and with the observation, by a poultry farmer in Walavati, that “What the Americans were doing in Abu Ghraib, they learned from our policemen here”. As he traces the ordeals of the “ordinary men and women whose lives are entangled in the War on Terror”, Kumar endeavours to connect not only the tortuous practices common to states fighting terrorists, but also the ways this “war” has been imagined. He covers the cases of three convicted terrorists, in their own words, and in the words of their loved ones. The three men were all caught in sting operations and accused of planning crimes, or expressing the desire to commit crimes, against the United States; one convicted of purchasing a rocket launcher, another of wanting to detonate bombs in the New York City subway, and the last of funding Sikh terrorists in India.

Alongside his personal encounters with these terrorists, Kumar shows the haphazardly constructed legal cases, the government witnesses, and the clash of half-digested cultural understandings. He peels back the stories that we only know by headlines – the Lackawanna Six, the American Taliban – with a novelist’s eye and a reporter’s doggedness. Kumar is not out to rehabilitate these characters nor to act as their apologist. He keeps a studied distance, a knowing diffidence – but not just to the terrorists: to the prosecution, to their evidence, to the informants used by the US government to provoke the defendants into convictable speech and acts.

It is when he widens his gaze from the terrorists to the arts, to public speech and to advocacy, in order to highlight the efforts of artists to observe, catalogue and explain – and the efforts of the state to control, coerce and regulate – that his book becomes a truly horrific indictment of post-September 11 “failure of imagination”. He correctly identifies “all of us” as participants in the state’s war on terror – sanctioning the drone attacks, extra-judicial assassinations and extraordinary renditions. By focusing on the banality of the state’s cases against the old, the infirm, the misfits, the ill-suited, Kumar reminds us that the war raging far from our doorsteps is also all around us. He wants to bring that war closer, and to make its consequences visible, by exposing the inequities of domestic counter-terrorism prosecutions.

More here.

Israel probes soldier's dance near Palestinian prisoner

2010-10-08T17:10:00.000-07:00

Why has this story not found its way into American media outlets?

Taken from here.

Israel's army says it is investigating a video which appears to show a soldier dancing around a bound and blindfolded Palestinian woman.

The video first appeared on the YouTube website and has since been aired on Israeli television news reports.

Palestinian officials have called for tough action against the soldier's "immoral and inhumane" conduct.

In August, a female Israeli soldier posted photos on Facebook of her posing next to Palestinian prisoners.

On that occasion, the Israeli military described the behaviour as "shameful".
'Ugly actions'

The latest YouTube video, which looks like it has been filmed on a mobile phone, appears to show an Israeli soldier in uniform dancing to Arabic music around a female Palestinian prisoner.

The woman is seen bound and blindfolded with her face up against a wall.

The soldier appears to move his body suggestively as he dances close to the woman, the BBC's West Bank correspondent Jon Donnison reports.

The Israeli military has issued a statement denouncing the behaviour, saying such incidents were "isolated cases that do not represent the IDF as a whole".

It has launched an investigation into the video.

But Issa Qaraqei, the Palestinian Authority's minister of prisoner affairs, told the BBC that the "ugly Israeli actions represent a blatant violation of human rights".

As in the previous incident involving the Facebook photos, the video "shows the very low immoral and inhumane status of the state of Israel," he added.

Mr Qaraqei said officials had identified the Palestinian prisoners who appeared in the Facebook photos and had filed a complaint against the former soldier, Eden Aberjil, on their behalf.

He called on international organisations to put pressure on Israeli officials to take action against the soldiers involved in both cases.

How Much Do You Know About Other Religions?

2010-10-06T13:48:00.000-07:00

Take the test!!

I scored a 73%... not as good as I had hoped, but apparently that's better than 80% of the country! How well did you do? Leave it in the comments!

Thousands in Pakistan protest scientist's prison sentence

2010-10-03T08:27:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

Islamabad, Pakistan (CNN) -- Hundreds of thousands protested in Karachi and Hyderabad Tuesday against the 86-year prison sentence for a Pakistani scientist convicted of attempting to kill Americans in Afghanistan.

The rallies were organized by the Muttahida Quami Movement, a Pakistani political party, in response to last week's sentencing of Aafia Siddiqui, who was convicted by a jury in February in the United States on seven charges, including attempted murder and armed assault on U.S. officers.

"I appeal to the U.S. government and their people to release Aafia Siddiqui with honor and dignity to get the praises of millions of people," MQM's leader, Altaf Hussain, said during a live address by telephone from his self-exile in London, England.

Hussain also questioned "why the people who are responsible for the drone strikes in Pakistan and killing innocent people" are not given similar sentences.

The United States does not officially comment on suspected drone strikes. But it is the only country in the region known to have the ability to launch missiles from drones -- which are controlled remotely.

Siddiqui's sentence -- which the country's foreign minister called "very harsh" -- has sparked widespread protests.

"Many people feel that she is innocent and she was framed and she should have got a fairer chance," Pakistani Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi said last week of the demonstrations.

Prosecutors said Siddiqui picked up a rifle and shot at two FBI special agents, a U.S. Army warrant officer, an Army captain and military interpreters while she was being held unrestrained at an Afghan facility on July 18, 2008.

The agents returned fire, shooting her in the abdomen.

Siddiqui was extradited to the United States in August 2008, after the shooting incident.

At her sentencing last week, the 38-year-old MIT graduate shook her head in defiance and wagged her finger in a "no" gesture as U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman laid out the case against her.

But Siddiqui was more subdued when Berman allowed her to speak before the packed courtroom filled with family, spectators and foreign and national press.

Clad in a khaki suit and a hijab that covered most of her face, Siddiqui repeatedly asked her Muslim supporters to not "get emotional."

"I don't want any violence in my name," Siddiqui said of the demonstrations in Pakistan, where her case has become a cause celebre. "If you do anything for me, please educate people about Islam because people don't understand that it is a religion of mercy."

Muslim burial site in upstate New York runs into problems

2010-10-01T13:51:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

(CNN) -- Leaders of a town in upstate New York are trying to shut down a local Muslim community center's burial site, prompting members of the center to wonder: Why now?

Hans Hass, spokesperson for the Sufi Muslim Osmanli Naksibendi Hakkani Dergahi, or community center, in Sidney, New York, told CNN that problems surrounding the cemetery and questions about its legality started around the time the lower Manhattan Mosque and Islamic Center controversy began making national news.

But Sidney town supervisor Bob McCarthy said the legality of the cemetery came up "long before that," referring to the lower Manhattan Islamic center controversy, though he did not say specifically when the issue came up. "What they do in New York City has nothing to do with us," he said. When asked if the lawsuit had anything to do with the burial site originating from a Muslim community center, McCarthy said, "No."

According to board meeting minutes provided to CNN by Hass, McCarthy and the town board voted in August to start "seeking an injunction prohibiting the burying of bodies on private property in violation of New York state town law." In addition to preventing future burials, town officials are seeking to disinter the two members of the Sufi Muslim community currently buried on the land.

McCarthy said he is "not an attorney" and was vague about the injunction proceedings, except to say that, currently, "there is no injunction." He referred CNN to the town's lawyer, Joseph Ermeti, who is handling the legal proceeding. Ermeti has not returned phone calls or e-mails to CNN.

Lisa French, town clerk for Sidney, told CNN that according to Sidney's zoning laws, cemeteries are permitted on property that contains a "single contiguous area of at least 15 acres." Hass said his community's burial site has over 60 contiguous acres.

And according to the New York state Department of Cemeteries, there are no state regulations concerning burial on private property -- each community is advised to consult its local government on the matter.

But French points to another law in the state's Department of Cemeteries, which does indicate that it is unlawful to mortgage land "used and occupied for cemetery purposes."

The community center's lawyers are looking into the mortgaged land issue and are still uncertain whether the law is applicable to their situation, Hass said. "We didn't have a cemetery that we mortgaged, we have a property that we had a mortgage on from the beginning and we put a cemetery on it," he said. The center is confident the matter will be resolved -- either by dividing the property or paying off the mortgage, Hass said.

The community's burial site was approved in 2005 by the town's code enforcement official Dale R. Downin, Hass said. Hass provided CNN with a copy of the approval letter, dated December 6, 2005, which simply states that Downin has "inspected" the proposed property and that "a cemetery at this location would be allowed use according to the Town of Sidney Zoning Ordinance." Phone calls to Downin to confirm its authenticity have not yet been returned.

But according to McCarthy, who said he has not seen Downin's letter to the community center, "The crux of the argument is that you can't just bury somebody in your lawn," McCarthy tells CNN. "That's what they're doing -- they buried [bodies] in their field."

Hass does not see it that way. "It's an unfortunate situation, and I don't think it really reflects the view of most Americans," he told CNN."This is a small-town issue and it's a small-town mentality ... and they're pressing ahead with it because their intentions, I think, are pretty transparent."

Hass also said the cemetery is not exclusively for Muslims. "We welcome anyone who would like to be buried here, including local people who otherwise are unable to afford burial," he said.

Omid Safi: Muslims in the Mosaic of America

2010-09-30T13:37:00.000-07:00

There is much heat, and not a lot of light, in the discussion about the Park51 Community Center.

No, it is not the “Ground Zero mosque.” In the crowded landscape of Manhattan, two blocks away from Ground Zero is a significant distance.

No, it is not a mosque. It is a community center with interfaith spaces, wedding halls, reading rooms, and yes, a place for prayer.

So what if it is a mosque? We have churches and synagogues close to Ground Zero. To say that having a mosque presents a problem is to suggest that Islam and Muslims somehow are held collectively responsible for the crimes of 19 terrorists. Those crimes are their own and cannot be used to label 1.3 billion members of humanity. Collective punishment runs against the very foundation of our legal system, in which each individual is responsible for his or her own actions.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has been a leading voice in the interfaith community of New York. The mere fact that the establishment of this community center has been viewed as promoting jihadism baffles the mind and would be laughable if the charges were not so serious. Are the critics aware that this community center would include a swimming pool? This is hardly the version of Islam the Taliban or Wahhabis would like to see established in America.

Most importantly, this controversy is not ultimately about Muslims or Islam or the place of Muslims in the mosaic of America. It is about competing and contentious visions of America. It is about what kind of a society we wish to be and to become.

We do have a culture war in this country, and on one side we have people who see us as being made richer through our existing diversity, and on the other side we have people who are displaying xenophobic anxieties about the increasing religious, ethnic, and sexual diversity of America.

Omid Safi is professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author, most recently, of “Memories of Muhammad: Why the Prophet Matters” (HarperOne, 2009).

Construction Workers Oppose Mosque Near Ground Zero Update

2010-09-29T13:24:00.000-07:00

I posted a question on the website of some construction workers who oppose the masjid near ground zero. (see my previous article) They did respond to me a little while back and I just haven't gotten the time to put into the blog as I need to so I didn't post it.

I'll try to find their response to my questions if for nothing else then to be fair, but basically, they said that their opposition is not about religion, it is simply about making sure that those who lost loved ones on 9/11 were not insulted. They also said that they would not mind a masjid outside a one mile radius of ground zero.

Let's face it, it is about religion. Which was my point in asking the question they dodged: if a radical Christian group committed the attacks on 9/11, would you have a problem with a church being built near ground zero? If they said yes... they're not going to say yes. And if they said no... well then it is about religion isn't it?

Texas education board mulls banning ‘pro-Islamic’ history books

2010-09-24T13:56:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

A new front in the Texas textbook wars may soon erupt.

The Texas Board of Education is considering targeting history textbooks that promote a “pro-Islamic, anti-Christian” point of view, The Dallas Morning News reported.

The board, which overhauled the state's history and social studies curriculum in May to reflect conservative values, will examine a resolution next week that would warn publishers not to “push a pro-Islamic, anti-Christian viewpoint” in world history textbooks, the newspaper reported.

Conservative board members requested the resolution after a candidate for a board seat warned them that “Middle Easterners” are buying textbook publishing companies.

Terrence Stutz of The Dallas Morning News reported:

A preliminary draft of the resolution states that "diverse reviewers have repeatedly documented gross pro-Islamic, anti-Christian distortions in social studies texts" across the U.S. and that past social studies textbooks in Texas also have been "tainted" with pro-Islamic, anti-Christian views.

In May, The Texas board’s conservative bloc, overhauled its existing social studies and history curriculum to reflect conservative contributions to U.S. history.

Among the approved amendments, according to the Texas Education Agency: discussions of the "solvency of long term entitlements, such as Social Security and Medicare"; and an examination of why "the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America" and guaranteed its free exercise.

Posted by: John Blake - CNN Writer

Children Praying in Boston Mosque Stirrs Controversy

2010-09-23T13:53:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

WELLESLEY, Mass. -- An Islamic mosque where students from the Wellesley Middle School participated in a prayer ceremony during a field trip in May denied reports Friday that the mosque invited the students to pray.

"I've double- and triple-checked with our tour guides and she certainly didn't invite them to participate in the prayer," said Bilal Kaleem, president of the Muslim American Society of Boston, which operates the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center in Roxbury.

The school superintendent apologized to local parents after the video, shot by a parent, was made public. It shows a handful of Wellesley sixth-grade boys kneeling and engaging in the prayer ritual during the May event at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center.

Kaleem said he did not know if the students prayed on their own, but a chaperone who was on the trip said the prayer was voluntary.

10 Things About Islam

"They weren't asked to pray. They weren't refused from going in ... to observe. You could go in and observe and some kids did sit down. There were some boys who sat behind the men and kind of copied them, but it wasn't like they had to," said Marijane Tuohy.

Flyers alerting the school community to the incident turned up on cars at a back-to-school meeting at the middle school Thursday night.

In the flyers, an online group called "Americans for Peace and Tolerance" slammed the school and demanded an investigation into the incident.

Some parents were offended by the group's campaign.

"Here's a group that says 'Peace and tolerance,' and what they're preaching, appears to me, to be hate," said parent Drew Knowland.

A man affiliated with the group that made the video said his issue is with the mosque that was chosen. He called it a "radical" mosque and said the school should have chosen a more moderate mosque if it was going to teach children about Islam.

Mosque officials, however, said they regularly host students and other groups and they worry that the incident is part of a growing wave of anti-Muslim sentiment.

"It just seems like a sensational, kind of publicity-seeking type of thing," said. "I mean, if this happened four months ago, and they've had this (video) for so long, if they were particularly concerned, wouldn't they reach out to us? Wouldn't they reach out to the school?"

Studying different religions is part of the school's sixth-grade social studies curriculum where classes also visit a synagogue and meet with Hindus. Students who visited the mosque in the past said they appreciated the visit.

"It was interesting. It was like, different to see our culture versus their culture," said one of the students.

Nevertheless, Wellesley Schools Superintendent Bella Wong said she doesn't apologize for her curriculum but she does believe in the separation of church and state. In a letter to parents she said, "It wasn't the intent for any of the students to participate in religious practices. The fact that any students were allowed to do so in this case was in error."

Wong apologized and said teachers would be given more guidance on future field trips.

Deepak Chopra's Seerah

2010-09-22T13:26:00.000-07:00

I must say I'm not sure what to make of it. I haven't read the book and am not sure whether to do so or not. He's definitely not the first non-Muslim to write about the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and definitely will not be the last. I imagine that it, at best will be all over the media for a while and then kinda fade into the volumes of other books out there on the life of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).

Taken From here.

Editor’s Note: Deepak Chopra is a founding member of the Chopra Center for Wellbeing located in Carlsbad, California. He is the author of over 50 books on health, success, relationships and spirituality. His newest book, "Muhammad: A Story of the Last Prophet” is a fictional biography of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad. It hits bookstores Tuesday, September 21st. He spoke with CNN in depth about the new book. This is an edited transcript of that conversation.

Why do you think the time is right for a novel about Muhammad?

I was just doing this as part of my trilogy; it started with Buddha and then Jesus, and now it turns out serendipitously that the timing is appropriate because there is so much discussion about Islam in the world. It all stems from not being aware of the other person. The only way this outrage can occur is when you demonize the other. When we expand our awareness, we have a more contextual knowing of why things are; then, we don’t react with violence, we respond with creativity. There is a lot of room for creativity right now.

In the book, you present some less than desirable characteristics of The Profit, including his illiteracy and his 6-year-old wife. Are you concerned there may be a backlash against your portrayal?

I am not, because first of all, it’s all historically true and nobody denies that. Not even the more fringe elements or the radical elements. It’s all the more astonishing that Muhammad is illiterate and does not know how to read and write but when he utters the Koran, it has the lyrical quality that listening to it allows you to enter these amazing realms of consciousness…
As far as his young wife, we have no idea of evaluating what the customs were in those days and how relationships were forged. There is no way to judge a culture across the yawning abyss of time… I’m not really concerned about any backlash. I did the book factually, honestly with respect, beyond that, of course, one can’t control anyone’s reaction.

HarperCollins, your book’s publisher, authorized e-book retailers to sell the book a week before its print publication. This is the first time they’ve ever placed an e-book for sale before the print edition.

This has to do with the timing and also on Twitter. If you go on Twitter and you [search] #Muhammad, you’ll see a lot of traffic around the book and the topic because, first of all, there are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, they are obviously very curious. When I visit Twitter, I’m seeing reactions from people [all over the world.] They’re all having a conversation right now.
Some of them have been a little critical, some are skeptical, but everybody is curious, and I think it’s starting a new conversation. Its easier to related to Muhammad than to Jesus or Buddha because he never claimed that he was of divine origin, he was as shocked at his revelation as anybody else, he frequently said many times “I’m a man amongst men,” he frequently said “all the good that happens comes from Allah and everything that is not good is my fault,” he’s very human and that is what makes him relatable. We can connect to him.

Why do you think Americans know so little about Islam?

I think part of it is we are, to some extent, ethnocentric, and we are very nationalistic, and extreme nationalism is a recent trend. America is a melting pot. I’m in NY City right now. You can walk through the city and visit almost every culture. This is the future of the world.
I have a grandson now who is three years old. He speaks English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and Hindi and he’s only three-years-old. His mother is a Chinese-American, his nanny is Spanish, we speak German, Hindi and Urdu, and he speaks English in school and he’s comfortable with all of that. This is the future of humanity and particularly of America.

What are your thoughts on the current debate surrounding the proposed Islamic center near ground zero?

I’ve had the wife of the Imam, Daisy Khan on my radio show. She is from Kashmir, the disputed territory between India and Pakistan. Her husband, the Imam, is Egyptian. They’ve been very involved in interfaith dialogues for many years; in fact, they’re just the kind of Muslims we should be looking at and encouraging dialogue with because they’ve been doing it for 10 years… Some people are trying to convince the Imam to focus on the multi-faith aspect of this and perhaps dedicate the whole institution to the victims of 9/11. That would be a creative solution in my opinion.

How has Islam factored into the lives of some of the celebrities that you have worked with, like Michael Jackson?

I spent a lot of time with him, he was curious about every tradition. So yes, Islam was an influence on him for a while, but he was more interested in the origins and the life of Muhammad than actually the tradition itself.

Buddha, Jesus, now Muhammad… who will you write about next?

Next, I’m going to look at the lives of all of the great saints of East and West. I am going to look at Christian mystics, and I’m going to do a book that looks at their lives and their revelatory experiences, and I’m going to call it ‘When God Spoke.’

Muslims Combating Extremism

2010-09-21T13:23:00.000-07:00

Sorry it's been a while... I'll get back to posting more often inshallah... Enjoy!

Taken from here.

(BTW, I can't figure out how to embed the video the way I used to so you'll have to go to the website if you want to watch the actual video.)

BOB ABERNETHY, host: A new report this week from the former heads of the 9/11 Commission says US authorities have not done enough to address the threat of homegrown terrorism. It urged new systems be put in place to counter radicalization. Kim Lawton reports that several leading US Muslim groups are already trying to confront those concerns with new efforts to prevent extremism from taking hold in their communities.
KIM LAWTON, correspondent: It’s late afternoon in Manassas, Virginia, not far outside Washington, DC, and at the Dar al Noor mosque they’re getting ready for a good all-American barbecue. The picnic is part of a new national initiative from the Muslim American Society called the Straight Path Campaign. It’s one of several new projects being launched by US Islamic groups in an effort to fight extremism within their community, particularly among young people.
IMAM MAHDI BRAY, Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation: We want them to say to America and prove to America through their efforts that, you know, we’re not terrorist suspects. We are America’s brightest prospects.
LAWTON: According to a new poll by the Pew Research Center, Americans hold conflicted views about whether Islam is more likely to encourage violence than other religions. Forty-two percent of those surveyed said that Islam does not encourage violence more than others, but 35 percent said it does. Almost a quarter said they didn’t know. The survey also found that almost 40 percent of Americans said they had an unfavorable view toward Islam. That’s a significant increase from just five years ago.
Since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, many American Muslims say it’s become increasingly difficult to counter the perception that their faith is linked to violence, and that job has been complicated by some recent high-profile terrorism-related arrests of Muslim Americans, including several who were born or raised in the US.
EDINA LEKOVIC, Muslim Public Affairs Council: The fact that there has been a string of incidents presents a reality that we cannot afford to ignore, regardless of whether it’s emanating from our own homes, or our own mosques, or our own communities.
LAWTON: A Duke University study released earlier this year found only a relatively small number of US Muslims who had planned or carried out terrorist attacks. The study concluded “homegrown terrorism is a serious, but limited, problem.”
BRAY: One is one too many, and so we have zero tolerance for that kind of seductive narrative and that seductive type of presentation that lures young people into things that will ultimately ruin their lives.
LAWTON: One of the first priorities for mainstream US Muslim groups has been trying to fight extremist messages online, including many from foreign-based English-speaking Americans.
Al-Qaeda Online Video: “I am calling on every honest and vigilant Muslim, unsheathe your sharpened sword and rush to take your rightful place among defiant champions of Islam…”
SALAM AL-MARAYATI, Muslim Public Affairs Council: What happens in extremist groups is that really there’s a cult mentality. There’s blind following of a charismatic leader, these pied pipers that are speaking to us now on YouTube from caves and jungles and war zones that are trying to glamorize violence. That’s basically what we’re dealing with.
LAWTON: Hoping to offer a different view, American imam Suhaib Webb has set up his own Web site where he challenges radical statements and answers questions about Islamic teachings.
IMAM SUHAIB WEBB: You know the Prophet, peace be upon him, said “If the day of judgment starts and you have a seed in your hand, plant that seed.” Stay positive. Never allow yourself to succumb to that negative discourse.
LAWTON: He’s been urging other Muslims to tackle the issue of extremism head on as well.
WEBB: If you’re not going to take the position, someone else will take that position for you. If you’re not going to step up to the mic, someone else is going to grab it and spit. That’s just the reality.
LAWTON: Webb says a major problem is that many of the radical Web sites twist and misrepresent Islamic teachings, either intentionally or through ignorance. He was one of nine US scholars and imams who denounced extremism in a recent video produced by the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
LEKOVIC: Communities really need to focus on religious literacy so that our young people start at an early age knowing what the Quran actually says, and what the Quran actually promotes us to do, which is to be a part of society, to be contributing, and to be good to our families, and to be model citizens within whatever countries we live in.
LAWTON: With the Straight Path Campaign, the Muslim American Society is also trying to educate Muslim young people about the tenets of their faith. Imam Mahdi Bray draws from his own experience in the US civil rights movement and talks about the importance of nonviolence within Islam as well.
BRAY (speaking at mosque): Nonviolence, the sanctity of life, is valued, and it’s not the sanctity of Muslim life. It’s the sanctity of all life.
LAWTON: The campaign is holding a series of meetings with youth and youth leaders across the country to discuss violence and Islam, and also how to address injustice and discrimination in positive ways. Bray says it’s important not to dismiss the very real concerns and frustrations among young Muslims.
BRAY: Providing young people with skill sets and tools that embrace nonviolence but at the same time doesn’t give them the feeling that they’re just rolling over and that they’re not really fighting back against some of the injustices that they see every day in their lives both here and abroad.
AL-MARAYATI (speaking in meeting): We don’t separate Islam from politics. This is actually an act of worship for us.
LAWTON: The Muslim Public Affairs Council is trying to help young Muslims address their concerns through the political process. The group holds a Young Leaders Summit in Washington, where participants learn how government works.
AL-MARAYATI: It’s easy for somebody to exploit people’s angers and frustrations and lead them to destructive behavior, so our approach is promoting the theology of life within Islam—that Islam is meant to be a part of a pluralistic society.
LAWTON: The students see the mechanics of politics up close and get to meet with politicians, this year including Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison and Indiana Representative Andre Carson, the only two Muslims in Congress. Organizers say the experience gives young Muslims a new vision for what can be accomplished.
LEKOVIC: In a post-9/11 reality, they sometimes have a hard time believing that their own government and their own elected officials want to hear from them, or even care about their opinions, because what they see on their campuses and in their hometowns is a rising level of Islamophobia.
LAWTON: The various projects are intended to be proactive against radicalism, but they have also provoked controversy. Several outsiders have accused the campaigns and their leaders of not being tough enough against extremism, while some Muslims fear the new initiatives could give the impression that the problem is bigger than it really is.
IBRAHIM HOOPER, Council on American-Islamic Relations: Some of the young people said, “Ah, yeah, before you get going on that, make sure it doesn’t portray us all as so-called radicalized,” that that’s a danger as well—to project something that isn’t there.
LAWTON: Some Muslims have accused Bray of perpetuating anti-Islamic stereotypes.
BRAY: There are some who say, oh, there’s no problem, everything is just fine, you know? Well, everything is not just fine.
LAWTON: American Muslim leaders say their young people, like young people of all faiths, are trying to figure out their identities, and, the leaders say, religion should be a culturally relevant part of the mix.
AL-MARAYATI: Islam is a religion that has a book that is supposed to be universal and is supposed to apply at different times. Therefore it is our responsibility to interpret the principles from the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet to America in the 21st century, and by and large that has not been done.
LAWTON: It’s a matter that hits all too close to home for students like these.
MATEEN RIAC: Saying that everybody, all Muslims are terrorists, I think that is like a big issue, so like it makes people feel left out, especially in schools, they’re like, “Wow, am I really like that?”
ATTIQAH SYEDA: The words “Muslim” and “terrorist” are not synonymous in any way, shape, or form.
LAWTON: And that’s the ultimate message they hope takes hold.
I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

Iraq Timeline Video

2010-08-27T09:22:00.000-07:00

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/by-topic/middle-east/ethics-and-iraq/6892/

Interesting video of the arguments both for and against the war throught the years...

Construction Workers Oppose Mosque Near Ground Zero

2010-08-21T08:37:00.000-07:00

I left a comment on their blog... I'll keep you posted if I get a response!

Hey guys,

A couple quick questions... if these horrible attacks were done by Christians, would you oppose the building of a church in this same spot? Also, how far from ground zero is far enough to build a mosque without being insulting? Lastly, what is your opinion of Islam and Muslims? From your comments, I get the sense that you feel Islam and Muslims are to blame for the attacks on 9/11 and not just a group of radicals. Don't forget that innocent Muslims died on 9/11 also, and they they also grieve for the loss of their loved ones.

Taken from here.

NEW YORK (Aug. 20) -- The proposed Islamic center near ground zero is facing stiff opposition from a group that will be vital if the plan is to be realized: the New York City building industry.

Construction worker Andy Sullivan has set up a "Hard Hat Pledge" on his website, calling on construction workers to vow not to do work on the Park51 community center and mosque, the New York Daily News said.

Diane Bondareff, MCTMosque opponent Andy Sullivan stands outside the site of the proposed mosque and Islamic center on Park Place near lower Manhattan's ground zero on Thursday.
Sullivan is not alone. Several New York construction workers interviewed by AOL News declared their opposition to the project.

"It doesn't make any sense to be there," said Eduard Nika, a marble worker. "The mentality these people have, it's not anything to do with religion."

The planned mosque and community center two blocks from the site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that killed 3,000 people has spiraled from a local zoning issue into a national political debate.

Public figures such as Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich have blasted the plan, saying it is an insult to the families of the victims. The Anti-Defamation League, whose mission statement says it exists to fight "all forms of bigotry," has said the center should be built at another location.

Others, such as Mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Barack Obama, have said that while they understand the strong resentment the project arouses, any effort to block the Islamic center would infringe on American values of freedom.

Handyman Frank Rivera, who said three of his relatives were in the World Trade Center at the time of the attack but survived, believes the project would be bad for New York City and an insult to the families of victims.

"It shouldn't be there. It's a slap in the face," Rivera said.

Like Nika, he said he would sooner quit his job than work on the project.

But not everyone is opposed to the Islamic center. Mike Bakovic, who works in interior construction and painting, said he'd work on the project -- even if he didn't get paid.

"Muslim people have the freedom or religion, same as everyone else, the Jew, the Catholic, everyone else," Bakovic said. "Islam is peaceable, like every other religion. "

Louis Coletti, president of the Building Trades Employers Association, told the Daily News that labor unions had not taken a "formal position" on the plan. Still, he said it was " a very difficult dilemma for the contractors and organized labor force."

The New York City Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO, did not respond to a call from AOL News seeking comment.

President Obama Supports 'Ground Zero Mosque'

2010-08-13T21:42:00.000-07:00

taken from here.

Aug. 13) -- President Barack Obama gave a thumbs up today to a proposed Islamic community center and mosque that is slated to be built two blocks from the site of the 9/11 attacks in lower Manhattan.

"Let me be clear," Obama said at a White House dinner celebrating the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, "as a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country.

"That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances," Obama said, according to CNN.

Obama's remarks drew a prompt response from Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. "President Obama is wrong," said King, The Associated Press reported. "It is insensitive and uncaring for the Muslim community to build a mosque in the shadow of ground zero. While the Muslim community has the right to build the mosque, they are abusing that right by needlessly offending so many people who have suffered so much."

The proposed construction of the Cordoba House Islamic Center has divided U.S. politicians and the public. Obama's remarks follow a line of argument put forth by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who made an impassioned defense of the construction of the Islamic center in a speech delivered on Governor's Island.

Politicians such as Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich have opposed the mosque, citing their view that the former site of the World Trade center is "hallowed ground" and that building Cordoba House in such close proximity is an affront to the memory of those who died in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"This is America," Obama declared today, "and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are. The writ of our founders must endure."

New York's Landmarks Preservation Commission has cleared the way for construction of the Islamic center, which will occupy the site that once housed a Burlington Coat Factory outlet store, but the state's governor, David Paterson, has suggested that other land might be made available to the developers of the project.

Group Makes Push For Muslim School Holidays

2010-07-11T18:54:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

By: Rebecca Spitz

NEW YORK CITY – A group of Muslim parents and their supporters gathered Wednesday on the steps of City Hall where they called on Mayor Michael Bloomberg to recognize Islamic holidays on the school calendar.

The coalition of religious, immigrant and labor groups is asking the mayor to honor a City Council resolution calling for two Muslim holy days -- Eid-ul Adha and Eid-ul Fitr -- to be added to the school calendar.

The resolution passed last year, however Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein say there is not room for more time off during the academic year.

The group says the fact they were considering pushing back the first day of school to accommodate Rosh Hashanah indicates that there is flexibility in the system. They also say having no Islamic holidays discriminates against the city's 100,000 Muslim school children.

"Twelve percent of the New York City's 1.1 million school children are Muslim. And our children deserve to have their holiday like everyone else," said City Councilman Robert Jackson.

"We want to make our holiday like other people. We want to be equal like other people. It's not fair. We want to get our rights just like other people get their rights," said one student.

Mayor Bloomberg says he is supportive of the Muslim community and the rights of all religious groups. However, he says New York City children need more time in the classroom, not less.

The teachers' union says it supports including the holidays, but did not offer any specific suggestions on how to make up the days.

Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?

2010-07-11T17:24:00.000-07:00

My wife said something really interesting... we were praying Maghrib on July 4th when we started to hear the fireworks go off. She said that when we hear bangs outside, we look out to see the show. When Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine hear bangs outside, they duck for their lives.

Jews and Palestinians Used to Live in Peace

2010-07-07T19:50:00.000-07:00

I'm sure you've seen this video before, and at the risk of having way too many Israel/Palestine blogs, but I saw this video again and it was just too good.

www.nkusa.org

My Take: New York's schools should observe Muslim holidays

2010-07-05T20:19:00.000-07:00

taken from here.

Editor's note: Imam Khalid Latif is a chaplain for New York University and Executive Director of the school's Islamic Center.

By Khalid Latif, Special to CNN

I was recently eating dinner at a restaurant with a friend near Times Square when it became time for me to pray. Muslims pray five times a day and this particular prayer, called Maghrib, is performed at sunset.

Having lived in New York City for decades, I’ve become comfortable praying pretty much anywhere. It also doesn’t hurt that there are stranger things happening on the streets here than a young guy bowing and kneeling for a few minutes.

After I started to pray, a tour bus parked in front of me and a large group of people proceeded to spill out.

While I continued, a woman from the group came closer to where I was praying. She removed a scarf from her neck, placed it on the ground so that I would be praying on something clean, then walked away before I finished.

A truly amazing woman whose name I don’t even know. But if I had not felt comfortable being myself and praying on the street, I would never have had the opportunity to learn from her.

A child at a recent rally for Muslim holidays to be observed by New York city schools.

It’s not easy fitting in. Whether you’re 15 years old or 55, most of us have to compartmentalize our identity in order to feel accepted. We let go of things that we hold dear in hopes that we can just belong and in doing so we assume the worst of the people around us. We think that they wouldn’t be able to understand and accept us for who we are.

A year ago this week, more than 80 faith-based, civil rights, community and labor organizations came together under the title Coalition for Muslim School Holidays. Our purpose was to encourage New York City to give permanent recognition to its Muslim community by adding two holidays observed by Muslims to the public school calendar: Eid ul-Fitr, which celebrates the end of Ramadan, the sacred month of fasting and Eid Ul-Adha, which celebrates the end of the Hajj, the yearly pilgrimage to Mecca.

New York’s City Council convened to vote on the issue and almost unanimously passed resolution 1281, calling for the Department of Education to recognize the holidays. But Mayor Michael Bloomberg has decided that the holidays won’t be added to the public school calendar

Yesterday, the Coalition for Muslim School Holidays held a late morning rally on the steps of New York’s City Hall. Hundreds of people attended and even more stood at the gates waiting to get in—a 300 person limit had been placed on the gathering—as politicians, city officials, interfaith leaders and activists spoke from the steps telling Mayor Bloomberg why he should change his mind.

The expectation that people have of Muslims these days is pretty confusing. On one hand, Muslims are explicitly told they need to integrate Islam more effectively into mainstream society. On the other hand, Muslims are implicitly shown that can’t really happen. The construction of our mosques is protested, our communities are profiled, and our children have to go to school on their holidays.

“One in every eight school kids in the City of New York observes the Muslim faith,” New York City Comptroller John Liu said in a statement issued yesterday by the Coalition for Muslim School Holidays. “Yet these students are forced to choose between their education and their faith, and it’s a situation that needs to be rectified.”

In addition all the presidents of New York’s five boroughs have sent letters of support to our coalition, while Public Advocate Bill de Blasio support the City Council resolution recognizing Muslim holidays.

“About 12 percent of New York City students are Muslim,” says de Blasio, “and consequently thousands of students miss exams and important activities because they are scheduled on Muslim holidays. The Department of Education should treat these students equally and include the two main Islamic holidays in the school calendar, just as it does with other major religions.”

It was a beautiful thing to stand amongst a diverse group of people yesterday in support of a cause that really goes beyond a holiday. I’m looking forward to the day that it’s celebration—not contention—that brings us together. Who knows? Maybe it’ll even be on Eid.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Khalid Latif. Author photo courtesy Bryan Derballa.

Ohio 6-Year-Old Turns Up on Terror Watch List

2010-07-02T22:45:00.000-07:00

Others on the no-fly list include, but are not limited to: The late Senator Ted Kennedy, Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens), and Nelson Mandella. So... how many actual terrorists are on this list? I'm not a world renowned politician, an international pop star, and certainly no terrorist... so if my name appears on the list, how do I get it off?

This article was taken from here.

(June 26) – The father of a 6-year-old Ohio girl who turned up on the U.S. government's terror watch list says the worst thing his daughter has ever done is probably been mean to her sister.

But Santhosh Thomas, a doctor from Westlake, Ohio, says he's sure that's not enough to land his 6-year-old Alyssa on the no-fly list of suspected terrorists. "She may have threatened her sister, but I don't think that constitutes Homeland Security triggers," he told CNN.

An airline ticket agent informed the family of their predicament when they embarked on recent trip from Cleveland to Minneapolis. "They said, 'Well, she's on the list.' We're like, okay, what's the story? What do we have to do to get off the list? This isn't exactly the list we want to be on," Thomas said.

The Thomases were allowed to fly that day, but authorities told them to contact the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to clear up the matter. Now they've received a letter from the government addressed to 6-year-old Alyssa, telling her that nothing in her file will be changed.

Federal authorities have acknowledged that such a no-fly list exists, but as a matter of national security, they won't comment on whose names are on it nor why. "The watch lists are an important layer of security to prevent individuals with known or suspected ties to terrorism from flying," an unnamed spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration told Fox News.

"She's been flying since she was two-months old, so that has not been an issue," Alyssa's dad said. "In fact, we had traveled to Mexico in February and there were no issues at that time."

That's likely because of a recent change by the Transportation Security Administration, which used to check only international passengers' names against the no-fly list, but since earlier this month has been checking domestic passengers as well.

The Thomases told CNN they plan on appealing Alyssa's status to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security again, and will be sure to leave plenty of extra time for check-in the next time they fly.

Michael Jackson Would Have Been Saved by Islam, Brother Says

2010-07-02T19:40:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

In an interview marking the first anniversary of Michael Jackson's death, one of his older brothers, Jermaine Jackson, said the pop icon would still be alive if he had converted to Islam, as Jermaine had long urged him to do.

"I felt that if Michael would have embraced Islam he would still be here today and I say that for many reasons," Jermaine Jackson, who is a Muslim, told BBC World Service radio.

"Why? Because when you are 100 percent clear in your mind as to who you are, and what you are, and why you are and everybody around you, then things change in a way that's better for you. It's just having that strength."

The elder Jackson added that some of that strength came from the Muslim security staff around MJ, chosen by the singer because of their faith:

"All of his security became Muslims because he trusted Islam, because these are people who would lay their lives down and also who were trying to be the best kind of human beings they could possibly be not for Michael Jackson, for Allah," Jermaine said. "So having those people around, you knew that you would be protected because it is protection from God," he added.

All of the Jacksons' were raised as Jehovah's Witnesses, and as they became famous and wealthy they also became generous supporters of the denomination, which is popular among African Americans. Yet as Michael Jackson's woes and weirdness increased, there were reports that he was "disfellowshipped," or effectively excommunicated.

Jackson was interested in many religions and practices; one of his close friends was the Orthodox rabbi and well-known personality, Shmuley Boteach. And Jackson had been photographed wearing a traditional Arab women's veil.

But in recent years, Jermaine Jackson and others apparently pressed Michael to convert to Islam; the elder Jackson said again in his BBC interview that he brought Michael books on Islam from Saudi Arabia and was the one who convinced him, near the end of his life, to move to Bahrain "because I wanted him to get out of America because it was having a cherry-picking time on my brother."

There was at least one report, in 2008, that he had done so and changed his name to "Mikaeel." But according to Jermaine Jackson, that may not have been a thorough conversion.

For a fuller sense of Michael Jackson's spiritual outlook, read a 2000 column that he penned for Beliefnet at the behest of his friend, Rabbi Boteach, titled "My Childhood, My Sabbath, My Freedom."

"More than anything, I wished to be a normal little boy. I wanted to build tree houses and go to roller-skating parties. But very early on, this became impossible. I had to accept that my childhood would be different than most others. But that's what always made me wonder what an ordinary childhood would be like."

"There was one day a week, however, that I was able to escape the stages of Hollywood and the crowds of the concert hall. That day was the Sabbath..."

A Comment on Comments

2010-07-01T18:45:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers,

Thank you so much for visiting the site and please be sure to come back and comment on what you read and what you'd like to read. I have been receiving many comments in asian languages and, unfortunately, I am not able to post them because I cannot ensure that they are not saying something derogatory or are just an advertisement.

Amil

Spain's Senate Votes to Ban Burqa

2010-06-30T22:11:00.000-07:00

It's times like this that make me proud to be an American. I know that regardless of what some ignorant people in America say, a Muslim woman's right to preserve her modesty will never be taken away in America. My most sincere duas (prayers) go out to all my Muslim sisters in Europe who are holding strong to their faith in the face of such oppression. Also note, that arguments for banning the niqab always go something along the lines of "...because women shouldn't have to be made subservient to men..." This, and similar arguments show a total lack of understanding of the religious and cultural traditions of the niqab. Has it never occurred to these people that maybe a woman would want to wear niqab, and by banning it, the state is actually hindering her freedoms as opposed to preserving them?

Taken from here.

By RAPHAEL MINDER

MADRID — In a significant escalation of Spain’s debate over how to handle radical Islam, the Senate on Wednesday narrowly and unexpectedly approved a motion to ban Muslim women from wearing in public the burqa or other garments that cover the whole body.

The vote, 131 to 129, was another setback for the Socialist government of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, which had favored more-limited restrictions on Islamic clothing and has instead been pushing to curtail religious fundamentalism through better education.

The Spanish vote comes amid several national initiatives across Europe to restrict the spread of radical Islam and defend liberal values.

In Belgium, the lower house of Parliament has already approved a measure that, if unamended by the upper house, would make it a crime to wear in public “clothing that hides the face.”

France, which has the largest Muslim population in Europe, has also been inching toward such a ban on the burqa. The measure has the backing of President Nicolas Sarkozy, who recently condemned the garment as “a sign of subservience” rather than one of religion.

In Switzerland last year, a referendum banned the construction of minarets.

While national politicians may be urging a clampdown on the burqa, such moves are still expected to run into legal obstacles. In March, France’s top administrative body, the Council of State, warned the government that a full ban would be unconstitutional. A commission of the Council of Europe, the European institution dealing with human rights issues, also recently warned governments against imposing a complete ban that would violate women’s individual rights.

Before the Spanish Senate’s vote, some of the country’s local authorities had already moved to introduce restrictions on the burqa. The issue was especially heated in the region of Catalonia, where the debate over Islam and immigration has become entangled in early campaigning ahead of regional elections later this year. The pending elections may have proved crucial in the Wednesday vote, as senators from the CiU, a Catalan party, surprisingly switched their earlier stance to vote in favor of a burqa ban.

The motion adopted by the senators calls on Spain to outlaw “any usage, custom or discriminatory practice that limits the freedom of women.” It was drafted and led by politicians from the main center-right opposition People's Party.

Justifying the vote, one of the senators from the CiU, Montserrat Candini, said that “we cannot tolerate that nobody understands that we are not in favor of banning the burqa.”

The Senate’s position also came as a surprise because although Spain has become a major European entry point for Muslim migrants from North Africa, few of those immigrants wear either the burqa or the niqab, which does not cover the eyes. A similar argument has also been made by opponents of a burqa ban in countries like France, where only an estimated 2,000 women wear the burqa out of a Muslim population of about 5 million. France, however, already passed a law in 2004 to ban head scarves or any other “conspicuous” religious symbol from state schools in order to preserve their secularism.

The Spanish government is supposed to follow the Senate’s motion. However, given that Socialist senators opposed the ban, the governing party is likely to seek ways to circumvent the vote.

Anna Terrón, the secretary of state for immigration, said the Senate vote had “more to do with the election campaign in which the CiU is involved than with a real discussion” on the burqa.

ICNA Launches Outreach and Relief efforts in Alaska

2010-06-30T18:42:00.000-07:00

By Suzanne Khazzal

ICNA members were hosted by the largest mosque in Alaska, the Islamic Community Center of Anchorage, Alaska (ICCAA) from May 21-28 where they visited to help establish ICNA activities.

The Friday night youth group listening to a presentation.

The team included Dr. Muhammad Ayub, member of the ICNA general assembly, Washington Unit, Amir Mertaban the WhyIslam Coordinator of Southern California and Waqas Syed the Assistant General Secretary of ICNA.

Mertaban presented a Friday sermon and was followed by a youth meeting later in the day to discuss organizing youth work. Young Muslims national will follow up with the youth coordinator to support them in running a successful youth circle at the mosque.

A group discussion in progress during the workshop.

Syed and Mertaban held a Dawah 101 workshop for the community, which included Dawah tips and ICNA’s WhyIslam project. The workshop presented the crowd with interactive sessions on frequently asked questions. An estimated 24 attendees signed up to volunteer for the project.

An interactive session during the workshop.

Some of the key members of the local WhyIslam team.

After the workshop an exclusive meeting was conducted regarding establishing a local team. A local WhyIslam coordinator was assigned and several dawah opportunities in Anchorage were formalized.

Dr. Ayub helping Tanya, who embraced Islam, to proclaim the Shahadah.

Also on the agenda was the new building ICCAA is building, with ICNA’s support. Various ICNA Relief services were discussed with the ICCAA President Lamin Jobarteh. He expressed desire to work with ICNA Relief in offering social services to the local community.

Jobarteh and ICCAA Dawah Chair Dawood Abuobaid organized a meeting with Regina Boisclair, Chair of Catholic Theology and professor of Religious Studies at the Alaska Pacific University. An understanding was reached regarding organizing a major interfaith event with ICNA in the near future.

Please visit and support: The Islamic Community Center of Anchorage, Alaska (ICCAA)

Siegman: No Peace Possible Between Israel and Palestinians without Hamas

2010-06-27T18:01:00.000-07:00

This is an old, but very interesting and relevant interview. Taken from here.

March 7, 2008

Henry Siegman, an expert on Middle East negotiations, says that no peace will be possible between Israel and Palestinians unless Hamas is brought into the process. “The notion that the Israeli government leaders and our own government have that it is possible to exclude Hamas from peace talks and have a successful result from those talks is a fantasy,” he says. “It’s not going to happen.” Because of President Bush’s refusal to deal with Hamas, he says, it is unlikely that any progress can be made until there is a new president in the White House.

There’s a bit of a lull right now in the fighting between Hamas and Israel, which has led to over one hundred Palestinians dead and a few Israelis in the past couple of weeks. Can you see a diplomatic way of getting a cease-fire that would permit peace talks to continue between Israel and the Palestinian Authority under Fatah leader, President Mahmoud Abbas?

I don’t see talks between Israelis and Palestinians leading anywhere without finding a way of bringing Hamas—who constitute the government of roughly half the Palestinian people—into that process. You can’t make peace with half the population and remain at war with the other half. The notion that the Israeli government leaders and our own government have that it is possible to exclude Hamas from peace talks and have a successful result from those talks is a fantasy. It’s not going to happen.

The question is, is it possible to persuade the United States and Israel’s government to allow Hamas to participate in this process?

The obvious question is would Hamas participate even if it is allowed?

Well, let’s go back in time a bit. After a Palestinian unity government was established in early 2007 as a result of the Mecca agreement, worked out by Saudi mediation, and even before that, when there were talks between Hamas and Fatah about the possibility of forming such a government, Hamas made it clear that even though they themselves would not sit in on those discussions, they had no objections to such discussions proceeding or to Abbas, as the president of the Palestinian Authority and also the president of Fatah, conducting those negotiations. So there was no obstacle to the peace process going forward, particularly since Hamas committed itself to putting an agreement, if one was reached with Israel, to a public referendum. Also Hamas committed itself to abiding by the outcome of that referendum. The notion that you can’t have peace talks while Hamas is in the government is simply not true.

Do you buy into this view that is in a new Vanity Fair article that the United States planned, in cooperation with Fatah, to cause a coup in Gaza and throw out Hamas, and that backfired, leading to the current split between Fatah and Hamas?

One does not need an investigative article to make that point to know it is true. The U.S. government made no secret whatsoever from the beginning that it intended to arm Abbas’s security forces, appoint an American general to be in charge of that program, and provide finances for training, equipment, and the arming of these people. They said publicly the purpose of this project would be for these people to have a showdown with Hamas and to oust them from the government. So, this was never a secret. This was always in the public domain.

I never saw that— that they were so blatant to say they wanted Fatah to oust Hamas.

Yes, they were precisely that blatant. What happened next is that under the direction of Mohammed Dahlan, who was Abbas’s national security adviser, the Fatah militias in Gaza were instructed to attack Hamas forces and to create a sufficient level of anarchy that would allow Abbas’s security forces to come in and to say they have to restore order and take over the government in Gaza. This never was a secret. In any event, the Vanity Fair article pretty much nails down the story.

When was this decision taken?

The decision, according to the article, was taken immediately after the election in January 2006. As the Vanity Fair story tells it, the State Department people and the White House were in a state of total shock when the election results came in.

Hamas was overwhelmingly elected and Fatah was ousted. Incidentally, at this time, Hamas itself was still observing a self-declared cease-fire. They were not sending in missiles or engaging in violence against Israel. I mention this because a lot of people are under the impression that this decision to overthrow Hamas is somehow related to Hamas’ violence. That is simply not true. At the time this decision was taken, there was a cease-fire that Hamas had observed for a year and a half.

So given the current situation, a resumption of talks between Abbas and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert would result in really nothing, right?

It would result in nothing for essentially two reasons. First, both Israeli officials and American officials are not aware of what it is that Abbas can agree to. They see him as a moderate and he is a moderate in that he opposed the violence of the second intifada [uprising] in 2000, and always argued that this was not the way that Palestinians will achieve their national goal. But it is precisely because he has argued against violence that he is not in a position—particularly when he is at odds with Hamas—to make any kind of significant compromises in the Palestinian position. There is no way that Israelis will be able to get his agreement of what they consider to be their minimal red lines. That is one reason why without Hamas’s participation there is no way that Israel and Abbas could reach agreement on the refugee issue, on the Jerusalem issue, and certainly not on the settlement and border issues, which comprise all of the major permanent-status issues.

The second reason is, as we have just seen in the past week or two, Hamas retains the capacity to blow up the negotiations at any point by simply engaging in violence. And if Hamas sees that there is a process going on that is intended to exclude them, to marginalize them, and ultimately to oust them, they are not going to allow the process to proceed.

The Bush administration will be out of office in ten months. The Israeli government is extremely weak because of a shaky coalition government. Both the U.S. and the Israeli governments won’t deal with Hamas. How do you get over this? Do you wait until there is a new president?

There is no choice but to wait for a new president because on this precise issue of dealing with Hamas, without a resolution, no peace process can succeed. President Bush is not going to change his mind. At least that is what I am told by people who are in touch with him or talk to him about it. He is absolutely convinced that Hamas is part of the “Axis of Evil.” He believes these are people who are essentially in the mold of al-Qaeda, that they support the globalist, jihadist ambition to take over the whole world and establish a caliphate, and so on.

Those convictions of Bush’s are completely divorced from reality. The fact of the matter is that Hamas and al-Qaeda are totally at odds, and have been from the very beginning. Al-Qaeda doesn’t believe in national liberation movements. They believe only in a religious return under a caliphate to the Islamic territories. The idea of a Palestinian nationalism, or any other, they reject completely. Al-Qaeda has no sympathy for Hamas and Hamas has publicly on several occasions repudiated and rejected the statements and prescriptions made by al-Qaeda’s leaders for the Palestinian movement.

What about the Israelis? The Israelis know Hamas pretty well. When Hamas was in opposition to the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization], the Israeli government had no great love for the PLO. Do you get any sense that the Israelis would like to deal with Hamas even though Hamas says it will never recognize the existence of the state of Israel?

Well, there was a poll recorded last week in Haaretz that showed a majority of Israelis want their government to reach out to Hamas because they understand that you can’t deal with the problem without Hamas participation. Now there are some well-informed people who tell me that Olmert and others in his government were ready to deal with Hamas, were prepared to respond to Hamas’s offer for a truce and to use the truce to allow a reestablishment of a unity government that would include Hamas and Fatah. But the opposition from Washington, from the White House, is so unyielding that they haven’t been able to act on that.

Have you been following any of the American political campaigns? Have any of the candidates shown any interest in going beyond what the stated American policy is right now?

None of the candidates have said anything on the subject except the very bland, general statements that they are totally committed to the security of Israel. What their real positions are, if they have the responsibility in office to deal with the problem, I simply don’t know.

Some of the advisers to these people, if they remain influential advisers once they get into office, have views that are far less rigid, certainly quite different, than those held by Bush and his people. There will have to be a change in position eventually that not only allows but encourages Israeli leadership to bring Hamas into the process and to deal with the violence coming out of Gaza not militarily but diplomatically. But we’re going to have to wait until the next administration.

Do you think the Egyptians could work out a truce right now? The Egyptians are right now engaged in talking to Hamas about trying to work out a truce, acting as surrogate negotiators with Israel.

The Egyptians have played that role for some time now—with not very impressive results—since Gilad Shalit, the [Israeli] soldier who was kidnapped by some militant groups in Gaza a year and a half ago. They have tried to formulate a package that would enable the parties to agree on a truce and to have an exchange of prisoners. So far, they simply have not been able to deliver. Whether they will be able to do so going forward is difficult to say, particularly since the situation has become even more complicated because there has been added to the mix the issue of the border between Egypt and Gaza . Israelis would like to see it resealed exactly the way it was before. That is something that is very difficult for Egypt to agree to since the Egyptians would then be seen as an accomplice in the Israeli effort to essentially strangle the population of Gaza. It is impossible at this point to cut a deal that doesn’t address that issue as well.

Israelis have said more recently that Hamas has been using missiles made in Iran to hit Ashkelon. Do you think that Iran is really involved now in helping out Hamas?

Hamas and Iran are not natural partners. Hamas are Sunnis. Unlike the Hezbollah, who are Shiites and are natural partners with the Iranians, Hamas is not. Nevertheless, they are fighting, as they see it, for their survival. In those circumstances they will accept assistance from whoever will give it to them. The fact that they are Shiites will not prevent accepting their help. However, there is not evidence, as far as I know, that they have accepted that help on terms that make them subservient to Iran. When Iran tried to organize a meeting to protest the U.S.-sponsored Middle East peace conference last November, Hamas refused to attend, forcing the Iranians to cancel their plans.

Economist: Reader debate: Still carrying the shield of democracy?

2010-06-25T17:22:00.000-07:00

taken from here.

Can Israel lay claim to being a true democracy while holding on to the Palestinian territories?

The Economist offers views from Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin and two Israeli academics on whether Israel can still be considered a democracy, given its regional policies.

ISRAEL continues to face criticism from the world for its raid of a flotilla bringing aid to Gaza and for its blockade of the area. The episode has provoked much debate within Israel itself; about the nature of Israel's response to the flotilla, about Israel's policies in Gaza and, most recently, about its policies towards Arabs living within Israel.

Last week a parliamentary committee voted to withdraw the privileges of an Arab member parliament, who sailed with the activists and who was almost attacked by another member of parliament. Reuven Rivlin, the speaker of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, says he will ignore the committee's recommendation but he worries that these incidents illustrate an erosion of Israel's democratic tradition.

Others have long believed that Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories undermines its democratic credentials. We asked Mr Rivlin and two Israeli academics whether they thought this was the case. Please join the debate below.

Full Text of Document

In Defense of Helen Thomas

2010-06-22T07:13:00.000-07:00

Thomas apologized on her website on June 4, saying, "I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not reflect my heartfelt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon."

I would like to point out, however, that Gandhi said the exact same thing... did he hate Jews? Helen Thomas should not have had to lose her position for speaking her mind. She said nothing derogatory to the Jewish people. Had she actually said something that was anti-semitic, I would be the first person to condemn her.

Gandhi said "But in my opinion, they [the Jews] have erred grievously in seeking to impose themselves on Palestine with the aid of America and Britain and now with the aid of naked terrorism... Why should they depend on American money or British arms for forcing themselves on an unwelcome land? Why should they resort to terrorism to make good their forcible landing in Palestine?"

Obama’s Patience With Israel Finally Cracks

2010-06-20T23:49:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

By Rachelle Marshall

ISRAEL’S first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, stated the Zionist dream in 1937 when he said, “The boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people, and no external factor will be able to limit them.” Ben-Gurion told the Zionist Executive Committee that “After the formation of a large army...we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.”

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is moving steadily to fulfill that dream. Unlike some of his predecessors, he has made no pretense of seeking a peace that would satisfy the Palestinians. He has obstructed Washington’s attempts to bring the two sides together, and tightened Israel’s hold on all the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

When Palestinians refused to take part any longer in talks that went nowhere, President Barack Obama came up with yet another plan to lure them back. This time the process is called “proximity talks,” during which the two sides will remain apart while special Middle East envoy George J. Mitchell shuttles between them. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas reluctantly agreed to take part.

The Israelis lost no time booby-trapping the proposal. As Vice President Joseph Biden arrived in Jerusalem on March 9, Israel announced plans to build 1,600 new homes in Arab East Jerusalem and 112 in the illegal West Bank settlement of Beitar Illit. Biden, who was blindsided by the news, condemned “the substance and timing of the announcement,” and Israeli officials hurriedly expressed regret—but only for the poor timing. A government spokesman made it clear that Israel would never relinquish its claim to all of Jerusalem.

But to Biden, Israel can do no wrong. Ignoring the slap delivered by the Israelis, the next day he asserted in a speech at Tel Aviv University America’s “absolute, total, unvarnished commitment to Israel’s security.” When Netanyahu assured him that construction of the new units might not take place for a year, the vice president hailed the statement, saying it would give peace negotiators more time to work out an agreement. The Palestinians were not as forgiving. The day after Biden left, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said that Abbas would take no part in peace talks until Israel abandoned its plan to build the 1,600 new homes.

Unlike his vice president, Obama refused to turn the other cheek. Shortly after Biden returned to Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Netanyahu and told him he had harmed “the bilateral relationship.” David Axelrod, Obama’s closest adviser, called Israel’s announcement “destructive” and an “affront.” Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Michael B. Oren, was summoned to the State Department, where he undoubtedly heard even tougher language.

The old relationship had definitely chilled. Obama demanded in blunt terms that Israel cancel the building project, and grant major concessions to the Palestinians, such as releasing prisoners and returning more West Bank land. Instead of complying, Netanyahu insisted the construction of new Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem was not a matter for negotiation and “would not hurt the Palestinians.” In fact, of course, such construction takes land from a future Palestinian state, cuts off East Jerusalem from the West Bank, and prevents Arab neighborhoods from expanding.

Meanwhile Israel quietly took action against peaceful protestors by closing off the village of Bil’in to Israeli and international peace activists on Fridays. The order will prevent outsiders from taking part in the weekly protests at the wall that splits the West Bank village in two, in effect allowing Israeli police to fire at will at nonviolent Palestinians, away from the eyes of foreigners.

[More than a year after Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead,” parents and children still live in tents, as Israel continues to prevent construction materials from entering the besieged Gaza Strip. (Photo courtesy Gretta Duisenberg)] More than a year after Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead,” parents and children still live in tents, as Israel continues to prevent construction materials from entering the besieged Gaza Strip. (Photo courtesy Gretta Duisenberg)

And chances are they will. Four Palestinian teenagers were killed by Israeli fire within 24 hours on March 21, two of them cousins who witnesses said were working on their family’s land near Nablus when they were shot by settlers. President Abbas quickly condemned what he called “The Israeli escalation and the killing of Palestinians on a daily basis,” saying it was “the response of the Israeli government to the Palestinians, the Arabs, and the Americans.” Nevertheless, U.S. envoy Mitchell was in Jerusalem the same day assuring the Israelis that “our commitment to Israel is unshakable and enduring.”

The Israelis may be reluctant to offend an American president, but they know that any threat to punish Israel is certain to raise a storm of protest in the U.S. At least two dozen members of Congress objected to Obama’s scolding of Israel, and Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League claimed to be “shocked and stunned.” According to pro-Israel zealots, when Israel thumbs its nose at the president while pocketing billions of dollars a year in U.S. aid, it is the president who is at fault.

Israel also has miffed the Europeans. The murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a senior Hamas official, was intended to be a routine operation by Mossad, which since the early 1970s has gotten away with at least 40 assassinations in Athens, Beirut, Rome, and several other cities. The latest action revealed Mossad agents to be bunglers as well as murderers.

The scenario that played out in a Dubai hotel room this past January could have come from a paperback thriller. The agents entered Mabhouh’s bedroom, injected him with a paralyzing drug, suffocated him with a pillow, smoothed away any signs of struggle, and even relatched the door when they left. But the fabled Mossad was no match for the Dubai police, which produced a 27-minute video showing the faces of 26 of the conspirators, many of them wearing obviously fake beards and wigs.

Because the suspects carried false British, French, Irish, German and Australian passports using the names of Israelis with dual citizenship in those countries, they had engaged in identity theft, a crime that goes to the heart of any security system. The British regarded it as so serious an offense that they expelled an Israeli diplomat and warned British travelers to Israel that their identity details might be at risk. Washington made no comment on either the killing or Israel’s use of fraudulent passports.

In fact, the degree of America’s involvement is one of the major mysteries of the affair. Two of the suspects were admitted to the U.S. shortly after the killing, and 14 of them carried credit cards issued by U.S.-based banks, MetaBank in Storm Lake, Iowa, and Payoneer in New York (see story p. 18). The State Department, which frequently denies visas to Palestinian peace activists, unaccountably failed to question Israelis traveling on false passports.

Netanyahu again showed his disregard for world opinion when in late February he announced a $100 million plan to rehabilitate 150 “Zionist heritage sites,” at least two of them in occupied Palestine. Since the list includes Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem and the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, where Abraham and Sara are buried, he in effect asserted Israel’s sole sovereignty over places sacred to Muslims and Christians, as well as Jews. ”People must be familiar with their homeland,” Netanyahu said. “This is what we will instill in this and coming generations, to the glory of the Jewish people.” To those with long memories, the statement was chillingly similar to the Nazis’ association of “land” with “blood.”

Netanyahu’s claim that the tombs of Abraham, Rachel and other biblical figures were the sole legacy of the Jews also seemed designed to infuriate Palestinians, since it came on the 16th anniversary of the massacre by a Jewish settler from Brooklyn, Baruch Goldstein, of 29 Muslim worshippers as they prayed at the Ibrahimi Mosque. Israeli peace activist Uri Avneri called it “nothing but an expropriation and a blatant provocation.”

Given Israel’s history of obstruction, Palestinians have every reason to believe that the proximity talks will do no more than take up time while the Israelis continue to build settlements. This time, however, Obama is insisting that the talks deal with substantive issues rather than procedures. He must now define the goal: either an independent Palestinian state in all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, or a single state in which Israelis and Palestinians live as equal ctizens.

It is even more important that Obama face up to Congress and the Israel lobby and announce what he will do to assure Israel’s acceptance of such an agenda and its ultimate outcome. On the line is his credibility in the Arab world, as well as what may be the last chance for peace. Meanwhile, the specter hanging over the proceedings will be the thousands of young Palestinians growing up with no hope of a future, and the pro-Israel extremists who prefer continued bloodshed to a just peace. It is a volatile mix that inflames anger in the region and increases the danger of terrorist attacks in the U.S.
Afghanistan Has Its Own Interests

Since the U.S. is pushing for harsher sanctions against Iran, and the Israelis claim Iran poses an existential threat to Israel, both Israel and the U.S. must have found disquieting a front-page photo in the March 11 New York Times showing America’s close ally, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, warmly embracing Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The photo indicated that in a region regarded as being of strategic importance to the U.S., our local allies don’t necessarily share the same concerns. As the war in Afghanistan goes into its ninth year, the differences become more and more evident.

Karzai ran into a storm of complaints when he visited Marjah shortly after Marines captured the town from the Taliban. Instead of cheering, residents complained of the corruption and cruelty of government officials that had made the Taliban a welcome alternative. A leading elder said, “The warlords who ruled us for the past eight years, those people whose hands are red with the people’s blood, those people who killed hundreds, they are still ruling over this nation.”

Others shouted examples of abuses committed by the U.S.-backed warlords who took power after the invasion, such as the rape and imprisonment of an 8-year-old boy. The elders also complained that the American troops fighting in Marjah had arrested innocent farmers, destroyed irrigation canals, and taken over schools and homes. “How can we educate our children,” they demanded, “when their schools are turned into military bases?”

The Afghan soldiers and police who are intended to replace the Americans are even less welcome. Immediately after Marines cleared a neighborhood in Marjah, Afghan soldiers looted its bazaar, requiring a Marine captain to pay hundreds of dollars to the outraged shopkeepers. The Afghan police who will be in charge of local security are notorious for bribery, drug trafficking and extortion, and are hated by the Afghan people. The U.S. and NATO plan to send thousands of Afghan police recruits to Jordan and Turkey for training, but meanwhile the Taliban forces are reportedly infiltrating back into Marjah and warning residents against cooperating with the allied troops and police.

The conquest of Marjah cost the lives of 15 allied soldiers and 35 civilians, including an elderly man who was shot by American troops in front of his home. The slain man’s grandson said, “For us the Taliban and the Marines are the same. They are fighting and killing us.” In the nearby town of Lashkar Gah, where many residents of Marja had fled to escape the fighting, a man whose brother was killed said, “This is a hell for us. Every day our people are burning, sometimes killed by IEDs and sometimes by foreign troops and sometimes by the Taliban.”

Then he asked a question many Americans have asked: “Why are they fighting? With whom are they fighting?” The question became even more poignant when the Pakistanis, with U.S. assistance, captured Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a top Taliban leader who was engaged in secret talks with the Afghan government when he was arrested. Baradar’s capture highlighted the rifts among the U.S. and its allies. British, Afghan and U.N. officials favor immediate peace talks, while the Americans want to move more slowly, undoubtedly playing for time until the Taliban are weakened and Afghan security forces are able to take over from U.S. troops.

Kabul officials who had been trying to arrange broader negotiations with the Taliban charged Pakistan with trying to sabotage the peace talks and said Baradar’s arrest could destroy all chances of reconciliation, especially if he is abused by U.S. and Pakistani interrogators. Other analysts believe Pakistan is holding Baradar in order to be assured of playing an influential role in those talks. (See “Jailed Taliban Leader Still a Pakistani Asset” by Gareth Porter, April 2010 Washington Report, p. 25.)

The Taliban have long been open to negotiations, on condition that foreign soldiers leave Afghanistan. In the Feb. 25 issue of the New York Review of Books, Pakistani analyst Ahmed Rashid cited a statement issued by Mullah Omar in November 2009 pledging that a future Taliban regime would bring peace and noninterference from outside forces—a clear implication that al-Qaeda would not be returning to Afghanistan under the Taliban. In a later speech that Rashid cites, Omar said the Taliban were fighting only for Afghanistan’s independence, and were ready “to take constructive measures together with all countries for mutual cooperation, economic development, and a good future...”

Kai Eide, former head of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan, warned in early March that a military victory was not possible. “A political process is indispensable for finding a solution to this conflict,” he said. “I believe the focus is too much on the military side.” Yet as he left the country in early March, U.S. forces were preparing for another major offensive, this time in Kandahar province, a stronghold of the Taliban. The Taliban responded to news of the operation by setting off a series of bombs in Kandahar that killed 35 people, And so the slaughter continues, even as Afghans wonder why.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Mill Valley, CA. A member of A Jewish Voice for Peace, she writes frequently on the Middle East.

ICNA Relief launches Muslim Response to Tennessee Flood

2010-06-15T09:11:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

ICNA Relief joins hands with other faith based organizations to help the people affected by the flooding in Nashville, Tennesse.

“In a matter of 30 minutes, everything you worked for, everything you thought was valuable, it all looks like trash” Mayor Karl Dean estimates the damage from weekend flooding could easily top $1 billion in Nashville alone. Many of the families affected by flood are Somali and Kurdish Muslim Families, who are still struggling to stand on their feet after divesting blow to their households. Masjid Salahuddin and Islamic School were also badly hit.

ICNA Relief has started the flood cleanup project in full swing. More volunteers needed! Visit http://icnarelief.org

Jews, Muslims, Christians unite in flood cleanup project

Faithful put others first

By Bob Smietana, THE TENNESSEAN

Disasters don’t discriminate, says Dan Hoeft of the Jewish disaster relief group Nechama.

The Nashville flood hit Jews and Baptists, Methodists and Muslims, believers and nonbelievers alike.

That’s why Hoeft will work with anyone who’s willing to lend a hand to flood victims.

“I don’t care what religion someone is,” said Hoeft, while overseeing an interfaith volunteer project at the Wynstone Apartments on Millwood Drive in Nashville on Monday. “We have a job to do, and that’s to help as many people as possible.”

Hoeft is part of a volunteer project that’s brought Muslims, Jews, Methodists and Baptists together. Monday, the interfaith volunteers cleaned flood-damaged apartments and distributed food and other supplies. The Jewish and Muslim volunteers also are living together at a house owned by a local Methodist agency. This all comes at a time when relations between Jews and Muslims are strained because of the recent Israeli attack on a boat carrying supplies to Gaza.

“We’re tearing down stereotypes one person at a time,” Hoeft said.

The interfaith project is a first for Abdulrauf Khan, a member of the disaster relief team for ICNA Relief USA, a Muslim charity. Khan, who’s based in Melbourne, Fla., has worked in that state and in Texas on disaster relief in the past. But he usually worked only with other Muslims.

When he arrived in Nashville, Khan met with Hoeft and other volunteer groups and offered to help them reach Muslims affected by the flood. That offering was a blessing, said Brandon Hulette, interim flood recovery coordinator for the Tennessee Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. Having Muslim volunteers trained in disaster relief means that volunteers can help flood victims who may have been overlooked.

“There are pockets like the Kurdish and the Somali communities that we aren’t able to get into,” Hulette said.

Loving other people

Khan tapped into local mosques to recruit volunteers such as Mohammed Khoshnaw of Antioch. Khoshnaw, who prays at the Salahadeen Center of Nashville on Elysian Fields Court, volunteered on Monday along with his wife, their two daughters and some teenage volunteers from the center.

When it comes to helping flood victims, religious differences don’t matter, he said.

“God created us to love each other. It doesn’t matter what religion they are,” he said.

Khoshnaw said he heard about the controversy over the Israeli raid but that shouldn’t affect what happens in Nashville, he said.

“That’s the Middle East, and we are here,” he said. “Here is not like the Middle East.”

Elie Lowenfeld, founder of the Jewish Disaster Response Corps from New York City, agreed. He said volunteers have more pressing tasks. And helping flood victims gives the volunteers a common purpose, rather than focusing on their differences in faith.

“It’s not, ‘Let’s talk about politics,’ ” he said. “It’s ‘How do we get this sheetrock out of here and not get jabbed by a rusty nail?’ We talk to each other as people. We work, and then we have lunch.”

That impressed David Myers, director of the Center for Faith-Based & Community Initiatives for FEMA.

“In being able to still come together even though the wider world politics are still tense — I think is a real testament to how disasters bring people of all faiths together,” said Myers, who was in Nashville on Monday and stopped by the project.

Working together

Living and working together also have created a sense of camaraderie, said Matthew Mazur, a Jewish volunteer from New York. During a lunch break, Mazur gave Iman Khoshnaw, a 9-year-old volunteer, a ride in a wheelbarrow while other volunteers watched and laughed. Earlier the two had teamed up to toss a door into the Dumpster. Iman Khoshnaw carried the door part of the way by herself, but was stymied when she got near the Dumpster.

“I’m not tall enough,” she said.

Monday’s project started out with the different faith groups wearing their own T-shirts — blue and green shirts for the Jewish volunteers, neon green for Muslims, red for the Methodists. By the end of the day, volunteers had begun swapping shirts.

Hoeft said that he and other leaders of disaster groups had been talking about doing an interfaith project for several years. The Nashville flood made that a reality, he said.

“We’ve moved from talking to doing,” he said. “And that’s a good thing”

Article Courtesy: The Tennessean
Photo Courtesy: MANDY LUNN / THE TENNESSEAN

Israelis and Palestinians both created by God

2010-06-14T09:02:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

Q: In a statement Monday, Vice President Biden said the U.S. is consulting with other nations "on new ways to address the humanitarian, economic, security, and political aspects of the situation in Gaza." What are the religious and moral considerations in determining those "new ways," especially in light of Israel's raid on an aid flotilla from Turkey bound for Gaza.

Since Israel's commando raid on a flotilla of ships bearing humanitarian aid to Gaza, much real and virtual ink has been spilled analyzing Israel's action and the motivation of the activists seeking to break the long siege of beleaguered Gaza. This is not the place to reiterate all the points made on both sides of the debate; there is keen commentary available on all topics related to the situation: international law; Geneva conventions; security; resistance; dueling definitions of what constitutes a humanitarian crisis; dueling definitions of what constitutes an "Occupation;" in fact, dueling definitions of just about everything!

And that is the crux of the problem. As Israeli politician Naomi Chazan once said in my hearing, "The problem here is that there are two competing narratives of the history of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and they are both true - and they don't meet!" Just look at the Gaza situation.

Much of the world sees in that densely populated and poverty-stricken strip of land a terrible humanitarian crisis. Israel's leadership says there is more than adequate humanitarian aid going in. Gazans experience a total land, air, and sea enclosure - a continued "occupation" by Israel; Israel speaks of having withdrawn from Gaza and given it a chance to flourish. Israel justifies its draconian policies in Gaza by pointing to the launching of Qassam rockets into Israel and the terrorizing of its citizens; Gazans point to the right of "self-defense," resistance, and the "terror" of Israeli strikes.

The list could go on and on - and extend into the broader conflict, and should. Gaza is not an isolated incident in the struggle for peace with justice in the region. Gaza is a vital part of a future Palestinian state - and the current Israeli government is struggling mightily to separate it from the West Bank, turn it into the "model" of what a Palestinian state would look like, and relegate the West Bank into isolated pockets of Palestinian populations, similar to the American Indian reservations that much of the policy of Occupation has been modeled after - that and South African Apartheid on steroids. And to this, there is another "narrative" rejoinder: "disputed" territory rather than occupied territory; security measures rather than subjugation; moral high ground and biblical precedent versus violent resistance.

So, that said, back to the question of the week: What "new" can be done in the world's response to the Gaza crisis?

How about a return to something "old"? Speaking truth. Cutting through the fog of dueling narratives to recognize a basic truth: both Israelis and Palestinians are human beings. Both are created by G-d and deserve the right to live in peace with justice and security. An Israeli life is not worth more than a Palestinian life. A Palestinian life is not worth more than an Israeli life. To quote Arab Israeli religious leader "Abuna" Elias Chacour, "We're not born Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Israeli, or Palestinian. We're born babies."

The ability to recognize this truth, however, is inhibited by what Jewish author of "Compartments," medical doctor Steven Feldman of Wake Forest University, calls our tendency to see the world only through our own narrow lenses. Growing up orthodox Jewish, in a "compartment" that saw all Arabs as terrorists, Israel as having been created out of barren, uninhabited swamps and desert, and Palestinian resistance as evil, Feldman's "epiphany" came when he visited Israel and simply asked the obvious question: "If this land was empty before my people came here, then where did 700,000 Palestinian refugees come from?"

As a scientist, he began trying to get at the facts and was shocked to discover a far more complex history to the conflict than he had been compartmentalized into.

And what is the result of our being in our isolated "compartments"? Palestinians can be seen as "less than," as subhuman. Israelis can be seen as "evil," brutal oppressors. And the nature of the region today, with Apartheid walls, fences, checkpoints, by-pass roads, and travel prohibitions - fiery sermons, recent grudges, and dueling histories, only exacerbates it.

The result is random rocket fire into civilian population centers under the guise of "resistance." The result is an air force pilot asked if he "felt anything" when his F-16 dropped a one ton bomb on a Gaza apartment, killing the targeted "terrorist" but also killing 15 civilians - many of them children: "Yes; I felt a slight bump when the bomb was released."

How about the "new" being getting out of our compartments and viewing both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs as human beings, not deserving of "terror," ghettoization, stereotyping, marginalization, and humiliation? And here, I have to say, the major change will have to be in both how we see Palestinians and Israeli Jews. Palestinians must be recognized as having legitimate rights to living in peace with justice, security, and the benefits we all seek in life. No American would tolerate fellow Americans being kept in the conditions Israel imposes on Gaza. No Israeli would tolerate a Jew anywhere in the world being treated like Palestinians in Gaza. Nor should we view Israeli Jews as heartless occupiers; their narrative, influenced by a sense of "siege" wherever they have lived in the world, affects their visceral response to threats against their existence. Nor should we view Israel any more as "David" versus "Goliath," "Good" vs. "Evil".

Palestinians and Israeli Jews are equals. Both are humans. Both deserve dignity and freedom. It's time for the "something new" to be a recognition of that fact, to stop treating Israel as something "special" and hold it to the same standards of international law and human rights that are defined by the rest of the world; to stop justifying violence by "security" and "resistance;" to seeing the loss of a Palestinian life as equal to the loss of a Jewish life.

Not as easy as it would seem, of course. We are firmly ensconced in our "compartments." But G-d is in the boundary-breaking business. And perhaps the events of the past week might just be the "epiphany" we need to begin hearing the "other" narrative in this conflict. Maybe then we'll recognize that there should be just one "narrative:" all humans are children of G-d; all humans deserve our respect, care, love, and assistance in living into a hopeful future.

By Max Carter
A recorded Friends minister, he serves on the Board of the American Friends Service Committee and the Advisory Board of the Earlham School of Religion.

Managing a More Assertive Turkey

2010-06-12T03:06:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

Interviewee:	F. Stephen Larrabee, Distinguished Chair in European Security, RAND Corporation
Interviewer:	Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor, CFR.org

June 3, 2010

Turkey's recent diplomatic differences with the United States and its sharpened deterioration of relations with Israel come from Turkey's desire to reestablish its role as a major influence in the Middle East and Central Asia, says F. Stephen Larrabee, an expert on Turkey at the RAND Corporation. "Turkey is returning to a more traditional role, one in which it was closely involved in the Middle East for centuries, going back to the Ottoman Empire," says Larrabee. He says the days when Turkey was a "junior partner" of the United States are over.

"We're dealing with a new Turkey, one that is more assertive and self confident," says Larrabee. "That doesn't mean our interests don't coincide in some areas, but we have to recognize that when it comes to the Middle East, U.S. and Turkish interests only partially coincide." He says the United States is "in danger of finding itself in a very weak position" unless it issues a stronger criticism of Israel for its attack on the Turkish ship headed to Gaza. And on Iran, he believes the Turks will abstain in the Security Council on new sanctions, which will only further strain relations with the United States and Turkey's European allies.

What has led to the widening split between Turkey and both the United States and Israel?

The downward spiral of relations over the last eighteen months goes back to the Israeli Gaza offensive in December 2008, which marked an important turning point. Relations since then have really gone downhill. Turkey appears to be on a strongly anti-Israeli course, but in a broader sense one has to see this in a historical perspective because this represents the adjustment of Turkey to the aftermath of the Cold War. Turkey became less dependent on the United States for its security. The end of the Cold War opened up new opportunities for Turkish policies in areas Turkey historically has had strong political and economical interests, particularly in the Middle East and Central Asia. Turkey is returning to a more traditional role, one in which it was closely involved in the Middle East for centuries, going back to the Ottoman Empire

Turkey's reaction has both internal and external components. Internally, it's been very popular. It has shown everyone that it wants to be a strong leader. Externally, it's been popular with the Arab countries and enhanced its prestige in the Arab world. Turkey eventually wants to be an important regional player in the Middle East. There's a vacuum there, and it's trying to fill that vacuum.

I've always thought that the U.S. problems with Turkey really began when the United States asked Turkey to let American troops come into Iraq from Turkey at the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003 and Turkey's parliament narrowly turned it down.

That obviously was an important catalyst. The decision of the Turkish parliament not to allow the United States to use Turkish territory to invade Iraq was an important turning point in the relationship with the United States, but then again you have to see it a little bit from Turkey's perspective. Turkey never had any love for Saddam Hussein. They considered him a dictator just like the United States did. But Saddam kept the Kurds, which have a rebellious minority in Turkey, under control and he represented stability. They regarded the American invasion of Iraq as very detrimental to their own security.

The decision of the Turkish parliament not to allow the United States to use Turkish territory to invade Iraq was an important turning point in the relationship with the United States.

You mean the Turks were concerned about the Kurds getting more independence from Iraq and festering Kurdish independence?

Yes, but I would say there were three things that they feared. First of all, they feared that the invasion would lead to the destabilization and fragmentation of Iraq, which it did. They feared that it would also lead to an increase of Iranian influence, which it did. And they most of all feared that it would lead to an increase of Kurdish nationalism and a thrust for independence, which would affect the integrity of the Turkish state itself, creating its own large Kurdish minority. So in other words, the strategic framework on which Turkish policy was based was really undermined and destroyed by the invasion, which as I said, they had great reservations about and tried to restrain.

More recently, Turkey and Brazil negotiated an agreement to trade Iran's low-enriched uranium for higher enriched fuel bars to be used in a research reactor in Tehran, a project which the United States and other powers proposed last October. Now the United States is hostile toward the deal because it gets in the way of a new sanctions vote in the Security Council. What prompted Turkey to take a lead role in these negotiations?

It's part of their general feeling that they want to be a major player in the Middle East. They've shown that by their willingness to act as a mediator in the dispute between Israel and Syria, and they've continued to play a role as a mediator between the United States and Iran. What they did with the nuclear deal was again to become the broker, but it's part of the larger dimension of Turkish policy. This is part of the changes since the end of the Cold War, which opened up new opportunities for Turkey.

In essence, this doesn't have much to do with Islam. It has much more to do with the change in the Turkish security environment. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, most of the security problems that Turkey has are now in the south, in and around its borders. That includes the fragmentation of Iraq; the possibility that Iran will get nuclear weapons; the Palestinian problem, which, of course, [Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdogan is taking a major role in and siding openly with the Palestinians. It's an important break with previous Turkish policy.

What do you think will come first in the dispute over the agreement with Iran--the sanctions vote in the Security Council or the Iranians sending this agreement to the IAEA and the Vienna Group?

It's hard to say, but I would say that frankly the situation over Israel is going to be really a much harder one for the United States in many ways because Turkey's determined.

And what is Turkey seeking? To get Israel to lift its blockade of Gaza?

Not only that. They've set up a number of criteria that they want. They want a formal apology; they want them to return the bodies of the dead; they want them to return the protesters. They're playing hardball because they know that they have quite a bit of support.

They're threatening to make [this] into a bigger thing in the UN, to put Israel in the defensive, politically and internationally. The Turks see this as an opportunity to enhance their role in the Middle East, particularly with the Arab nations. They know Israel's in a weak position so they want to exploit as much as they can to their political advantage.

Do you think that Erdogan and the foreign minister's anger at Israel really stems from the 2008 Gaza attack?

That was a turning point, but something that had been mounting over the years. This is not the first time that Turkish foreign officials called Israeli actions "state terrorism." This is part of an evolving process where Turkey, and Erdogan himself, has moved in an anti-Israeli direction. The Gaza offensive was a turning point, but it wasn't the beginning. It was just the climax of a deterioration of a relationship which has been going on for some time.

On the Gaza blockade, the United States is faced with a delicate internal problem. It's in danger of finding itself in a very weak position if it doesn't come out with a stronger statement on the Israeli action.

It's interesting that when the previous Israeli government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was in power, Israel agreed to have Turkey mediate with Syria. So relations must have been pretty good at that point.

They were better, but under the surface there were still an awful lot of difficulties. But they hadn't really sprung out into the open as viscerally as it did after the Gaza invasion. And part of what many people feel was a springboard was the fact that Olmert was in Turkey for three or four days meeting with Erdogan before the offensive and he didn't mention a word to Erdogan, and Erdogan felt as if he'd been double-crossed. That's what a lot of Turks say.

Some people think perhaps the whole problem began when Erdogan had this public confrontation with Israeli President Shimon Peres at the Davos conference at the end of January 2009.

But it didn't begin then. That was just, again, the culmination of the rising frustration that had been kept up for several years. [Davos] came right after the Gaza invasion, and Erdogan simply exploded. It was only a few weeks after the offense. Emotions were still very, very raw.

This week, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Washington, presumably to discuss the Iran agreement, but clearly the whole Gaza blockade came up.

There was no joint press conference, but Davutoglu made very clear to reporters afterwards he was quite disappointed with the American response to the Israeli raid on the Turkish ship, which he felt was far too tepid.

Actually, the American reaction on the blockade was balanced, calling for an investigation. It criticized the actions of the Israelis, but in relatively mild terms. It tried to take a balanced position, saying, "We have to get all the facts," and Davutoglu made quite clear this was unsatisfactory.

What would you say if you were giving advice to the State Department or the White House on what to do with Turkey?

Generally, they should start from the point of recognizing that we're dealing with a new Turkey, one that is more assertive and self confident; we shouldn't expect Turkey to act as it did during the Cold War when it was sort of a junior partner. That doesn't mean our interests don't coincide in some areas, but we have to recognize that when it comes to the Middle East, U.S. and Turkish interests only partially coincide. The real issue is to manage those differences. It does not mean that Turkey is turning its back on the United States or on the West. It does not mean its policies are becoming Islamized, but we have to recognize the changes that have taken place structurally since the end of the Cold War and try to manage those divergences as best as we can.

And on Iran and the Gaza blockade?

They are separate issues. On the Gaza blockade, the United States is faced with a delicate internal problem. It's in danger of finding itself in a very weak position if it doesn't come out with a stronger statement on the Israeli action. We are very much apart from a lot of our allies, let alone from Turkey. I think the Turks have overemphasized their influence in Iran. But they're not likely to back down, and in the Security Council, they are likely to abstain, which will further exacerbate relations between Turkey and the United States. Although here, it's not just between Turkey and the United States, but between Turkey and its Western allies.

Tragedy in the Middle East. Call for Emergency Meeting

2010-06-10T02:55:00.000-07:00

By Othman Shibly, DDS

It is another sad day where the loss of innocent lives happened. Few > days
ago it was in Pakistan and today in the Middle East. Where our > civilians
and peace activists were killed in their mission to bring humanitarian
aids to a 1.5 million people in Gaza who are suffering from siege and
blockade by Israeli government.

Israeli government justification for the siege is that Hamas is ruling
Gaza. So they want to put pressure on Hamas by making the life of
civilians miserable. Israeli government is trying to do political > change
in Gaza through inflecting suffering on civilians. This is > perceived to
be an act of terrorist state when groups or states use civilians to > reach
out to their political goals.

This attack on the Freedom Flotilla is unjustifiable. We may have
different stories how the tragedy happens. Nevertheless, the facts are
that Israeli army boarded the Turkey ship in the International water > with
force and deadly weapons. This perceived to be a piracy act of a > state.
The results were 15 peace activists dead. Let us not forget that > Turkey
ships in the middle ages went to Spain and saved Jews from the > inquisition
period. And yesterday Israeli army attacked those Turkish ships. > Let us
remember that Jewish leaders in the middle ages used to tell Jews in
Europe to move out from Europe and seek the country the carry > cresent flag
(Ottomans) to save themselves from oppression in Europe. And now > Turkish
people have been killed.

This collective punishment against all population of Gaza is > inhumane and
lack passion and caring for children, women and elderly. This must be
lifted.

I know talking about Israel is sensitive to some of our Jewish > friends. I
really value your friendship and part of my value is to share my > honest
feeling and draw your attention to your moral obligation in such
tragedies. I respect and value every one of you. It is > understandable to
have different historical perspective of the story of conflict in the
middle east nevertheless we should have similar story for peace for > both
sides based on the International and UN agreements. The board of > Rabbis
was very vocal in criticizing the WNY peace Center because of the > feeling
that WNY peace center was critical of Israel. I want to see now > will the
board of Rabbis be critical and vocal to Israeli government when they
approved the attack on the ships, when Israeli government continue
inhumane treatment of civilians in Palestine. This is a moment of > truth.

Our country is the most supporter and contributor to Israeli > economical
and military power. So as Americans we are guilty by letting our US > aid
goes toward an inhumane treatment and siege and blockade of 1.5 > million in
GAZA. It is our military equipments that were used on the attacks on
unarmed civilian ships the Freedom Flotilla.

I would like to call upon an emergency meeting for the Board of > governors
and the executive counsel to discuss this human tragedy and steps > that are
necessary to be taken based on our moral and spiritual values. These
steps may include a request of our government to ask Israeli > government
1 to lift more than 3 years of inhumane blockade and siege of Gaza
2 to avoid using our military equipments against civilian targets > such as
Freedom Flotilla.
3 independent investigation of the tragedy and bring those > responsible for
the killing or ordering the killing to the court for justice

Let us pray and. Hope that peace overcome war and love overcome hate > and
freedom for all overcome occupation. Let us pray that promoting of > hate
against any religion or culture be stopped.
Peace and love for all

Othman

Attached notes and references:
"The Muslim Public Affairs Council today called upon the Obama
administration to condemn Israel's deadly attack on a convoy of > unarmed
international peace activists bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza, > which has
at least 10 people dead. Media reports indicate over 60 people were > also
wounded after Israeli Defense Forces descended on the aid convoy in
international waters while sailing for the Gaza Strip."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/world/middleeast/01flotilla.html?hp

Ahmadi Mosques Attacked in Pakistan

2010-06-08T02:54:00.000-07:00

By Othman Shibly, DDS

It is so hurtful to see the loss of innocent lives as a result of
extremism and intolerance. The worse kind of crimes are those > crimes that
committed against other communities for the sole reason that they > differ
in their color, or race or religion belief. We see these crimes are
happening in all parts of the world. In this last event where > militants
entered two mosques and start killing innocent worshippers just > because
they differ in their belief is the worse kind of crimes. Also we > saw this
in the past when some entered shittes mosques and killed worshippers > and
also when extremist jewish entered a mosque in Hebron and killed
worshippers in Ramadan and extremist Jews built a shrine for him In > Israel
We all have seen mosques, churches, synagogues and many other > temples have
been attacked and bombed and innocent people died. Lately a mosque in
Florida have been bombed but luckily no one was hurt.

However, it is more hurtful destroying a life of any single human > being
than destroying the most scared temple or mosque. Because the > temple or
the mosque was created by man while any single life it was created > by God.
Destroying what God created is more hurtful to what man created.

This killing is not hurting to Ahmadieh community alone but it is > hurtful
to every Muslim and to every human being in this wrold.

Muslims in general and muslim scholars in particular should do more to
confront these idiologies of extremisms and intolreance and they > should
revive the true teaching of Islam. The teaching that value and > respect
our diversity and promote peace and understading among all humanity.
Equally important all other religions and cultures to do the same.

I pray to Allah for his mercy to the families of the victims and I > pray
for God's guidance for all of us to value and spread peace to all
humanity.

Salam and Peace
any
Othman

American Muslim History

2010-06-07T05:45:00.000-07:00

TAKEN FROM HERE.

A Chronological Observation By Fareed H. Numan (December 1992)
(Edited by Ishaq Zahid for islam101.com)
Unquestionably, Muslims have made an impact on the evolution of American society. Historically Muslims have made major contribution, e.g. humanities, the sciences, and art. They explored North America 300 years before the so-called "discovery" of the New World by Christopher Columbus. They used the Mississippi river as their access route to and from the continent's interior. Here are a few glimpses of Muslim life in American History:
1178
A Chinese document know as the Sung Document records the voyage of Muslim sailors to a land know as Mu-Lan-Pi (America). Mention of this document is contained in the publication, the Khotan Amiers, 1933.
1310
Abu Bakari (Abu Bakar), a Muslim king of the Malian Empire, spearheads a series of sea voyages to the New World.
1312
African Muslims (Mandinga) arrive in the Gulf o Mexico for exploration of the American interior using the Mississippi River as their access route. These Muslim explorers were from Mali and other parts of West Africa.
1513
Pri Ries completes his first world map, including the American, after research maps from all over the world. The practicality and artistry of his map surpassed any from his time or before.
1530
African slaves arrive in America. During the slave trade, more than 10 million Africans were uprooted from their homes and brought to American shores. Many of these slaves were from the Fulas, Fula Jallon, Fula Toro, and Massiona as well as other areas of West Africa. These areas were governed from their capital, "Timbuctu." These slaves were sent to Mexico, Cuba, and South America. More than 30 percent of these 10 million slaves were Muslim. They became the backbone of the American economy.
1539
Estevanico of Azamor, a Muslim from Morocco, lands in Florida with the ill-fated expedition of Panfilo de Narvaez in 1527. Estevanico remained in America to become the first of three Americans to cross the continent. At least two states owe their beginnings to this Muslim, Arizona and New Mexico.
1732
Ayyub ibn Sulaiman Jallon, a Muslim slave in Maryland, is set free by James Oglethorpe, founder of Georgia, and provided transportation to England. He arrived home (Boonda, Galumbo) from England in 1735.
1790
Moors from Spain are reported living in South Carolina and Florida.
1807
United States Congress prohibits the importation of slaves into America after Jan. 1, 1808. Despite suppression of the slave trade during the next 60 years, slavery reached its peak between 1840 and 1860. The last Slave ships to be confiscates by the federal government were Wildfire, Storm King, Williams, Erie, Echo, Cora, and Binita, all of which violated the ban on importing slaves.
1807
Yarrow Mamout, an African Muslim slave, is set free in Washington DC, and later becomes one of the first shareholders of the second chartered bank in America, the Columbia Bank. Yarrow may have lived to be more than 128 years old, the oldest person in American history. Two portraits of Yarrow done by well known artists are on public display. The first, painted by Charles W. Peal in 1819 was done when Yarrow was 100 years old. It hangs in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. A second portrait completed by James Simpson in 1828, almost a decade later, can be seen in the Peabody Room at the Georgetown Public Library, Washington DC.
1809
Al Haj Umar ibn Sayyid is enslaved in Charleston after running away. In jail, he is visited by John Owen and taken to Blade County and placed on the Owen plantation. John Owen later became Governor of North Carolina. It has been reported that Umar lived to be 100 years old.
1828
Abdulrahman Ibrahim Ibn Sori, a former prince from West Africa and now a salve on a Georgia plantation, is freed by the order of Secretary of State Henry Clay and President John Quincy Adams. He was known to many during his lifetime as "The Prince of Slaves." A drawing of him, done by Henry Inman, is displayed in the Library of Congress. His life has also been well-documented.
1839
Sayyid Sa'id, ruler of Oman, orders his ship The Sultana to set sail for America on a trade mission. The Sultana touched port in New York, April 30, 1840. Although the voyage was not a commercial success, it marks the point of successful friendly relations between the two countries that continue to this day.
1856
The United States cavalry hire a Muslim by the name of Hajji Ali to experiment with raising camels in Arizona.
1865
The American Civil War ends. During the war, the "scorched earth" policy of the North destroyed churches, farms, schools, libraries, colleges, and a great deal of other property. The libraries at the University of Alabama managed to save one book from the debris of their library buildings. On the morning of April 4, when Federal troops reached the campus with order to destroy the university, Andre Deloffre, a modern language professor and custodian of the library, appealed to the commanding officer to spare one of the finest libraries in the South. The officer, being sympathetic, sent a courier to Gen. Croxton at his headquarters in Tuscaloosa asking permission to save the Rotunda. The general's reply was no. The officer reportedly said, "I will save one volume as a memento of this occasion. The volume selected was a rare copy of the Qur'an.
1870
The Reverend Norman, a Methodist missionary, converts to Islam.
1889
Edward W. Blyden, noted scholar and social activist, traveled throughout the eastern and southern parts of the United States, proclaiming Islam. In a speech before the Colonization Society of Chicago, Blyden told his audience that the reasons Africans choose Islam over Christianity is that, "the Qur'an protected the Black man from self-depreciation in the presence of Arabs or Europeans."
1893
Muslim immigrants from the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, etc. arrive in North America. They are mainly Turks, Kurds, Albanians, and Arabs.
1913
Timothy Drew (Noble Drew Ali) establishes an organization in Newark, NJ, known as the Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA). Drew Ali reportedly was commissioned by the Sultan of Morocco to teach Islam to Negroes in the United States. The MSTA is also responsible for many of today's African-American converts to Islam.
1915
Albanian Muslims build a Masjid in Maine and establish an Islamic association. By 1919, they had established another Masjid in Connecticut. Theirs was one of the first associations for Muslims in the United States.
1920
The Red Crescent, a Muslim charity modeled after the International Red Cross, is established in Detroit.
1921
A branch of the Ahmadiyya Movement is founded in Chicago by Dr. Mufti Muhammad Sadiq. This movement converted many African Americans to their deviant brand of Islam.
1926
Duse Muhammad Ali, mentor of Marcus Garvey and the person who had a considerable impact upon Garvey's movement, establishes an organization in Detroit known as the Universal Islamic Society. Its motto was: "One God, One Aim, One Destiny."
1926
Polish-speaking Tatars build a mosque in Brooklyn, NY which is still in use.
1930
African American Muslims establish the First Muslim Mosque in Pittsburgh, PA.
1933
The Nation of Islam (NOI), one of the most significant organizations in American Muslim history, is founded. A high percentage of African Americans who were members of Nation of Islam later converted to Islam. NOI was also effective in highlighting American Christians' difficulties combating the effects of slavery and racism among African Americans. The NOI's philosophy was introduced in the United States by Fard Muhammad (Wallace Ford), a mystic who disappeared in 1933. The late Elijah Mohammed, who succeeded Fard in 1933, helped build the organization into a strong ethnic movement advocating a deviant brand of Islam as a way of life. Two of the most famous African Americans, Muhammad Ali, and Al Hajj Malik al-Shabazz (Malcolm X), were early adherents of this movement. Both later embraced the true Islam.
1934
The Lebanese Community of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, opens its first Masjid.
1939
The Islamic Mission Society is founded in New York City by Sheikh Dawood. It publishes a magazine entitled "Muslim Sunrise."
1952
Muslims in the Armed Services sue the federal government to be allowed to identify themselves as Muslims. Until then, Islam was not recognized as a legitimate religion.
1955
The State Street Masjid in New York City is established by Sheikh Dawood Ahmed Faisal. It is still in use today and represents a special point in the development of the American Muslim community. From this Masjid was born the Dar-ul-Islam movement.
1960
The NOI's University of Islam schools flourished and drew the attention of the American media. Coverage focuses upon the Black Muslims' self-help programs for Blacks, but considered them a "threat" to the white establishment.
1962
The Dar-ul-Islam movement, another important groups among the African American Muslim community is born. Until its disappearance in 1982-1983, it made a serious impact upon the development and practice of traditional Islam in America.
1962
The newspaper Muhammad Speaks is launched. It later becomes the largest minority weekly publication in the country and reached 800,000 readers at its peak. In subsequent years, it underwent some name changes, and the NOI itself underwent various transformations. It has also been know as Bilalian News the A.M. Journal and currently, the Muslim Journal.
1963
The Muslim Students Association (MSA) is established as an organization to aid foreign Muslims students attending schools in the United States. MSA now has more than 100 branches nationwide. In the 1970s, it gave birth to the Islamic Medical Association (IMA), The Association of Muslim Social Scientists (AMSS), and the Association of Muslim Scientists and Engineers (AMSE).
1965
Al Hajj Malik al-Shabazz (Malcolm X) is assassinated in New York . He was one of the most outstanding Muslims in American history as well as a dedicated fighter for justice and equality for African Americans and other oppressed people.
1968
The Hanafi Movement is founded by Hamas Abdul Khaalis. The Hanafi Madh-hab Center was established in New York, but later moved to Washington DC. This movement had a membership of more than 1000 in the United States. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar a famous basketball player, is one of the Muslims who first came into contact with Islam through this movement. In 1977, Khaalis and some of his followers seized control of three District of Columbia buildings, holding hostages for more than 30 hours. One man was killed. Khaalis is now incarcerated in Washington DC, serving a sentence of 41 to 120 years. This movement marks a challenging period in American Muslim History.
1971
The Association of Muslim Scientists and Engineers is established.
1972
The Association of Muslim Scientists is launched.
1975
Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, dies and is succeed by his son Warith Deen Mohammed, who has been credited with moving the NOI toward the broader universal concepts of Islam. He is now regarded as one of the leading Muslim spokesmen in the United States.
1981
The first American Islamic library is established in Plainfield, Indiana.
1982
The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) is established in Plainfield, IN. ISNA is now an umbrella organization for many active Islamic groups seeking to further the cause of Islam in the United States.
1986
Dr. Isma'il R. Al-Faruqi and his wife are murdered in their home outside Philadelphia. Dr. and Mrs. Faruqi are the authors of the Cultural Atlas of Islam as well as many other books and research papers. Dr. Faruqi is the founder of AMSS and the International Institute of Islamic Thought, located in Northern Virginia. This truly remarkable Muslim family is responsible for some of the most constructive programs to promote Islam in the United States.
1990
Muslims hold the first solidarity conference called "Muslims Against Apartheid." This was the first conference of its kind in support of Muslims for the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. The conference was organized by the American Muslim Council.
1991
Imam Siraj Wahhaj offers an invocation (opening prayer) to the United States House of Representatives. He was the first Muslim to do so.
1991
The Muslim Members of the Military (MMM) organization hold their first "Unity in Uniform" conference. The conference took place at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington DC. According to the Untied States Department of Defense, there are more than 5000 Muslims in uniform on active duty in the military.
1991
Charles Bilal, Kountze, TX becomes the nation's first mayor in an American city.
1992
Imam Warith Deen Mohammed gives the invocation in the Senate.
Information Resources
The University of Alabama, A Pictorial History by Suzanne Rau Wolfe History of the First Muslim Mosque of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania by Jameelah A. Hakim, 1989
African Presence in Early America by Ivan Van Sertima, 1987
Deeper Roots by Abdullah Hakim Quick, 1990
Arab America Today (A Demographic Profile of Arab Americans) By John Zogby, 1990
A Survey of North American Muslims by El Tigani A. Abugideiri, June 1977
A Century of Islam in America by Yvonne Y. Haddad, 1986
Ethnic Distribution of American Muslims and selected Socio Economic Characteristics by Arif Ghayrur, 1984
The Demography of Islamic Nations by John Weeks, 1988
Islam in the United States: Review of Sources by Dr. Sulayman S. Nyang, 1988
Demographic Consequences of Minority Consciousness: An analysis By Salaha M. Abedin, 1980
World Population Data Sheet Population Reference Bureau, Inc. Washington DC, 1990
Statistical Abstract of the United States U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of the Census, 1990
Muslim Peoples , A World Ethnographic Survey Edited by Richard V. Weeks, 1984, vol. II
Muslim Peoples, a World Ethnographic Survey by Richard V. Weeks, 1978
The 1991 Almanac 44th Edition , by Houghnton Mifflin Company, 1991
The Islamic Society of North America Directory of Islamic Centers, Schools, Masjids, and MSA Chapters 1989 Revised Edition
The Islamic Struggle in America by Hijrah Magazine, Oct./Nov. 1985
Seven Muslim Slaves by Abdul Hakim Muhammad 1983
Prince Among Slaves by Terry Alford, 1977
Nature Knows no Color Line by J.A. Rogers, 1952
African Muslims in Antebellum American by Allen Austin, 1984
The Arab World Published by the Arab-American Press, 1945
The United States and the Sultanate of Oman Produce by the Sultan Qaboos Center, The Middle East Institute Washington DC, 1990

Islam: The Next American Religion?

2010-06-05T17:11:00.000-07:00

August 2, 2007 by TMO
By Michael Wolfe

http://www.islamfortoday.com/ wolfe3.htm

The U.S. began as a haven for Christian outcasts. But what religion fits our current zeitgeist? The answer may be Islam.

Americans tend to think of their country as, at the very least, a nominally Christian nation. Didn’t the Pilgrims come here for freedom to practice their Christian religion? Don’t Christian values of righteousness under God, and freedom, reinforce America’s democratic, capitalist ideals?

True enough. But there’s a new religion on the block now, one that fits the current zeitgeist nicely. It’s Islam.

Islam is the third-largest and fastest growing religious community in the United States. This is not just because of immigration. More than 50% of America’s six million Muslims were born here. Statistics like these imply some basic agreement between core American values and the beliefs that Muslims hold. Americans who make the effort to look beyond popular stereotypes to learn the truth of Islam are surprised to find themselves on familiar ground.

Is America a Muslim nation? Here are seven reasons the answer may be YES.

Islam is monotheistic. Muslims worship the same God as Jews and Christians. They also revere the same prophets as Judaism and Christianity, from Abraham, the first monotheist, to Moses, the law giver and messenger of God, to Jesus–not leaving out Noah, Job, or Isaiah along the way. The concept of a Judeo-Christian tradition only came to the fore in the 1940s in America. Now, as a nation, we may be transcending it, turning to a more inclusive "Abrahamic" view.

In January, President Bush grouped mosques with churches and synagogues in his inaugural address. A few days later, when he posed for photographers at a meeting of several dozen religious figures, the Shi’ite imam Muhammad Qazwini, of Orange County, Calif., stood directly behind Bush’s chair like a presiding angel, dressed in the robes and turban of his south Iraqi youth.

Islam is democratic in spirit. Islam advocates the right to vote and educate yourself and pursue a profession. The Qur’an, on which Islamic law is based, enjoins Muslims to govern themselves by discussion and consensus. In mosques, there is no particular priestly hierarchy. With Islam, each individual is responsible for the condition of her or his own soul. Everyone stands equal before God.

Americans, who mostly associate Islamic government with a handful of tyrants, may find this independent spirit surprising, supposing that Muslims are somehow predisposed to passive submission. Nothing could be further from the truth. The dictators reigning today in the Middle East are not the result of Islamic principles. They are more a result of global economics and the aftermath of European colonialism. Meanwhile, like everyone else, average Muslims the world over want a larger say in what goes on in the countries where they live. Those in America may actually succeed in it. In this way, America is closer in spirit to Islam than many Arab countries.

Islam contains an attractive mystical tradition. Mysticism is grounded in the individual search for God. Where better to do that than in America, land of individualists and spiritual seekers? And who might better benefit than Americans from the centuries-long tradition of teachers and students that characterize Islam. Surprising as it may seem, America’s best-selling poet du jour is a Muslim mystic named Rumi, the 800-year-old Persian bard and founder of the Mevlevi Path, known in the West as the Whirling Dervishes. Even book packagers are now rushing him into print to meet and profit from mainstream demand for this visionary. Translators as various as Robert Bly, Coleman Barks, and Kabir and Camille Helminski have produced dozens of books of Rumi’s verse and have only begun to bring his enormous output before the English-speaking world. This is a concrete poetry of ecstasy, where physical reality and the longing for God are joined by flashes of metaphor and insight that continue to speak across the centuries.

Islam is egalitarian. From New York to California, the only houses of worship that are routinely integrated today are the approximately 4,000 Muslim mosques. That is because Islam is predicated on a level playing field, especially when it comes to standing before God. The Pledge of Allegiance (one nation, "under God") and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (all people are "created equal") express themes that are also basic to Islam.

Islam is often viewed as an aggressive faith because of the concept of jihad, but this is actually a misunderstood term. Because Muslims believe that God wants a just world, they tend to be activists, and they emphasize that people are equal before God. These are two reasons why African Americans have been drawn in such large numbers to Islam. They now comprise about one-third of all Muslims in America.

Meanwhile, this egalitarian streak also plays itself out in relations between the sexes. Muhammad, Islam’s prophet, actually was a reformer in his day. Following the Qur’an, he limited the number of wives a man could have and strongly recommended against polygamy. The Qur’an laid out a set of marriage laws that guarantees married women their family names, their own possessions and capital, the right to agree upon whom they will marry, and the right to initiate divorce. In Islam’s early period, women were professionals and property owners, as increasingly they are today. None of this may seem obvious to most Americans because of cultural overlays that at times make Islam appear to be a repressive faith toward women–but if you look more closely, you can see the egalitarian streak preserved in the Qur’an finding expression in contemporary terms. In today’s Iran, for example, more women than men attend university, and in recent local elections there, 5,000 women ran for public office.

Islam shares America’s new interest in food purity and diet. Muslims conduct a monthlong fast during the holy month of Ramadan, a practice that many Americans admire and even seek to emulate. I happened to spend quite a bit of time with a non-Muslim friend during Ramadan this year. After a month of being exposed to a practice that brings some annual control to human consumption, my friend let me know, in January, that he was "doing a little Ramadan" of his own. I asked what he meant. "Well, I’m not drinking anything or smoking anything for at least a month, and I’m going off coffee." Given this friend’s normal intake of coffee, I could not believe my ears.

Muslims also observe dietary laws that restrict the kind of meat they can eat. These laws require that the permitted, or halal, meat is prepared in a manner that emphasizes cleanliness and a humane treatment of animals. These laws ride on the same trends that have made organic foods so popular.

Islam is tolerant of other faiths. Like America, Islam has a history of respecting other religions. In Muhammad’s day, Christians, Sabeans, and Jews in Muslim lands retained their own courts and enjoyed considerable autonomy. As Islam spread east toward India and China, it came to view Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism as valid paths to salvation. As Islam spread north and west, Judaism especially benefited. The return of the Jews to Jerusalem, after centuries as outcasts, only came about after Muslims took the city in 638. The first thing the Muslims did there was to rescue the Temple Mount, which by then had been turned into a garbage heap.

Today, of course, the long discord between Israel and Palestine has acquired harsh religious overtones. Yet the fact remains that this is a battle for real estate, not a war between two faiths. Islam and Judaism revere the same prophetic lineage, back to Abraham, and no amount of bullets or barbed wire can change that. As The New York Times recently reported, while Muslim/Jewish tensions sometimes flare on university campuses, lately these same students have found ways to forge common links. For one thing, the two religions share similar dietary laws, including ritual slaughter and a prohibition on pork. Joining forces at Dartmouth this fall, the first kosher/halal dining hall is scheduled to open its doors this autumn. That isn’t all: They’re already planning a joint Thanksgiving dinner, with birds dressed at a nearby farm by a rabbi and an imam. If the American Pilgrims were watching now, they’d be rubbing their eyes with amazement. And, because they came here fleeing religious persecution, they might also understand.

Islam encourages the pursuit of religious freedom. The Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock is not the world’s first story of religious emigration. Muhammad and his little band of 100 followers fled religious persecution, too, from Mecca in the year 622. They only survived by going to Madinah, an oasis a few hundred miles north, where they established a new community based on a religion they could only practice secretly back home. No wonder then that, in our own day, many Muslims have come here as pilgrims from oppression, leaving places like Kashmir, Bosnia, and Kosovo, where being a Muslim may radically shorten your life span. When the 20th century’s list of emigrant exiles is added up, it will prove to be heavy with Muslims, that’s for sure.

All in all, there seems to be a deep resonance between Islam and the United States. Although one is a world religion and the other is a sovereign nation, both are traditionally very strong on individual responsibility. Like New Hampshire’s motto, "Live Free or Die," America is wedded to individual liberty and an ethic based on right action. For a Muslim, spiritual salvation depends on these. This is best expressed in a popular saying: Even when you think God isn’t watching you, act as if he is.

Who knows? Perhaps it won’t be long now before words like salat (Muslim prayer) and Ramadan join karma and Nirvana in Webster’s Dictionary, and Muslims take their place in America’s mainstream.

Noam Chomsky on Israel and the Gaza Flotilla Attack: "Sheer Criminal Aggression, with no Credible Pretext"

2010-06-04T08:29:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

CHICAGO, Illinois - June 2 - Professor Noam Chomsky, renowned foreign policy analyst and bestselling author of Hegemony and Survival and most recently of Hopes and Prospects (Haymarket Books) offered the following statement to Egypt's Al-Ahram regarding Israel's justification for it's attack on humanitarian aid boats headed for Gaza and the broader context regarding the economic blockade which the activists aboard the ships were attempting to break. Chomsky, who is Jewish, was recently detained at the Israeli border and barred from entering the West Bank for a planned speaking engagement, provoking an international debate, and outrage over the issue of free speech in Israel.

Hijacking boats in international waters and killing passengers is, of course, a serious crime. The editors of the London Guardian are quite right to say that "If an armed group of Somali pirates had yesterday boarded six vessels on the high seas, killing at least 10 passengers and injuring many more, a Nato taskforce would today be heading for the Somali coast." It is worth bearing in mind that the crime is nothing new.
For decades, Israel has been hijacking boats in international waters between Cyprus and Lebanon, killing or kidnapping passengers, sometimes bringing them to prisons in Israel including secret prison/torture chambers, sometimes holding them as hostages for many years.

Israel assumes that it can carry out such crimes with impunity because the US tolerates them and Europe generally follows the US lead.
Much the same is true of Israel's pretext for its latest crime: that the Freedom Flotilla was bringing materials that could be used for bunkers for rockets. Putting aside the absurdity, if Israel were interested in stopping Hamas rockets it knows exactly how to proceed: accept Hamas offers for a cease-fire. In June 2008, Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire agreement. The Israeli government formally acknowledges that until Israel broke the agreeement on November 4, invading Gaza and killing half a dozen Hamas activists, Hamas did not fire a single rocket. Hamas offered to renew the cease-fire. The Israeli cabinet considered the offer and rejected it, preferring to launch its murderous and destructive Operation Cast Lead on December 27. Evidently, there is no justification for the use of force "in self-defense" unless peaceful means have been exhausted. In this case they were not even tried, although—or perhaps because—there was every reason to suppose that they would succeed. Operation Cast Lead is therefore sheer criminal aggression, with no credible pretext, and the same is true of Israel's current resort to force.

The siege of Gaza itself does not have the slightest credible pretext. It was imposed by the US and Israel in January 2006 to punish Palestinians because they voted "the wrong way" in a free election, and it was sharply intensified in July 2007 when Hamas blocked a US-Israeli attempt to overthrow the elected government in a military coup, installing Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan. The siege is savage and cruel, designed to keep the caged animals barely alive so as to fend off international protest, but hardly more than that. It is the latest stage of long-standing Israeli plans, backed by the US, to separate Gaza from the West Bank.

These are only the bare outlines of very ugly policies, in which Egypt is complicit as well.

PAAWNY Condems Attacks on Ahmadiyya Community

2010-06-03T11:54:00.000-07:00

(Buffalo, NY-5/28/2010)

The Pakistani American Association of Western New York condemns the recent
attacks in Lahore, the cultural heartland of Pakistan, on Ahmediya community
and their places of worship. We believe that the attack on Ahmediya
community is an attack on the unity and sovereignty of Pakistan. This is the
time for Pakistani government and Pakistani people to unequivocally denounce
the religious bigotry and violence based on extremism by aggressively
pursuing the perpetrators and persecuting them to the fullest extent of the
law. Locally Pakistani community joins the Ahmediya community in praying for
those who have lost their lives and their loved ones. We stand by them at
this hour of tragedy and suffering.

This incident underlines the continuous sacrifices that Pakistani people are
subjected to in the U.S. lead war on terror. The targeted killing of
minority sects is the last ditch effort by the religious extremists and
Pakistan¹s ill wishers. They have been using this sinful tactic to divide
and destroy the very fabric of the Pakistani society. We urge the Pakistani
community all over the world to stay united and stand against the religious
fanaticism.

We must find our renewed commitment to religious freedom in Pakistan in this
quote by the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah:

³You are free; you are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to
your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan.
You may belong to any religion, caste or creed --that has nothing to do with
the business of the State.²

Community members who will like to donate to help the victims and their
families please contact any of the following organizations.

a. EDHI Foundation: http://www.edhifoundation.com/
<http://www.edhifoundation.com/>

b. International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC): http://www.icrc.org/
<http://www.icrc.org/>

c. Pakistan Red Crescent Society: http://www.prcs.org.pk/
<http://www.prcs.org.pk/>

###

Contact:

Faizan Haq, President

Pakistani American Association of Western New York

Haq@FaizanHaq.net

(716) 923-4390

Pakistan lifts Facebook ban

2010-06-01T07:06:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

Pakistan lifted a ban on Facebook on Monday after officials from the social networking site apologised for a page deemed offensive to Muslims and removed its contents, a top information technology official said.

The move came almost two weeks after Pakistan imposed the ban amid anger over a page that encouraged users to post images of Islam's Prophet Muhammad. Many Muslims regard depictions of the prophet, even favorable ones, as blasphemous.

"In response to our protest, Facebook has tendered their apology and informed us that all the sacrilegious material has been removed from the URL," said Najibullah Malik, secretary of Pakistan's information technology ministry, referring to the technical term for a Web page.

Facebook assured the Pakistani government that "nothing of this sort will happen in the future," Malik said.

Officials from the website could not immediately be reached for comment. They said earlier the contents of the "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!" page did not violate Facebook's terms.

The page encouraged users to post images of the prophet to protest threats made by a radical Muslim group against the creators of the American TV series South Park for depicting Muhammad in a bear suit during an episode earlier this year.

Pakistan blocked Facebook on May 19 following a ruling by one of the country's highest courts. The Lahore High Court reversed its ruling Monday because of Facebook's response, paving the way for the government to restore access, Malik said.

The government will continue to block some Web pages that contain "sacrilegious material," but Malik declined to specify which ones.

The Facebook controversy sparked a handful of protests across Pakistan, many by student members of radical Islamic groups. Some of the protesters carried signs advocating holy war against the website for allowing the page.

Bangladesh also decided to block Facebook on Sunday but said it would restore access to the site if the offensive material was removed.

It is not the first time that images of the prophet have sparked anger. Pakistan and other Muslim countries saw large and sometimes violent protests in 2006 when a Danish newspaper published cartoons of Muhammad, and again in 2008 when they were reprinted. Later the same year, a suspected al-Qaida suicide bomber attacked the Danish Embassy in Islamabad, killing six people.

Anger over the Facebook controversy also prompted the Pakistani government to block access to YouTube briefly, saying there was growing sacrilegious content on the video sharing website. The government restored access to YouTube last week but said it would continue to block videos offensive to Muslims that are posted on the site.

AP

Source: smh.com.au

Bangladesh 'blocks Facebook' over political cartoons

2010-05-30T11:50:00.000-07:00

Our love for the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is greater than the love other religions have for their leaders. I'm sorry if that offends some readers, but that's the truth. "I've seen the kings of Persia and Rome," said one observer at the time of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) "but I've never seen a leader who is more loved by his people than Muhammad (pbuh)." Even now, Muslims pray every day that God send down his peace and blessings on As-Sadiq and Al-Amin (The Truthful and The Trustworthy, Muhammad peace be upon him). Muslims love The Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) more than their friends, families and even themselves. Hence, Muslims react to undignified defamatory statements about the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) just like they would react to such statements about their friends or family: we get angry.

Non-Muslims should keep this in mind when they want to criticize the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). Muslims have no problem with debate and disagreements. It is apart of our religion to respect the beliefs of others. However, disrespecting the Prophet Muhamad (pbuh) merely to prove that you can, only creates more division and hatred in the world. It serves no real purpose and fails to convince anyone of anything. All that is being accomplished is merely angering and disrespecting an entire religious group. What religion teaches to do that?

Muslims should also keep in mind that our love should not always turn us to anger. Muslims need to stop acting aggressively and start acting progressively when faced with ignorance and hatred. All too often, this love blinds us from acting appropriately to a situation where someone defames Habibullah (the Beloved of God, peace be upon him). We need to remember his (pbuh)
sunnah (way) and act in a way that would please Allah. Wouldn't it be better, for example, to, instead of getting angry and banning facebook, to send articles to non-Muslim friends about the greatness of Rasulullah (pbuh)? Wouldn't it be prudent to tell them about how amazing he (pbuh) was and show them why we love Rasulullah (pbuh) so much and why they should too?

Taken from here.

Bangladesh has blocked access to Facebook after satirical images of the prophet Muhammad and the country's leaders were uploaded, say reports.

One man has been arrested and charged with "spreading malice and insulting the country's leaders" with the images, an official told the AFP news agency.

Officials said the ban was temporary and access to the site would be restored once the images were removed.

It comes after Pakistan invoked a similar ban over "blasphemous content".

A spokesman for the Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (BTRC) told AFP Facebook had "hurt the religious sentiments of the country's majority Muslim population" by carrying "offensive images" of Mohammed.

"Some links in the site also contained obnoxious images of our leaders including the father of the nation Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and the leader of the opposition," said the commission's acting chair, Hasan Mahmud Delwar.

On Saturday, one man was arrested by the elite Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) in Dhaka and charged with uploading the images.

"Facebook will be re-opened once we erase the pages that contain the obnoxious images," said Mr Delwar.

Pakistan blocked all access to Facebook - along with YouTube, Wikipedia and Flickr - last week after images of Muhammad started to appear online.

People were invited to submit their images of him in the run-up to "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day" held by some users of Facebook on 20 May.

Most Muslims consider representations of the Prophet Muhammad to be blasphemous.

Thousands of people joined anti-Facebook protests in Bangladesh on Friday demanding the site be blocked over the contest.

How to Gauge Karzai's U.S. Visit

2010-05-25T20:39:00.000-07:00

Interviewee:	Stephen Biddle, Roger Hertog Senior Fellow for Defense Policy, CFR
Interviewer:	Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor, CFR.org

May 13, 2010

Afghan President Hamid Karzai's four-day trip to Washington was marked by an amicable tone from the White House after a period of intense criticism by U.S. officials. The Obama administration's intention is to persuade Karzai to "start behaving like a wartime leader and less like an innocent bystander in a fight between Americans and other Westerners and the Taliban," says CFR defense expert Stephen Biddle. Biddle notes that while the U.S. still wants Karzai to reform corruption and improve governance, those are messages best delivered in private rather than in public. Obama's pledge to begin U.S. troop withdrawal by July 2011 may help him with Democrats in the United States, says Biddle, but it also worries Pakistan and causes Karzai to hedge his bets.

Was the principal purpose of this trip to repair relations after the frictions of recent months?

That was clearly the single biggest purpose of the trip. I don't think it was the only one, but fences needed to be mended and it was entirely appropriate and important that they do that. I would hope that behind the scenes it was also made clear to Karzai that there are still changes we need from him: We need corruption reform, we need governance improvement. But that has to be done privately rather than publicly. The biggest single problem with the administration's approach to Karzai in the first part of Obama's term has been public as opposed to private use of sticks. The other thing this trip could accomplish is to help get both Karzai and his cabinet out of an insular environment in Kabul. One of the interesting things about this trip is just how large an entourage Karzai brought with him.

How many people did he bring?

It was practically the entire cabinet. Many Westerners in Kabul have a perception that Karzai lives is in a bit of a bubble, that he's isolated and that his information sources are limited. General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander, has been trying to help Karzai get out and meet his constituents in places like Helmand and Kandahar. We provide military transport and military security to enable him to get out and travel around and just see the place. A common reaction among Western military who've been along on these trips is that they've been quite struck by how much Karzai has seen as a result.

Part of this trip to Washington, I'm sure, is similarly to get him and his cabinet in touch with a wider range of American opinion. Get them out to Capitol Hill, get them to less senior figures in the executive branch, increase the amount of information they have about American attitudes toward the conflict, as a way of improving their decision-making, given that they may not have been given this information otherwise.

Is it true, as has been reported in the American press, that even though the U.S.-led military intervention in Marja took place in February, it's still not run by the Afghan civilians?

What's being reported is what, to some degree, can be expected in the natural history of an operation like that. Establishing counterinsurgency success in a place like Marja means going through a series of stages: clear, hold, build, transition. If you're going to have a counterinsurgency with the United States involved, it's much more likely to fail in the hold and build phase than in the clear phase, and we're fairly early on in the hold and build phase in Marja. It would be very surprising, just in terms of the normal timelines of counterinsurgency, if Marja looked like Atlanta right now.

It would be very surprising, just in terms of the normal timelines of counterinsurgency, if Marja looked like Atlanta right now.

My sense is that the ordinary indicators of progress are occurring somewhat sooner than you would normally expect. We were getting a surprisingly early transition to civilian tips about locations of roadside bombs, and the presence and identity of insurgents. That's a strong indicator of local civilian attitudes: It's very dangerous for a civilian to tip off a government counterinsurgent official because he risks retaliation from insurgents. Normally it takes a long physical presence by the counterinsurgent, in apparent control of the environment, before civilians will take these risks in any significant numbers.

There's a lot that could still go wrong, and there's a lot that has to go right before Marja can be put in the success category. That is particularly true of the "governance in a box" concept that we're debuting in Marja---bringing in a government team once the military has secured the area. There have been the usual, to-be-expected growing pains in making that work. My assessment of Marja is that the early phases went about as well as you could reasonably expect, but the real test is how it performs over time, and it's really too early to know very much about that.

The United States has advertised in advance that it's going to have a major offensive this summer in Kandahar, where the Taliban has been based traditionally. Was preparing for that offensive part of the aim of the visit?

I'm sure that was one part of a pretty lengthy agenda. Part of what we want Karzai to do is, we want him to start behaving like a wartime leader, and less like an innocent bystander, in a fight between Americans and other Westerners and the Taliban. General McChrystal has been trying to get Karzai to make decisions and take responsibility: to "authorize" and "approve" things like the Kandahar plan and the offensive that's to take place there. Karzai has had a tendency in the way he talks to Afghans to behave as though he's some sort of third-party intermediary, rather than an actual combatant.

What is this peace "jirga" [assembly] that he has planned for May 29 to work out a program for assimilating Taliban into Afghan society?

It's related to the problem of getting Karzai to take responsibility for victory over the Taliban, to have him portray himself as a national leader in a war by his government against the Taliban, in which the United States is assisting. Karzai would like to be seen as the man who made peace. He's much more comfortable in that role than he is in the warrior role.

Part of what's going on with the peace jirga is Karzai would really like to forge some sort of negotiated settlement that everyone can live with. Another reason for the jirga is we are pressuring him to do things he doesn't want to do, including, for example, corruption reform. When one party is trying to pressure another to do something they don't want to do, the other party pushes back and tries to use leverage in another direction. One of Karzai's potential forms of pushback is the very subtle threat of a separate peace with the Taliban on terms that the Americans can't or won't tolerate. He's a sovereign leader. If he wants to deal with the Taliban, he can do it with or without our approval.

Is there any sign the Taliban leadership is at all interested in this?

The general perception, certainly, in the United States, is that the Taliban still believes that they're winning the war, hence they're not willing to compromise much, and therefore the talks aren't likely to go anywhere in the near term. Other actors in this process have other perceptions. Generally speaking, the British, for instance, seem to be more bullish on this than we are. Karzai seems to be more bullish on this than we are. The reality seems to be that we don't know. Our ability to discern what's in the heart of Taliban leadership is limited by all the filters through which we can observe this. This is a very secretive collection of insurgent organizations, which have very substantial divisions among them.

Do we know who's going to show up at this meeting?

It is primarily an outreach effort to some 1,500 Afghan community leaders to discuss the way forward in reconciliation. U.S. Special Ambassador Richard Holbrooke has implied that the jirga could include some "insurgent leaders," and presumably some of their sympathizers could be among the participants. But the primary purpose of the session is to discuss approaches to negotiation, rather than to negotiate directly with the Taliban as such.

Karzai has had a tendency in the way he talks to Afghans to behave as though he's some sort of third-party intermediary, rather than an actual combatant.

What should we look for in coming weeks and months in Afghanistan?

We're going to see the slow buildup of security forces in and around Kandahar, and an attempt to shoulder aside the Taliban shadow government that's gradually been rooted there. We'll see continued attempts to solidify governance in Marja and elsewhere in the Helmand River Valley. We'll eventually see an effort to secure the limited part of the Helmand River Valley that is not currently secure. And I hope we will see a policy toward Karzai that, to a greater degree than in the past, balances sticks and carrots--that isn't overwhelmingly carrot, as the Bush approach was, or overwhelmingly stick, as the Obama early approach was, but to track back to the center and combine the two in a way that makes the use of sticks privately and delivery of carrots publicly.

What about Obama's pledge to begin withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in July 2011? Is there any change in that policy?

The president in the press conference with Karzai had some very calculated ambiguity. He made clear that the United States will remain economically and diplomatically engaged long after July 2011. He didn't say anything about military presence one way or another. You can draw the implication that the military presence would persist as well, albeit in some reduced numbers. But he didn't say anything about it explicitly either way. I'm sure that was deliberate. I suspect there are several aspects to that. One is that the president has domestic political considerations to keep in mind; the progressive wing of the Democratic Party wants a substantial and rapid withdrawal. But secondly, the administration believes that an absolute commitment to perpetuity of large military forces creates disincentives for Karzai to reform. They want Karzai to think that he needs to do some things in order to get continued American military support. Now, the whole problem with this sort of use of withdrawal threats for leverage is that it has complex effects, some of which help you and some of which hurt you.

Be specific.

It helps you in the sense that it reduces the partner's belief that they have no need to change because the United States will keep their chestnuts out of the fire in perpetuity militarily. All things being equal, that's a good thing. But other things aren't equal. One thing it does--by creating uncertainty about whether or not you'll stay long enough to make good on your promise to defeat the insurgency--is cause your partners, both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, to say, "I'm not so sure how committed the Americans are to this thing, I have to hedge my bets, given that uncertainty."

Certainly for the Pakistanis, the way they hedge their bets is by retaining links to the Afghan Taliban. Because they're the Pakistanis, they want an insurance policy against American abandonment of Karzai, the collapse of his government. The danger is that if they didn't keep links to the Afghan Taliban, the result could be a successor government that could be closely aligned with India and seriously affect Pakistan's interest. If Karzai think there's some chance the United States is going to walk out in him, then he has to start hedging his bets. And part of that process is, maybe you don't want to be too harsh with at least all elements of the insurgency, because some of them might end up overwhelming your government, and perhaps you might need to do a deal with them on terms that are more favorable to them than you would like.

Weigh in on this issue by emailing CFR.org.

Opinion: Do Terrorists Hate Us, or What We're Doing?

2010-05-17T20:36:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

(May 17) -- Flying menacingly over northwest Pakistan, U.S. unmanned drones have become the deadliest tool in America's war on terror. While wreaking havoc on al-Qaida's leadership, they have extended the anti-terrorism fight to include al-Qaida's nominal Pakistani Taliban allies, the TTP. So it should come as little surprise that the TTP is now targeting the U.S.

According to Attorney General Eric Holder, the group is suspected of hatching the recently bungled Times Square bombing plot. Suspect Faisal Shahzad has allegedly cited the drone strikes against the Pakistani Taliban as his motivation.

Have U.S. military actions in Pakistan -- including the reported assassination of the TTP leader Baitullah Mehsud last year -- helped to increase the threat of terrorism on American soil?

It's an important question, but there's a good chance it won't be asked. Since Sept. 11, 2001, those who have sought to kill innocent Americans have been portrayed as "evildoers" or "haters of freedom." In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, for example, President George W. Bush spoke to a joint session of Congress and declared that those who attacked America "hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."

While there's no question that al-Qaida resents Western influence in the Muslim world -- and has yet to make peace with the forces of modernity -- many of its grievances are more specific. It resents the presence of U.S. soldiers near Islamic holy places in Saudi Arabia. It is angered by U.S. support not only for Israel but also for corrupt Arab regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. And it seeks to weaken U.S. influence throughout the Middle East.

It's not that terrorists simply hate American values -- they hate America's foreign policy and its impact on the Muslim world.

This is not to suggest that America's policy choices have been necessarily wrong. There's plenty of justification for them. But there's been very little discussion in the U.S. as to whether these policy choices continue to serve America's interests -- and may in fact be doing more harm than good.

Does unwavering support for Israel hurt our image, particularly in the Arab world? Should the U.S. be pushing countries like Egypt, Jordan or Saudi Arabia toward greater political openness, even if it risks strengthening Islamic political movements? Has the use of military force in Iraq and Afghanistan, to paraphrase former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, helped to create more, not fewer, terrorists? Finally, would changing any of America's behavior on the world stage leave our country safer?

The tendency among policymakers, legislators and journalists is to not even broach these questions. But only focusing on the inherent "evil" of terrorists provides Americans with an incomplete understanding of the threats they pose.

Along these same lines, current U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan have focused on the importance of weeding out Taliban militants from the Afghan population. Military officials boast about the reduced number of civilians being killed by American arms, ignoring the fact that our very presence in southern Afghanistan helps to inflame the insurgency, plays into the Taliban's anti-occupation rhetoric and almost certainly leads to more civilian casualties.

If, in fact, the Pakistani Taliban is actually responsible for Times Square attack, it raises the question: If the U.S. were not dropping bombs on TTP leaders in northwest Pakistan, what would be the rationale for Pakistani militants -- whose main grievance is with their own government -- to kill New Yorkers?

Earlier this year, an Afghan national named Najibullah Zazi was arrested for plotting to attack the New York subway system. Is it so incomprehensible to imagine that U.S. military actions in Afghanistan may have prompted Zazi to act?

Again, this is not to say that American actions in Afghanistan and Pakistan are necessarily wrong. Attacking al-Qaida leaders who are plotting to kill Americans is certainly appropriate. But if broadening those attacks creates new and greater terrorist threats to the U.S., then perhaps the ends don't justify the means. At the very least, it is a matter worthy of public debate.

When it comes to the war on terrorism, the U.S. likes to portray itself as a benign force in the world: We're innocent bystanders being attacked by terrorists for who we are, not what we do. In that plot line, terrorists are fundamentally irrational and "evil." In reality, they're often rational political actors using what they believe to be their most effective weapon: terror.

A more honest national discussion about terrorism would recognize that America's policies and its broad definition of national interests -- for better or for worse -- can have direct, and often deadly, consequences for the American people. In other words, what we do -- rather than what we are -- matters.

Beautiful Quote

2010-05-16T14:01:00.000-07:00

"I have faith in the American intellect, in the American intelligence, and in the American love of fair play, and I will defy any intelligent man to understand Islam and not love it."

Alexander Russell Webb

Karzai's Visit: Rebranding the Partnership

2010-05-10T13:39:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

Author:
Brett H. McGurk, International Affairs Fellow in Residence

Brett H. McGurk, International Affairs Fellow in Residence
Afghan President Hamid Karzai arrives Monday for a week of high-profile meetings in Washington. He will be hosted at the State Department, Pentagon, White House, and Capitol Hill in a visit that is essential to repairing a troubled but vital partnership.
The administration has been divided on how best to handle the Afghan leader. Public spats over corruption and cabinet appointments only hardened Karzai and caused him to lash out at the United States. This was not a good development for Afghanistan or for the United States--which needs a steady partner in Kabul over the next eighteen months, perhaps the most critical window of the war.
Afghanistan has presented U.S. President Barack Obama with a host of thorny "multiple audience" problems. On the one hand, he wants to signal to the American people and to Afghan leaders that American patience is not unlimited--thus the July 2011 date for beginning to withdraw U.S. surge troops. On the other hand, however, he needs to reassure Afghan leaders and ordinary Afghans that the United States is committed to long-term success in Afghanistan. The Taliban is not going anywhere, and they let Afghans know it.
This visit should be tailored to reassure the Afghans that the United States has a vision for a multidimensional long-term partnership. With military operations beginning in Kandahar, the heart of the Taliban insurgency, a strategic signal must be sent early and often that the Taliban cannot simply wait America out. That signal is essential to isolating the most hardened elements of the insurgency and weaning rank and file fighters off the battlefield.
Reassurance will also strengthen Karzai's hand as he tries to divide and weaken the insurgency. He had intended to start the process last week to build support for opening discussions with Taliban leaders but smartly delayed the talks until after his White House meeting. Closed-door sessions this week must ensure that Karzai's vision for these talks is generally aligned with our own and complement joint operations in Kandahar.
The anchor to the visit should be a commitment to negotiate a long-term strategic framework between Afghanistan and the United States, to include an enduring security partnership. As in Iraq, such agreements are the bookend to a surge policy--and vehicles for strengthening Afghan sovereignty with a template to guide future relations.
Another audience, finally, is Pakistan. Its leaders want to know the United States is committed to stabilizing its northern neighbor--before stepping up its own counterinsurgency campaign. Once again, a message of reassurance plus a pledge to forge enduring ties is in our own self interest and something to watch for as this important week unfolds.

Extremists of any color or belief can commit terrorism

2010-05-07T14:01:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

Editor's note: Arsalan Iftikhar is an international human rights lawyer, founder of TheMuslimGuy.com and legal fellow for the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a nonprofit research organization in Washington, D.C.
(CNN) -- Within the last month, our country has witnessed two senseless, high-profile acts of criminal violence that would have been labeled terrorism if brown-skinned Arab Muslim men with foreign-sounding names had committed them.
Because two white men committed these acts of violence, however, our political and media chattering class never used the word "terrorism" in its discussions.
Most recently, John Patrick Bedell, a 36-year-old man from California, walked up to two security guards outside the Pentagon Metro station in suburban Washington and started shooting. He was then shot and killed. According to The Christian Science Monitor, Bedell appeared "to have been a right-wing extremist with virulent anti-government feelings" and also battled mental illness before his shooting rampage.
A few weeks ago, on February 18, another white anti-government extremist named Joseph Stack flew his small airplane into an Internal Revenue Service building in Austin, Texas, killing two people and injuring 13 others.
According to media reports, Stack had left behind a disjointed suicide letter in which he expressed his hatred of our American government and outlined grievances with the IRS, chillingly stating that "violence not only is the answer; it is the only answer."
Both the Pentagon Metro and IRS attacks come at a time of "explosive growth in [domestic] extremist-group activism across the United States," according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
A recently released law center report showed so-called patriot groups -- steeped in anti-government conspiracy theories -- grew from 149 in 2008 to 512 in 2009 -- a 244 percent increase that the Southern Poverty Law Center report judged to be an "astonishing" rise in the one-year period since President Obama took the oath of office. The number of these groups that are domestic extremist paramilitary militias grew from 42 in 2008 to 127 in 2009, the report said.
Even so, for any reasonable observer who is still skeptical about labeling the recent Pentagon area shooting and IRS attack terrorism, keep one thing in mind:
Let us imagine that these Pentagon and IRS attacks had been committed by an olive-skinned Arab Muslim man named Ali Muhammad.
Our national media and political commentators would have wasted little time in calling both of these acts terrorism, and some might have also called for the closings of other IRS and federal government office buildings around the country as a necessary counter-terrorism safety precaution.
Instead, shortly after the IRS plane attack, some prominent media commentators immediately asked why people -- especially conservatives on the right -- were not calling the IRS attacker a terrorist.
"If this had been done by a brownish-looking Muslim guy whose suicide note paralleled Islamist political themes," wrote media commentator Matthew Yglesias, then right-wingers would "demand that anyone who refused to label the attack 'terrorism' be put up on treason charges."
In a recent piece, Robert Wright, of the New America Foundation, wrote: "In common usage, a 'terrorist' is someone who attacks in the name of a political cause and aims to spread terror -- to foster fear that such attacks will be repeated until grievances are addressed." Following suit, the IRS attacker's suicide manifesto before his aerial kamikaze attack reads in part: "I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be as many after ... I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be whitewashed and ignored" -- at which point, God willing, -- "the American zombies wake up and revolt."
If this same above-mentioned suicide letter had been instead written by an Arab Muslim man named Ali Muhammad right before crashing his airplane into an IRS building, most of the right-wing blogosphere would instantaneously erupt with screaming headlines of another act of Muslim terrorism.
Because Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber; Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh; Atlanta, Georgia, Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph; the Pentagon shooter and IRS attacker were all white men motivated by their respective ideologies, surprisingly, the term "terrorism" has never seemed to stick to any of them. To prove my point even further, the recently indicted American woman Colleen LaRose, who called herself "Jihad Jane," can rightfully be termed a wanna-be terrorist. But why does this not apply to other white extremists?
If our nation is truly conducting a ''war on terror'' and not a "war on Islam," it is our duty as Americans of all colors, political persuasions and nationalities to condemn and distance ourselves from all acts of terrorism, regardless of the race or religion of those who commit violent acts in the name of extreme ideology. Simply put, terrorism is terrorism, whether it is committed by a white, black or brown person anywhere in the world.
If we as a nation fail to adequately condemn all acts of terrorism equally, the only clear message that we will be sending to the rest of the world is that the word "terrorist" applies only to those with olive skin and foreign-sounding last names.

Times Square and the long war on terror

2010-05-06T13:26:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

"Let us not give them what they want from the Times Square incident: endless debates about threats we face from jihadists and debates about whether we are safer but not yet safe. Our adversary revels in the publicity from failed attacks. They spread the message that we are weak as we writhe in self-scrutiny about why security isn't perfect. Our adversaries take pleasure in being called jihadists, warriors. They want to be seen as gallant fighters, carrying a banner inherited from equally gallant forebears.

It is not so. The ideology unfurled by al Qaeda a decade ago may have had ideological resonance then; it has less now, as potential adherents understand that the only message is one of wanton bloodshed in pursuit of a goal that is unclear and unachievable.

Let Times Square go. Don't let our adversary glory in it. And, if the purported plotter, Faisal Shahzad, is in fact the perpetrator, let him rot without comment. If he did this, he is no jihadist, no revolutionary. He may be, instead, just a man bent on killing innocent women and children. That is not jihad. It is murder."

Philip Mudd is a senior research fellow with the New America Foundations' Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative. He managed Iraq analysis for the CIA from 1999 to 2001; during the George W. Bush administration, he served as the first deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's National Security Branch. He was nominated by President Obama -- and later withdrew his nomination -- as undersecretary of intelligence and analysis at the Department of Homeland Security in early 2009.

What I want to stress is the spirit of the article. We choose to live in a democratic society where we have freedoms and rights which, unfortunately, some violent people (Muslim and non-Muslim) use against us. We should not let such random spurts of violence scare us into taking back the freedoms and rights we hold so dear. It is much braver to stay the course of reason than it is to begin any sort of war on anything.

Obama Faith Council: Final Report and Recommendations

2010-05-03T07:50:00.000-07:00

taken from here.

In February 2009, President Obama appointed 25 prominent religious and community leaders to spend one year advising him on policy issues including global and domestic poverty, climate change, the promotion of responsible fatherhood, and interfaith cooperation. The panel also studied partnerships between the government and faith-based social service organizations. On March 9, the advisory council presented its final report, including more than 60 policy recommendations, to the president and senior administration officials. Watch several council members discuss their work, including Melissa Rogers, Wake Forest University Divinity School; Jim Wallis, Sojourners; Rabbi David Saperstein, Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism; Peg Chemberlin, National Council of Churches; and Eboo Patel, Interfaith Youth Core.

Congress Urged to Drop Evangelist From Event

2010-04-27T20:13:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

WASHINGTON (April 26) -- A Muslim civil liberties group urged Congress to disinvite evangelist Franklin Graham from a prayer event, just days after the Pentagon booted the minister from another gathering because of his anti-Islam remarks.

Graham is scheduled to attend the congressional National Day of Prayer event on Capitol Hill on May 6. He was to have led services at the Pentagon the same day but was told last week that he was no longer welcome after Army leaders decided his comments that Islam is a "very evil and wicked religion" were a problem. Graham refused to back down, saying on Fox News that Muslims were "enslaved" by their beliefs.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations pushed Congress to rescind evangelist Franklin Graham's invitation to attend the National Day of Prayer on Capitol Hill.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations "supports the desirable goal of bringing Americans, regardless of their faith traditions, together in prayer," said Corey Saylor, the group's national legislative director. "However, a congressional prayer observance should reflect the best of our nation's ideals. Speakers such as Franklin Graham reflect a message of religious intolerance, rather than the more American message of differing faiths united in shared support of our nation's founding principles."

In a message to supporters on his website, Graham thanked "the many thousands of believers" who have offered support since he was ousted from the Pentagon event, saying, "Recent events have demonstrated just how desperately our nation needs to turn to God." He said he would "be leading many in prayer at the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C., and I hope millions more will be joining us at prayer events throughout the nation."

A spokesman for Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., a member of the Congressional Prayer Caucus and the sponsor for the last two years of the congressional National Day of Prayer observance, said he will not rescind Graham's invitation.

D.J. Jordan, Aderholt's spokesman, said Focus on the Family founder James Dobson would take part in the Capitol Hill service, as would his wife's group, the National Day of Prayer Task Force. The task force -- whose mission is to "publicize and preserve America's Christian heritage" -- pulled out of the Pentagon event after Graham was uninvited. Shirley Dobson blamed "atheist groups" for what she called an "assault on religious freedom and people of faith."

Aderholt and other members of Congress have spoken out against a ruling by a federal judge in Wisconsin that found the National Day of Prayer first authorized by President Harry Truman to be unconstitutional.

President Barack Obama has said his administration will appeal the ruling. On Sunday, he demonstrated his personal respect for the importance of prayer by visiting and praying with ailing evangelist and presidential adviser Billy Graham at his North Carolina home. Franklin Graham, Billy's son, was also at the meeting.

According to The Associated Press, Franklin Graham said he spoke briefly to the president about the Pentagon controversy. "I wanted to make him aware of that," the younger Graham said. "He said he would look into it."

"We're not commenting on what was discussed in a private conversation," White House spokesman Bill Burton said. "No one here is organizing the Hill prayer event."

Army spokesman Wayne Hall declined to comment on whether the White House had contacted the Pentagon chaplain's office. "It would be inappropriate for the Army to discuss executive communications between the White House and Army leadership," he said.

Hall said the Pentagon National Day of Prayer service is still planned for next week. No replacement speaker has been named.

Mikey Weinstein, whose Military Religious Freedom Foundation originated the protest over Franklin Graham's involvement in the Pentagon event, said his group doesn't get involved in issues beyond the armed forces. But he called it an "extremely huge mistake" for any branch of government to put its imprimatur on Franklin Graham, whom he calls an "Islamophobe, an anti-Muslim bigot and an international representative of the scourge of fundamentalist Christian supremacy."

As for Obama's reported promise to "look into" the Pentagon's decision, Weinstein said: "Our strongest hope is he was saying it the same way that somebody smiles and says, 'Yes,' to crazy Aunt Bertha in the attic, 'Of course, we'll bring up milk and cookies for the Martians who visit you each night.' "

(It's worth noting that the older, Billy Graham, disagrees with his son about Muslims and has reported to say nice things about Muslims.)

Obama hosts Muslim-focused entrepreneurship summit

2010-04-26T13:40:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

(CNN) -- Delivering on a promise he made nearly a year ago, President Obama will host a two-day entrepreneurship summit beginning Monday designed to improve relations with the Muslim world.
"It represents an opportunity to highlight and support business and social entrepreneurship in Muslim-majority countries, including their minority populations, and Muslim communities around the world," a statement from the summit's website said.
"Through this summit, the United States seeks both to join existing efforts and inspire new efforts to promote entrepreneurship and innovation."
The summit will include remarks by the president and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and closing comments from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Participants from more than 40 countries on five continents have been invited to participate, according to the White House. "The summit will highlight the role entrepreneurship can play in addressing common challenges while building partnerships that will lead to greater opportunity abroad and at home," it said.
The president extended the offer for the summit to Muslims around the world while in Cairo, Egypt, in June. In a speech, Obama stressed the importance of "education and innovation" in lands where "there remains underinvestment in these areas." He called for "a new corps of business volunteers to partner with counterparts in Muslim-majority countries"
The June address was billed as a fence-mending mission between the United States and Islam, and in it the president urged the Cairo audience and those viewing the speech worldwide to enter a new, productive and peaceful chapter in their relationship.
"I know there are many -- Muslim and non-Muslim -- who question whether we can forge this new beginning," Obama said then.
He added: "It is easier to start wars than to end them. It is easier to blame others than to look inward, to see what is different about someone than to find the things we share."

Islam in Indonesia: A Look At Islam in America

2010-04-22T13:53:00.000-07:00

Wait, what? That title doesn't even make sense! Watch the video. The socio-political culture on the rise in Indonesia that brings religion and democracy together has been alive and well in Muslim-American culture for quite some time!

The video is taken from here.

Taliban Increasingly Unpopular in Pakistan

2010-04-22T13:22:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

This article is the first of a two-part series that looks at Pakistanis' and Afghans' views of the Taliban's influence and their respective countries' efforts to combat terrorism.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Taliban's presence on either side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border is largely unwelcome, but increasingly so in Pakistan, where Gallup surveys show they have lost much of the little appeal they had. Four percent of Pakistanis in a November-December 2009 poll, conducted prior to Pakistan's current push to rout the Taliban within its borders, said the Taliban's presence in some areas of the country has a positive influence, down from 15% in June.
Gallup most recently polled Pakistanis in the particularly deadly period after the army's anti-Taliban operations in the South Waziristan tribal area started in October. Retributive militant attacks across Pakistan reportedly have claimed more than 600 Pakistanis' lives since then, which the public's increasingly negative view of the Taliban may reflect.
The Taliban lost support in every region of Pakistan. But nowhere are they more unpopular than in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), ground zero for a full-scale military offensive against the Taliban last May. In November-December 2009, 1% of NWFP residents said the Taliban have a positive influence, down from 11% in June. The percentage saying the Taliban's influence is positive in Baluchistan, which abuts South Waziristan, dropped from 26% to 5%.
On the other side of the border, Afghans agree with Pakistanis that the Taliban have a negative influence. However, Afghans' views have remained relatively unchanged despite the Taliban's threats and violence before the presidential election in August. In both surveys in 2009, roughly 8 in 10 Afghans said the Taliban has a negative influence.
Majorities of Afghans in every region of the country see the Taliban as a negative influence, with their opinions changing little throughout 2009. Residents in the South, which included people in Kandahar, where U.S. and coalition forces are expected to challenge the Taliban this summer, continued to be more likely than others to say the Taliban have a positive influence. But even so, the majority said the Taliban have a negative influence.
Bottom Line
Gallup's surveys show few Afghans and even fewer Pakistanis view the Taliban's presence as a positive influence, which suggests there may be popular support for government efforts to dislodge the Taliban. Public support will be an important factor in the coming months if Pakistan continues its anti-Taliban operations and as the U.S. and coalition forces begin their offensive in Kandahar.
For complete data sets or custom research from the more than 150 countries Gallup continually surveys, please contact worldpollpartners@gallup.com or call 202.715.3030.
Survey Methods

Tariq Ramadan Revisists U.S.

2010-04-22T06:44:00.000-07:00

Taken from here.

In 2004, the Bush administration barred prominent Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan from entering the United States, accusing him of giving money to a charity that funds terrorists. For the last six years, Ramadan has been fighting the ban, saying the charity was not on any terrorist watch lists at the time and he was unaware of any ties to terrorists. The Obama administration lifted the restrictions against Ramadan in January, and last week he made his first visit to the US since the ban was reversed. Watch excerpts from his April 12 address at Georgetown University and his conversation with journalists, including Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly managing editor Kim Lawton. Ramadan discusses fear of the religious “other” and the need for policies that foster a better understanding of Islam, US relations with the Islamic world in the wake of President Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo, and the new visibility of Islam in the West and current debates in Europe over whether to ban the burqa, the niqab, and other Islamic garments.

South Park Insults the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), But That's Not My Biggest Concern

2010-04-20T21:06:00.001-07:00

In a recent episode, the Comedy Central show, South Park aired an episode where the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) was shown in a bear costume. Apparently, this is the second time that South Park has depicted the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) on their show. Unfortunately, what is as disturbing as the episode itself, is the media's portrayal of the issue.

CNN's Anderson Cooper's Blog Article on the subject reads: "Evening Buzz: Radical Islamic Website Warns 'South Park' Creators. It's sad that even when Muslims are victim to defamatory and insulting comments, the media still depicts them as the bad guy. Instead of the media focusing on the unnecessary and rude comments made by the South Park creators, the media focused on the reaction Muslims had towards such acts. Apparently, Anderson Cooper has no problem fighting for the freedom to insult Muslims, but he does have a problem with Muslims getting upset about it.

Instead of focusing on the content of the South Park episode, Cooper focused on a blog post by Revolution Muslim, a blog based in New York, which decried the South Park episode, and created a video discussing what happened to certain people who insulted the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) during the Prophet's lifetime. And that's the rub. Anderson Cooper needs to be even-handed. If he's OK with South Park insulting Islam, then he should be OK with Muslims insulting South Park. Why isn't the article entitled "Radical Show Insults World's Second-Largest Religion"? Cooper is showing a clear bias in which he is encouraging the insulting of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) while refusing stand by Muslims whose speech is also protected by the 1st Amendment.

A quick note on how Muslims should react to such hate speech perpetrated by shows like South Park. Often, Muslims get upset and sometimes some may become violent more to show off how angry they are than because they actually care that much. It seems that the ones who really love the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) would follow his sunnah and act the way he would act. Once, for example, the Blessed Prophet had a neighbor who threw garbage on the Prophet's doorstep every day. Once, when the Prophet Muhammad saw that no one had thrown garbage doorstep, he inquired about the neighbor and learned he was sick. The Prophet Muhammad then visited the neighbor and nursed him back to health. Once the neighbor became better, he embraced Islam. Muslims reading this can think of many other stories but for the sake of brevity, I'll stop here. The point is, that if Muslims want people to see the Prophet Muhammad as the peaceful, caring and loving man that he was, Muslims should also act in that fashion. Death threats and the like don't really help the situation.

Israelis and Palestinians Grieve Together

2010-03-08T13:58:00.000-08:00

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: It’s a common observation that one of the most important paths to peace between enemies is to learn to see others not as demonized stereotypes, but as unique human beings. When she was in the Middle East last month, Kim Lawton learned about the Parents Circle-Families Forum — Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims who have lost loved ones in their long conflict but have learned to replace hate with reconciliation, even friendship. Here is Kim’s special report.
KIM LAWTON: Since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank have been hotbeds of unrest and often scenes of angry confrontation between displaced Palestinians and Israeli soldiers. Because of the continuing military and political conflict, few Israeli civilians ever venture in. But don’t tell that to Rami Elhanan. On this day, he and his wife Nurit have come to the Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem to visit their friend, Mazen Faraj. It’s is an unexpected friendship. Both have lost family members in the conflict. Yet their grief has brought them together.
MAZEN FARAJ: Today it’s our responsibility for our children and for our families to build something new.
RAMI ELHANAN: We put a crack in this wall of hatred and fear that divide these two nations, and we show another way. We show another possibility. We show the ability to listen to each other’s pain, which is essential if you want to get to any kind of reconciliation.
Mr. FARAJ: This was the first room for our house.
LAWTON: Faraj has lived in Dheisheh his entire life. During the early part of his childhood, fifteen people in his family lived in this one crowded room.
Mr. ELHANAN: This is the place he’s always talking about—that you don’t need someone to hate you to teach you how to hate when you grow up in a room like this.
LAWTON: In April of 2002, there was a violent confrontation between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians fighters outside Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, the site where Christian tradition holds that Jesus was born. Palestinian fighters holed up in the church, and Israeli soldiers laid siege. During a lull in the fighting, Faraj’s 62-year-old father went out to Jerusalem to get groceries. He was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers.
Mr. FARAJ: He got killed in April 2002 when he was coming back from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. The Israeli soldiers, they started shooting him and without any reason. No one can kill his soul. They succeeded to kill his body, but without his soul. His soul’s still around us and give us like the power every day, how to keep going in our lives.
LAWTON: But there is great pain on the Israeli side as well. Elhanan had 14-year-old daughter, Smadar. Of four children, she was the only daughter, and the family had called her “the princess.” On September 4, 1997, the first day of school, Smadar went to a popular shopping area in Jerusalem.
Mr. ELHANAN: And she went down the street with her girlfriends to buy new books for the new year. Two suicide bombers blew themselves up, killing five people that day, including three little girls. One of them was my 14-year-old Smadar.
LAWTON: Elhanan says he was overwhelmed by anger and despair.
Mr. ELHANAN: It took me almost a year to understand who I am, to try to recover, and to understand that I have to choose a way for myself and translate these feelings of anger and despair into something constructive and create some hope out of it. And I joined the Parents Circle and I found a meaning for my life.
LAWTON: The Parents Circle-Families Forum was launched in 1995 as a way to bring bereaved Israelis and Palestinians together. The group now has several hundred participants who’ve lost immediate family members because of the violence in this region. Organizers believe it’s the only project of its kind in an area where conflict is still ongoing. The nonprofit group sponsors face-to-face dialogue meetings for bereaved family members and public lectures about reconciliation.
Mr. ELHANAN: The minute I saw in that meeting the first bereaved Palestinian families as human beings I was completely shocked. It was the first time ever in my life that I meet Palestinians as human beings after so many years of demonizing each other. So this was the turning point.
LAWTON: Faraj, who was dealing with his own feelings of anger and revenge, went to one Parents Circle meeting where Elhanan spoke.
Mr. FARAJ: And it was this man talking about his suffering and his pain, too. But I told him, “What do you know about suffering and pain? You just live in Jerusalem. You are Israeli, you are the occupier, you are everything.” And then he starts to talk about his daughter, and then really I found out that, whoa, it’s the same pain.
LAWTON: The two men became close friends. Elhanan was drawn by Faraj’s humor.
Mr. ELHANAN: He’s the only guy in the world that makes me laugh.
LAWTON: Faraj couldn’t believe that Elhanan was willing to visit him in the refugee camp. They built a deep mutual respect.
Mr. FARAJ: He’s just a human being, and you can deal with him in an easy way, and you can build a discussion with him with easy way, and you can build the fight also in easy way, too. But the most important thing’s that he’ll respect the other.
Mr. ELHANAN: What he’s doing needs a lot of guts, and his ability to face the world, tell his truths after all the things that he’s been through, I think it’s admirable, and I really respect him for it.
LAWTON: Faraj and Elhanan started doing joint lectures for the Parents Circle.
Mr. ELHANAN: We use this enormous respect that the two societies have for people who paid the highest price possible to convey this message, to convey the message of dialogue, of reconciliation, of peace.
LAWTON: Elhanan and Faraj have given more than 1,000 joint lectures in Palestinian and Israeli schools. They say most of the kids have no idea that Palestinians and Israelis can be friends.
Mr. ELHANAN: If there is only one kid at the end of the class who nods his head with acceptance to this message, we saved one drop of blood. According to Judaism, this is the whole world.
LAWTON: The Parents Circle is nonsectarian, but is supported by several Muslim, Christian, and Jewish groups. In 2008, Catholic Relief Services brought Faraj and Elhanan on a speaking tour across the United States.
BURCU MUNYAS (Program Manager, Catholic Relief Services): They are giving a message of hope in the midst of hopelessness in the Holy Land. So we thought that this would be a strong message to bring to our US Catholic audiences.
LAWTON: For their part, Elhanan and Faraj try to keep the focus on relationship, not religion.
Mr. FARAJ: It’s the important things that we don’t want to make this conflict like a religion conflict.
LAWTON: Their work isn’t always easy. Both men have received sometimes strong criticism from within their respective communities.
Mr. ELHANAN: People tell me that I’m a traitor or a — but I think more people are impressed by my ability to translate the pain into hope.
Mr. FARAJ: I really believe in what I’m doing and — but not all the people they really accept that, but anyway, if you believe in something you have to continue.
LAWTON: Parents Circle supporters hope these relationships can be a model for others, which they believe will help further the political peace process.
Ms MUNYAS: By building trust with each other they become more and more ready to trust the other side, to compromise, and to tell their leaders that they are ready, that they can move ahead, they can compromise, and they can sign the peace agreements.
LAWTON: Faraj and Elhanan agree.
Mr. FARAJ: We have a different culture, a different religion, and different, also, conditions on the ground, too. So how we can find a way? This the problem. It’s not about that’s it, I found the solution for the conflict. No. But the first step, we have to know each other.
Mr. ELHANAN: I devote my life to go everywhere possible to tell the very simple truth that we are not doomed. It’s not our destiny to keep on killing each other, and we can stop it by talking to one another — that simple.
LAWTON: Simple in theory, much more elusive to work out. But they hope their relationship proves it is possible. I’m Kim Lawton in the West Bank.

Taken from here.

Jews, Muslims worry body scanners violate religious laws

2010-03-04T21:14:00.000-08:00

taken from here.

by Omar Sacirbey
Religion News Service

(RNS) Canadian lawyer Kerry Gearin is planning to fly to Washington, D.C., this summer for a conference on Islamic family law, but the full-body scanners being deployed in some U.S. airports make her wonder if she'll be forced to leave her modesty at home.

"When I saw the pictures, I thought, it's too much information," said Gearin, a former atheist who said she "reverted" to Islam a few years ago.

Concerns about the grainy body images produced by the scanners prompted the 18-member Fiqh Council of North America to issue a fatwa, or religious edict, which said the scanners violate Islamic law.

Muslims, the fatwa said, should instead request a pat-down.

"It is a violation of clear Islamic teachings that men or women beseen naked by other men and women. Islam highly emphasizes 'haya' (modesty) and considers it part of faith," the edict said.

But it's not just Muslims who are concerned.

Agudath Israel, an Orthodox Jewish umbrella group, has told lawmakers that scanners should only be used on passengers who had failed metal detectors. In a letter to Congress, the group called full-body imaging "offensive, demeaning, and far short of acceptable norms of modesty" within Judaism and other faiths.

Even Pope Benedict XVI has weighed in, however obliquely, telling Italian airport workers on Feb. 20 that "the primacy of the person and attention to his needs" must always be respected, although some said
Benedict could well have been calling for improved customer service.

The scanners -- revived after a Nigerian Muslim attempted to blow up a Delta flight on Christmas Day in Detroit -- are the latest clash between religious sensitivity and national security. Some religious
groups say the scanners are forcing an uncomfortable choice between the two.

The scanners, which are produced for the Transportation Security Administration by New York's L-3 Communications and Rapiscan in Torrance, Calif., can detect items -- guns or small containers, for example -- or explosives hidden under clothing. The images are basically grainy outlines of the human body, but also clearly show the outlines of breasts, buttocks, and sexual organs.

To minimize passenger discomfort, screeners who view the images work in separate booths away from screening lines, and don't see the passengers they scrutinize. All images are immediately deleted, and the machines have no ability to store images.

TSA officials say customers who still have qualms can request a personal pat-down -- an option that Gearin, the Canadian lawyer, plans to take -- although a 2007 pilot program found that 98 percent of passengers preferred scanners to pat-downs, a TSA spokeswoman said.

"TSA is committed to treating all passengers with respect and dignity during the screening process," said Sarah Horowitz, a TSA spokeswoman. There are now 40 scanning machines in 19 airports, though that number is expected to grow to 450 machines across an unknown number of airports by the end of 2010.

Leading Muslim groups, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, endorsed the fatwa against body scanners, but the issue has put Muslims in a tight spot -- wanting to cooperate with security and combat terrorism, but also wanting to respect Islamic custom at a time when Muslims are already under intense scrutiny.

Ihsan Bagby, an Islamic studies professor at the University of Kentucky who sits on the Fiqh Council, said the offer of pat-downs "showed some sensitivity" on the part of TSA. "People had seen the pictures, and became concerned," Bagby said.

Rabbi Steven Weil, CEO of the Orthodox Union, said the scanners violate Jewish laws on modesty, or tzniut. While Islamic interpretations discourage exposure to either male or female eyes, it is not a violation of Jewish law for men or women to be seen exposed by the same gender, meaning Jews can walk through scanners if men are screened by men and
women screened by women.

"You have two competing values. You have the need for security and safety, and the need for human dignity and modesty," said Weil, who flies up to four times per week.

Concerns are also shared among some fundamentalist Christians who would have similar concerns, for example, about immodest bathing suits and mixed-gender swimming. On one Pentecostal listserve thread that considered the topic, all but one person expressed worries.

"Christian morality goes to intent, not legalism," wrote one commenter, likening the experience to visiting the doctor. "The motive of the scanner is not to be titillated by the view of the body, but to
provide safety and security."

Buddhism and Hinduism, however, seem to have fewer problems with the scanners.

"Everything in Buddhism is a matter of intent. If the screening is done to oppress and in a way that is insensitive, then it's bad," said Andrew Olendzki, executive director of the Barre Center for Buddhist
Studies in Massachusetts. "But if it's done to protect, and done respectfully, then it's OK."

Modesty is also important in Hindu tradition, but it does not trump a serious security threat, said Suhag Shukla, managing director of the Hindu American Foundation.

"Hindu tradition is replete with examples of sacrificing for the greater good," she said.

Danish daily issues apology over prophet drawing

2010-02-27T13:21:00.000-08:00

by Jan M. Olsen
The Associated Press

COPENHAGEN (AP) -- A Danish newspaper on Friday apologized for offending Muslims by reprinting a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb-shaped turban, rekindling heated debate about the limits of freedom of speech.

Danish daily Politiken said its apology was part of a settlement with a Saudi lawyer representing eight Muslim groups in the Middle East and Australia.

It drew strong criticism among Danish media, which previously had stood united in rejecting calls to apologize for 12 Muhammad cartoons that sparked fierce protests in the Muslim world four years ago.

Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen expressed surprise at Politiken's move, saying he was worried that Danish media no longer were "standing shoulder to shoulder" on the issue.

Read the complete story (Some news sites require registration)

Launch of Religious Perceptions in America

2010-02-25T13:51:00.000-08:00

Religious Perceptions in America: With an In-Depth Analysis of U.S. Attitudes Toward Muslims and Islam is a study of Americans’ opinions regarding a number of world religions with a special focus on Islam and Muslims. The results are based on the Gallup World Religion Survey, which explores Americans’ opinions of four major religions — Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism — and their followers. This analysis examines Americans’ self-reported level of prejudice toward members of those faiths.

A Very Riviting Video

What the Danish Cartoon Controversy Tells Us About Religion, the Secular, and the Limits of the Law

2010-02-24T14:50:00.000-08:00

By Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

Taken from here.

A new book by four leading intellectuals (Talal Asad, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood, and Wendy Brown) brings attention to the ongoing failures of the Euro-American liberal legal order in the face of the conflict between religious and secular values—and in doing so puts those very categories into question.

Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech
by Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood
(California, 2009)

This very rich little book seems to me a very good place to begin the new decade. It is smart, informed, thoughtful, urgent—and properly unsettling. It is also very difficult to read quickly or to summarize in short order. It is well worth the effort.

The principal essays, by anthropologists Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood, take the Danish cartoon controversy as a starting point. They review the contexts of the publication of the satirical cartoons of Mohammed in Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper, and the angry responses that ensued; they ask us to take seriously the fundamental incoherence of the assumptions about religion that underlie the dominant narratives of those events (dominant narratives that were repeated again this week in the stories about a recent attack on one of the cartoonists.) The book also includes an introduction by political scientist Wendy Brown and a response to the essays by philosopher Judith Butler.

The Danish cartoons were first published in 2005. The angry response from Muslims around the world was incomprehensible—and repellent—to many outside those communities. In some places there were riots, and later boycotts of Danish goods. The most common explanation for the violence in the English and European language press was that the production of images of Mohammad is prohibited by Islamic law and further that Muslim immigrants in Europe and elsewhere have failed to internalize the democratic value of free speech. Jyllands-Posten, for its part, self-righteously claimed to be heroically rescuing free speech in the face of the fearful self-censorship practiced by Danish writers and artists with respect to criticism of Islam. The incident was portrayed as a clash between the liberal values of an open society and an anti-modern, authoritarian, and superstitious religion.

In their essays, Asad and Mahmood convincingly argue that this narrative largely misses the point in almost every respect. It misunderstands Islam; it misunderstands the liberal political order; and it misunderstands the complex common genealogy of Christianity and secularism.

(click here to read the rest)

Yes yes, another Danish Cartoon article... Very well written though, don't you think?

Obama Names US Envoy to Islamic Conference

2010-02-22T13:49:00.000-08:00

Taken from here.

President Obama has appointed someone to help him improve relations with the Muslim world. Rashad Hussain will be Obama’s special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the umbrella group for predominantly Muslim countries. Hussain is a former White House lawyer. He’s also a hafiz—someone who has memorized the entire Qur’an.

As Saudi Women Meet Clinton, No Talk of Rights

2010-02-19T19:30:00.000-08:00

Taken from here.

JIDDA, Saudi Arabia — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke to young women at a Saudi women’s college here on Tuesday, the site of a spirited exchange five years ago with a female official of the Bush administration over the rights of women in Saudi Arabia.

But despite Mrs. Clinton’s invitation to raise the issue, none of the women in the audience asked her about it. The discussion, while lively, focused on the same foreign-policy and security themes that have dominated her visit to the Persian Gulf, notably Iran and the Middle East peace process.

Mrs. Clinton said she wanted to hear the views of the students on women’s rights, noting that “American media presents a very unidimensional portrayal of Saudi women,” focusing on the black veils most wear.

She called for women to get better access to education and to play a bigger role in society. But she avoided criticism of Saudi Arabia, instead praising King Abdullah for his support of coeducational and women’s-only institutions, like the one that played host to her visit, Dar al-Hekman College.

None of the students picked up on Mrs. Clinton’s observation about how the American media portrays Saudi women, which had been a point of contention when Karen Hughes, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy in Bush administration, visited this college in 2005.

In that session, Ms. Hughes raised the hackles of some in the audience when she said the image of Saudi Arabia in the United States had been tarnished by the country’s refusal to allow women to drive.

On Tuesday, the students responded enthusiastically to Mrs. Clinton, though afterward, some expressed confusion about why women’s rights did not come up, given Mrs. Clinton’s iconic status.

“Maybe because it was Hillary Clinton, people wanted to ask her about issues bigger than whether Saudi women can drive,” said Duaa Badr, 18, a freshman management student from Jidda. She noted that many young women wanted to ask questions, but did not get a chance. The college appeared to exert tight control over who was handed a microphone.

Among the questions asked was why the United States was putting so much pressure on Iran not to make a nuclear bomb when other countries in the region, like Israel, possess nuclear weapons.

Mrs. Clinton did not answer directly about Israel, which has never confirmed its nuclear-weapons status. But she repeated the sharp criticism of Iran she has voiced at every stop on this three-day trip, saying the Iranian government was the world’s largest supporter of terrorism and backed radical Islamic groups that threatened its neighbors, including Saudi Arabia.

A young woman asked Mrs. Clinton to explain the debate in the United States over reforming the health-care system. Mrs. Clinton offered a short tutorial about the political complexities, and expressed sympathy that President Obama and his White House advisors were still grappling with it.

The earnest tone of the gathering was broken somewhat when a young man asked Mrs. Clinton whether she was horrified by the prospect of Sarah Palin becoming president, and if she were elected, whether Mrs. Clinton would consider emigrating to Canada or Russia.

“The short answer is no, I will not be emigrating,” she said with a laugh, before ducking the rest of the question.

“I’m not going to speculate on who might or might not be nominated by the Republicans,” she said. “I am very proud to support Barack Obama and I will continue to support Barack Obama.”

2010-02-19T08:03:00.000-08:00

Submitted by The Doha Network on Sat, 02/13/2010 - 14:07

President Barack Obama has addressed the U.S.-Islamic World Forum by video this evening in Doha, speaking of ways to transform the initiatives mentioned in last June's Cairo speech into action. In addition, he named his Deputy Associate Counsel (and Forum participant) Rashad Hussain as Special Envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Watch the entire video below, courtesy of the White House.

A full text transcript of the speech is available here on the White House Blog.

Added On February 14, 2010 U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Qatar

2010-02-18T07:56:00.000-08:00

See the video on CNN.com

2010 U.S.-Islamic World Forum

2010-02-17T08:11:00.000-08:00

Taken from here.

Since our last Forum we have witnessed a significant shift in the dialogue between the United States and global Muslim communities. A new American President has endeavored to set a new and positive tone for engagement, exemplified by his historic remarks in Cairo. Over the next three days we will explore how much has changed and whether this altered discourse has been translated into substantive policy recommendations and programs. In recognizing the need for a sustained civic infrastructure to coordinate and complement the activities of our partners in the non-governmental and private sectors, we have designed a special session this year entitled “Maintaining the Momentum: A Strategy Session to Develop Public and Private Partnerships.”

The Muslim Legal Fund of America

2010-02-16T07:51:00.000-08:00

Taken from here.

The Muslim Legal Fund of America was established in November, 2001, by a group of Muslim civil rights activists concerned with the growing trend of racial and religious profiling by law enforcement before and after the events of September 11, 2001. While about thirty Muslims were detained indefinitely through the unconstitutional use of secret evidence since Congress passed the Omnibus Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, the Muslim community did not experience widespread profiling and discriminatory prosecution until 9/11.

After the horrible attacks of that day, law enforcement, as well as many members of the general public, reacted by mistreating and violating the safety and civil rights of Muslims in America. This period of time is commonly referred to as the �Backlash of 9/11�.Thousands of Muslims were detained and held without charge during this Backlash, which is still continuing.

Law enforcement agents are questioning Muslims about their constitutionally protected right of free speech, peaceful assembly and religion. Individuals and small vigilante groups reacted by committed acts of discrimination and violence � even murder. Articles, books, speeches and websites that unfairly paint the entire Muslim community as terrorists and Islam as a religion of terrorism appeared with increasing and alarming frequency.

The situation worsened after Congress passed the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (USA Patriot Act) with virtually no debate about the merits of the Act�s provisions. Much of the Act expanded the existing Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to allow domestic spying on Americans, citizens and non-citizens, at a level normally reserved for criminal investigations. Wiretaps, searches and other methods of �intelligence� gathering are now allowed without probable cause. Agents only need to demonstrate a desire to seek probable cause.

Shortly after the passing of the USA Patriot Act, other laws and executive orders were passed that placed undue suspicion on the Muslim community. One example was the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), which requires nonimmigrant aliens from Muslims countries to register with the government. During these special registrations, volumes of Muslims were treated like criminals, fingerprinted, interrogated, detained and deported. Another example was the President�s executive orders to shut down and freeze the assets of the three largest Muslim charities in the United States. These seizures marked the first time in the history of Islam that zakat and sadaqat (Islamic charitable funds) were seized by a government and prevented from reaching their intended recipients.

The government is continuing to target Islamic organizations, Muslim leaders and activists. Law enforcement agents raided numerous Muslim homes and offices, arrested Muslim individuals and continue to focus on the Muslim community in a clearly disproportionate manner while virtually ignoring real security threats from non-Muslim groups and individuals.

The Muslim Legal Fund of America is non-profit, charitable organization committed to preserve, safeguard and promote the civil and legal rights of American-Islamic institutions and Muslim individuals in the United States of America. In the six and a half years since its founding, MLFA received thousands of requests for legal aid and has processed over 450 cases in over 30 states. These cases include federal, immigration, discrimination, indefinite detention, hate crimes and profiling cases. Some cases are high-profile due to the news coverage and government press conferences, but most cases involve everyday Muslims who would be left defenseless without the help of MLFA and its supporters.

MLFA maintains a database of over 350 pre-screened attorneys nationwide to represent Muslims in various types of cases. Individuals who are financially underprivileged can apply to receive financial aid towards their legal defense. Through the generous support of the Muslim community, MLFA was able to provide legal aid to individuals who would otherwise not have the financial means to hire competent attorneys.

As part of its mission to help protect the civil and legal rights of Muslims in America, MLFA regularly conducts workshops and seminars to teach the Muslim community about their rights when encountering law enforcement, discrimination and other issues of concern. MLFA works with several other organizations to promote legal and civil rights for Muslims through education and fundraising. Currently, MLFA is developing a Liberty Task Force of like-minded organizations in an effort to launch a nationwide campaign to educate, motivate and mobilize the community to be civil rights activists by joining and supporting the efforts of organizations that promote liberty and justice for all.

MLFA received its tax exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service in November, 2002 and a fatwa from the ISNA Fiqh Council of North America in March, 2003, declaring donations to MLFA as legitimate Zakat-ul-Mal. MLFA also received endorsements from numerous imams and Muslim leaders, including Imam Siraj Wahhaj, Dr. Abdullah Idris, Sheikh Muhammed Nur Abdullah of ISNA, Dr. Souhail Ghanouchi of MAS and Br. Omar Ahmed of CAIR.

After the horrendous attacks of September 11, 2001, law enforcement and many members of the general public reacted by mistreating and violating the safety and civil rights of Muslims in America. Thousands of Muslims were, and are still, being detained and held without charge due to this backlash.

With the sole initiative to tackle this growing trend and the increase of racial and religious profiling of Muslims, a group of civil rights activists rallied together. And in 2001, The Muslim Legal Fund of America (MLFA) was established. Since then MLFA has been challenging the unconstitutionality of these alarming trends.

Law enforcement officials have questioned Muslims about their right of free speech, peaceful assembly and religion. Individuals and small vigilante groups have reacted by committing acts of discrimination, violence, and even murder. Uncountable articles, books, speeches and websites unfairly paint the entire Muslim community as terrorists and Islam as a religion of violence.

MLFA is dedicated to eradicating this trend and to preserving the civil liberties of Muslims in America.

This Time We Went Too Far

2010-02-14T19:24:00.000-08:00

Taken from here.

by Mohammed Ashik

A NEW BOOK FROM NORMAN G. FINKELSTEIN

“Better than any other book, ‘This Time We Went Too Far’ shows how the massive destruction visited on Gaza was not an accidental byproduct of the Israeli invasion but its barely concealed objective.” — Raja Shehadeh, author, Palestinian Walks

For the Palestinians who live in the narrow coastal strip of Gaza, the December 2008 Israeli invasion was a nightmare of unimaginable proportions: in the 22-day-long action 1,400 Gazans were killed, several hundred on the first day alone. More than 6,000 homes were destroyed or badly damaged. The cost of the destruction and disruption of economic life, in one of the world’s poorest areas, is estimated at more than $3 billion.

And yet, while nothing should diminish recognition of Palestinian suffering through these frightful days, it is possible something redemptive will emerge from the tragedy of Gaza. For, as Norman Finkelstein details, in a concise work that melds cold anger with cool analysis, the profound injustice of the Israeli assault has been widely recognized by organizations impossible to brand as partial or extremist.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN investigation headed by Richard Goldstone, in documenting Israel’s use of indiscriminate and intentional force against the civilian population during the invasion (100 Palestinians died for every one Israeli), have had an impact on traditional support for Israel. Jews in both the United States and the United Kingdom, for instance, are beginning to voice dissent, and this trend is especially apparent among the young.

Such a shift, Finkelstein contends, can result in new pressure capable of moving the Middle East crisis towards a solution, one that embraces justice for Palestinians and Israelis alike. The seeds of hope were thus sown in the bitter anguish of Gaza. “This Time We Went Too Far”, written with Finkelstein’s customary acuity and precision, will surely advance the process it so eloquently describes.

Norman G. Finkelstein’s books include Beyond Chutzpah, The Holocaust Industry, A Nation on Trial and Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.

“[Finkelstein’s] place in the whole history of writing
history is assured.” — Raul Hilberg, author,
The Destruction of the European Jews

Publication March 31 2010 208 pages
Hardback $20/£12 Ebook $10/£6
Hardback and Ebook $25/£16

Keeping faith, courting conservatives

2010-02-07T04:18:00.000-08:00

Taken from here.

by Peter Wallsten
The Wall Street Journal

President Barack Obama's willingness to keep Bush-era policies on government-backed religious charities has angered many liberals but is helping to woo traditionally Republican evangelical leaders who can influence key blocs of voters.

The approach, according to conservative leaders and liberal critics alike, is part of a broader strategy by Mr. Obama and fellow Democrats to regain credibility with centrist and conservative voters who tend to be more religious and have supported the GOP in recent polls and elections.

Mr. Obama has left in place a contentious Bush policy permitting charities that receive federal aid to hire employees based on their religious beliefs--a policy that civil-liberties groups consider unconstitutional and that candidate Obama had criticized.

The president will consider retaining a Bush-era practice of allowing government-backed religious charities to display crucifixes, "Jesus saves" posters and other symbols in the rooms where people receive aid, according to people involved in the discussions. Critics say that essentially amounts to taxpayer-funded proselytizing. This week, a majority of members of a faith advisory council appointed by Mr. Obama to examine the program voted against requiring charities to remove the images, according to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Read the complete story (Some news sites require registration)

In many ways, a religious Democrat is the perfect President for Muslims. ("Religious," meaning allowing faith to play a larger role in governmental affairs.) The fact that the President is religious means that they will ensure that faith and God are not taboo in American society and allow religious organizations more leeway in what they may say and do. The fact that the President is a Democrat, ensures that the words "religious," "religion," and "faith" don't mean "born again," "Christianity," and "Judeo-Christian."

Imam's autopsy report raises more questions

2010-02-04T16:17:00.000-08:00

Taken from here.

by Eric D. Lawrence
The Detroit Free Press

DETROIT -- U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, along with a coalition of civil rights and Muslim activists, again is calling for a Justice Department investigation into last fall's shooting of a Detroit imam by FBI agents. The cleric's long-awaited autopsy report was released Monday.

Conyers and the others will hold a news conference at 10 a.m. Tuesday in Detroit to reiterate a request that the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division investigate the death of Luqman Ameen Abdullah. Abdullah died from 21 gunshot wounds, according to the autopsy.

The autopsy was completed in November, but the report's release was put off until Monday at the request of Dearborn, Mich., police because the incident remains under investigation. The shooting happened at a Dearborn warehouse.

The investigation is likely to take several more weeks, Dearborn Police Chief Ronald Haddad said Monday, noting the results are to be sent to Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox.

Read the complete story (Some news sites require registration)

Obama the Savior?

2010-02-02T05:59:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post recently asked:

"Q: In the Weekly Standard, University of Virginia professor James. W. Ceaser argues that President Obama's approval ratings are suffering, in part, because Obama has been cast as a secular savior by people who are trying to "replace God with the Religion of Humanity." Ceaser writes: "Being the leader of humanity is incompatible with being the president of the United States. No man can serve two masters."

Do we expect our presidents to be spiritual leaders as well as political leaders? Can they be? Should they be?"

America's religion is constantly changing into what it was before. Since the inception of our country, America has been a country of agnostics: believing in some great power with some great plan, for some great purpose. We are "religious" in that we acknowledge faith as important, but as a whole, do nothing with that "religiosity" in our personal lives. "You don't have to go to church to be a Christian," one coworker recently told me. As new cultures and religions were added to the mix throughout American history, new ways of viewing God and religion were explored; eventually, coming to the same conclusion: there is some great power, with some great plan, for some great purpose.

Up until Watergate, we as Americans viewed our president to be the best version of us. The president was honest, moral, and of course, God-fearing. The president was expected to be about as religious as we were: pray during times of hardship, but not too much; then he'd just be crazy. Hence, Obama is not expected to be a spiritual leader, as much as he's expected to be spiritual.

As a leader, it's true that Obama is expected to be the secular prophet who leads us out of our dark times. In that sense, he's like a spiritual leader. He gave us "hope," in times of crises, and promises of a better tomorrow. For most Americans however, tomorrow is always a day away.

Obama's approval ratings are slipping because his supporters are getting impatient and want their miracle now. The economy is still a mess, we're still in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the health care reform made good progress, but fell short of what was promised. People who view Obama as "the answer to our prayers" need to reread the religious book of their choice and remember that the Great Power who has a great plan for a great purpose always expects His followers to first have great patience with their great leader before they can have any great payoff.

Jews, Muslims can defeat common enemies

2010-01-29T16:01:00.000-08:00

See the entire article here.

By Imam Mohammad Shamsi Ali
and Rabbi Marc Schneier

American Jews and Muslims can defeat a common enemy by working together. That common enemy is prejudice - and if one needed statistical evidence for it, stark proof was revealed this week.

A Gallup poll found that 43 percent of Americans admit to at least "a little" prejudice against Muslims, and that such self-reported feelings are strongly linked to the respondent's views on Jews. Remarkably, those who say they feel "a great deal" of prejudice toward Jews are about 32 times more likely to report feeling a "great deal" of prejudice toward Muslims, according to the polling company.

Such numbers should serve as a call to action for both the Jewish and Muslim communities: We must work together as individuals on the grass-roots level to promote tolerance and reduce anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Barriers start to crumble when rabbis, imams and the members of their houses of worship take the time to learn about each other -- and then show the rest of the country that they share a common value system.

Of course, Jews and Muslims don't agree on everything, but there are many more areas of agreement. Gallup also noted this week that compared with other religious groups in the United States, Muslim Americans and Jewish Americans are most similar in terms of political ideology, education and political party identification, according to previous research. And a poll of Israelis earlier this month found a plurality of voters in Israel would oppose a ban on the construction of minarets on mosques built in Israel. The poll was taken after Swiss voters approved a resolution banning the construction of minarets late last year.

Jews and Muslims can use such common interests to forge and strengthen relationships and build an agenda that works for the betterment of a society as a whole. Sharing common roots as children of Abraham, Jews and Muslims can talk about their similarities in theology, as well as the times during history when their two peoples co-existed successfully. And they can forge bonds by talking about their similar interests in such issues as saving the environment, fighting poverty and reforming the U.S. immigration system.

For example, last November, Jews and Muslims in Buffalo turned those views into action. Doctors and dentists worked together to provide joint health screenings for people without health insurance in their community, and the success of that program has encouraged other mosques and synagogues to put similar programs together. Such a project not only builds relationships among Jews and Muslims, but also shows those who may still harbor some bias toward the two faiths that our similarities override our differences.

Muslims and Security

2010-01-27T13:52:00.000-08:00

This is the second interview I've heard with Salam Al-Marayati. Always very impressive.

See the video here.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: In the wake of the failed Christmas Day airplane bombing, the Obama Administration took new steps this week to improve airline security. President Obama ordered US agencies to move faster and more accurately to prevent future terrorist attacks. He said while the vast majority of Muslims reject al-Qaeda, the US must develop a strategy that addresses the challenges posed by lone recruits. Under new TSA [Transportation Security Administration] procedures, passengers traveling from 14 nations, most of them predominantly Muslim, are facing enhanced screenings. Many American Muslim groups say while they are concerned about security, they are still worried that their community is being unfairly targeted by what they call “religious profiling.”
Joining me is Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles. Mr. Marayati, welcome. What’s the matter with tougher airline security?
SALAM AL-MARAYATI: Nothing wrong with tougher airline security, but when we stigmatize and profile a population, that divides our country, making it more difficult to counter the threat. We have to be united against extremism and united against hate.
ABERNETHY: Well, for instance, are head scarves a problem? Shouldn’t—and certainly somebody who, a lone guy gets on an airplane and pays cash for a one way ticket, shouldn’t those things raise alarms?
AL-MARAYATI: There’s a difference between behavior profiling and religious profiling. If someone buys a one-way ticket with cash only without baggage, flying from Africa or Asia to the United States, of course that should raise suspicions. But going after women with head scarves is ineffective.
ABERNETHY: So are you saying that you and other Muslim leaders come down more on the side of individual freedom that you do on security?
AL-MARAYATI: No I think we have to have both. If you are going to stigmatize or isolate a population, that feeds into radicalization. Part of the radicalization problem is when a community feels isolated, and when one person—and we’re talking about now the concern over lone wolves or lone recruits, if that person feels desperate, depressed, then he becomes prey for extremist recruiters, and we should do anything and everything to help accelerate integration of Muslims into American society.
ABERNETHY: After the Christmas Day near-disaster in the air near Detroit, and some other recent events, too, do you sense a growing backlash against Muslims in this country?
AL-MARAYATI: There’s a rise of the mob mentality. You read the comments on a number of stories, you get the emails, you get the phone calls, and I feel, unfortunately, that the level of hostility against Islam and Muslims is at an all-time high, and I’m very concerned.
ABERNETHY: Many Americans think that Muslims leaders in this country and in the Middle East should be doing a lot more to combat and condemn the interpretation of Islam that is so popular among many young radical extremists. Do you agree with that?
AL-MARAYATI: Well, I think that we as Muslims have done a lot in terms of the message against extremism. Our problem is that we have not been able to develop an effective way to get the message out. We don’t have the capacity in terms of public relations, if you will, in terms of making our message of moderation more newsworthy than the sensationalist message of extremism.
ABERNETHY: Do you think there is a role for the Unites States government in combating the ideology of radical Islam?
AL-MARAYATI: The Unites States government will not be able to defeat ideology of radicalism. It needs the Muslim American community in partnership, for those people unfortunately who are being recruited by extremists, they don’t regard the United States government as an authority, but they regard Muslim leaders as authorities. So it is our task, Muslims, who will help win the victory against radicalism and extremism
ABERNETHY: Many thanks to Salam Al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
AL-MARAYATI: Thank you.

US Lifts Visa Ban on Two Muslim Scholars

2010-01-25T16:25:00.000-08:00

Taken from here.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lifted a controversial travel ban on two prominent Muslim scholars. Tariq Ramadan and Adam Habib had been barred from entering the US because the Bush administration claimed they had connections to terrorist groups. But the academics said they were being discriminated against for their political views. They gained support from many religious and civil liberty groups when Ramadan was unable to accept a tenured teaching position at the University of Notre Dame because of the ban.

Survey: Americans Admit Prejudice toward Muslims

2010-01-25T13:25:00.002-08:00

Taken from here.

A new poll on attitudes toward Muslims finds that many Americans acknowledge having prejudice against Muslims and the Islamic faith even as a majority says it is unfamiliar with Islam. The Gallup poll reports that 43 percent of respondents admitted to harboring at least some prejudice against Muslims. Fifty-three percent reported an unfavorable view of Islam, but 63 percent said they had little or no knowledge of Islam.

....for the first time in 25 years....

2010-01-23T07:12:00.000-08:00

One of my friends is a marine in active duty. He has served in Germany, Iraq and is now in Afghanistan. Every so often he'll send me an email with updates on how he is doing. I thought this last email was very touching.

"Seriously, we went on a patrol up the Nawa Valley, Afghanistan, which has a road that leads into Pakistan. We met up w/ Afghan Border Patrol and met their counterparts in Pakistan. At first, they wouldn't let us cross over in Pakistan ( it was a small strand of c-wire dividing afghanistan from Pakistan), but once they found out I was born in Karachi, they let us cross over and we drank chai and ate rice w/ goat. True story. I got a cool Pakistani 14th Mountain Corps Patch. Pictures to come later.

NBD.

No.Big.Deal.

-Khanimus Maximus"

Speaking Truth to Power

2010-01-19T06:41:00.000-08:00

Quick note... Didn't the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) say that the greatest jihad is to speak truth to an oppressive ruler? Anyone know?
This article was taken from Chapati Mystery

by Kathy Kelly
January 8, 2010

There’s a phrase originating with the peace activism of the American Quaker movement: “Speak Truth to Power.” One can hardly speak more directly to power than addressing the Presidential Administration of the United States. This past October, students at Islamabad’s Islamic International University had a message for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. One student summed up many of her colleagues’ frustration. “We don’t need America,” she said. “Things were better before they came here.”

The students were mourning loss of life at their University where, a week earlier, two suicide bombers walked onto the campus wearing explosive devices and left seven students dead and dozens of others seriously injured. Since the spring of 2009, under pressure from U.S. leaders to “do more” to dislodge militant Taliban groups, the Pakistani government has been waging military offensives throughout the northwest of the country. These bombing attacks have displaced millions and the Pakistani government has apparently given open permission for similar attacks by unmanned U.S. aerial drones. Every week, Pakistani militant groups have launched a new retaliatory atrocity in Pakistan, killing hundreds more civilians in markets, schools, government buildings, mosques and sports facilities. Who can blame the student who believed that her family and friends were better off before the U.S. began insisting that Pakistan cooperate with U.S. military goals in the region?

In neighboring Afghanistan, 2009 was the deadliest year for Afghan children since 2001, according to the Afghanistan Rights Monitor. In a January 6 statement, the group noted that in 2009 about 1050 children had died in suicide attacks, roadside blasts, air strikes and the cross-fire between Taliban insurgents and pro-government forces, both Afghan and foreign. The group’s director, Ajmal Samadi, noted that this figure amounted to nearly three children per day. It’s estimated that nearly one third of these children’s deaths were caused by US/NATO coalition forces. This week, hundreds of Afghans have taken to the streets in protest after the Afghan government said its investigation has established that all 10 people killed by U.S. led forces on January 3rd, in a remote village in Kunar province, were civilians and that eight of those killed were schoolchildren, aged 12-14. The London Times reports that the U.S.-led troops were accused of dragging the innocent children from their beds, handcuffing several of them, and then killing all eight of them.

Stories of carnage, horror and impoverishment aren’t new in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan. Ten years ago, each of these countries suffered under severely repressive governance and extremes of poverty. In the case of Iraq, these conditions were made immeasurably worse by U.S.-imposed economic sanctions that punished innocent Iraqi citizens for their inability to rise from under Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime, all the while rendering them completely dependent on Hussein’s regime to meet their basic survival needs. Yet in all this suffering that preceded the U.S. invasions of the region, there were very few accounts of suicide bombings in the lands where the U.S. is now at war. The “kidnapping and torture for ransom” industries, now rife in all three countries, had not developed, and their entire economies had not been hobbled by blatant official corruption.

What has U.S. invasion and occupation unleashed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan? And how are these wars creating security for U.S. people?
The New York Times reported on November 14, 2009 that, according to internal U.S. government estimates, it costs one million dollars to keep one soldier in Afghanistan for one year. Consider this sum in light of the fact that, in Afghanistan, district governors earn 70 dollars per month. Their operation budget is 15 dollars per month, and half of them have no dedicated office. Or, in light of the UN estimate that the Gross Domestic Product, per capita, in Afghanistan, is less than $1,000 per year. Or that The United Nation’s Children’s Fund, better known as UNICEF, says Afghanistan is the worst place in the world to be born, having the highest infant mortality rate in the world with 257 deaths per 1,000 live births. Only 70 percent of Afghans have access to clean water.

Kai Eide, the outgoing Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for Afghanistan, briefed the UN Security Council on January 5, 2010. With regard to military activities, he bluntly stated that “civilian casualties, house searches, and detention policies are sources of recruitment for the insurgency.”
President Obama’s administration is soon expected to request another “emergency” supplemental expenditure for the Iraq and Afghan wars, this time for between 40 and 50 billion dollars. If (some would say, when) this figure is approved, it will make 2010 fiscally the most costly year of the ongoing War on Terror, surpassing President Bush’s expenditures by a significant margin. Before the year is out, President Obama will also have submitted a budget item to fund the wars in 2011, with military services already planning to request something in the range of $160 to $165 billion.

The U.S. Constitution states that Congress shall make no law to abridge the right of people to assemble peaceably for redress of grievance. We are deeply aggrieved by the folly of these wars. Our right to free speech is irrelevant if we don’t exercise it, and so we intend to raise the lament of those who bear the brunt of our wars but whose voices seldom reach U.S. government figures.

For two weeks this January, leading up to the date when President Obama is due to submit his budget for Fiscal Year 2011 to Congress, Voices for Creative Nonviolence and friends will gather in Washington D.C. for a “Peaceable Assembly Campaign” project. We’ll be meeting with elected representatives to raise questions about the folly and the crime of war, holding daily vigils at the White House, and engaging in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience to emphasize our refusal to cooperate with the war makers.

We urge you to join us in this year-long campaign, whether in Washington D.C. this month, or participating locally where you live. Please make sure to visit the Voices website, www.vcnv.org, to learn more about ways to become involved, both locally through this coming summer and in the Days of Resistance in Washington. We’ll be there from January 19th through February 2nd.

Kathy Kelly (Kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence

Rumi Really is the best-selling poet in America!

2010-01-15T15:00:00.000-08:00

I always heard that Rumi was the best selling poet in America. So I did some "research" and found this article. Just more proof of Islam's influence on America even to this day!

This Time magazine article was taken from here.

What does it take to become a successful poet today? Basically, a miracle. Books of poetry, after all, rarely sell. A few thousand copies are considered more than respectable by most publishers. A few hundred thousand? Only the rarest and luckiest of American poets have seen such numbers. Just ask the best-selling poet in the U.S. today. Then again, don't bother. A Muslim mystic born in Central Asia almost eight centuries ago, he is no longer available for comment.

Jalaluddin Rumi was, among many other things, a lover of irony, of the odd and absurd juxtapositions that life creates. So it may be that he would have savored the fact that Madonna set translations of his 13th century verses praising Allah to music on Deepak Chopra's 1998 CD, A Gift of Love; that Donna Karan has used recitations of his poetry as a background to her fashion shows; that Oliver Stone wants to make a film of his life; and that even though he hailed from Balkh, a town near Mazar-i-Sharif situated in what is today Afghanistan, his verse has only become more popular with American readers since September last year, when HarperCollins published The Soul of Rumi, 400 pages of poetry translated by Coleman Barks. September 2001 would seem like an unpropitious time for an American publisher to have brought out a large, pricey hardback of Muslim mystical verse, but the book took off immediately. It has a long road ahead, however, if it is to catch up with a previous Rumi best seller, The Essential Rumi, published by HarperCollins in 1995. With more than 250,000 copies in print, it is easily the most successful poetry book published in the West in the past decade.

Guantanamo guard reunited with ex-inmates

2010-01-12T17:20:00.000-08:00

Click here to watch the video.

By Gavin Lee
BBC News

Why would a former Guantanamo Bay prison guard track down two of his former captives - two British men - and agree to fly to London to meet them?

"You look different without a cap."

"You look different without the jump suits."

With those words, an extraordinary reunion gets under way.

The last time Ruhal Ahmed met Brandon Neely, he was "behind bars, behind a cage and [Brandon] was on the other side".

He would say, 'you ever listen to Eminem or Dr Dre' and... I thought how could it be somebody is here who's doing the same stuff that I do when I'm back home

Brandon Neely (above, centre)

Q&A: Closing Guantanamo

The location had been Camp X-Ray - the high-security detention camp run by the US in Guantanamo Bay. Mr Ahmed, originally from Tipton in the West Midlands, was among several hundred foreign terror suspects held at the centre.

Mr Neely was one of his guards.

The scene of this current exchange of pleasantries couldn't be more different from where they last met - a television studio in London. Also here is Shafiq Rasul, a fellow ex-Guantanamo prisoner, without whose Facebook page the reunion would never have happened.

The journey of reconciliation began almost a year ago in Huntsville, Texas. Mr Neely, 29, had left the US military in 2005 to become a police officer and was still struggling to come to terms with his time as a guard at Guantanamo.

He felt anger at a number of incidents of abuse he says he witnessed, and guilt over one in particular.

Highly controversial since it opened in 2002, Guantanamo prison was set up by President George Bush in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks to house suspected "terrorists". But it has been heavily divisive and President Barack Obama has said it has "damaged [America's] national security interests and become a tremendous recruiting tool for al Qaeda".

Mr Neely recalls only the good publicity in the US media.

"The news would always try to make Guantanamo into this great place," he says, "like 'they [prisoners] were treated so great'. No it wasn't. You know here I was basically just putting innocent people in cages."

Hip-hop tastes

The prisoners arriving on planes, in goggles and jump suits, from Afghanistan were termed by then US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld as the "worst of the worst". But after getting to know some of the English-speaking detainees, Mr Neely started to have doubts all of them were fanatical terrorists.

He recalls how when he and Mr Ahmed chatted through the bars at Guantanamo, they had a surprising amount in common.

GUANTANAMO PRISON HISTORY

First inmates arrive at makeshift Camp X-Ray January 2002

Detainees refused rights of prisoners of war and right to a trial

Camp Delta, with more permanent facilities, opens April 2002

Some 700 prisoners eventually transferred to site

Many since been released or handed to national governments

By 2009, 215 men of various nationalities remain

President Obama concedes in 2009 his deadline for closing - January 2010 - will be missed

Inside Guantanamo Bay

"It was no different from me sitting at the bar with a friend of mine talking about women or music," says Mr Neely. "He would say, 'you ever listen to Eminem or Dr Dre' and he threw off a little rap and it was just funny. I thought how could it be somebody is here who's doing the same stuff that I do when I'm back home."

Mr Neely was 22 when he worked at the camp and left after six months to serve in Iraq. But after quitting the military his doubts about Guantanamo began to crystallise. This led to a spontaneous decision last year to reach out to his former prisoners.

"I was pretty new to Facebook and decided to type in their names to see if their profiles popped up and I came across Shafiq's Facebook page. I decided to send him a little e-mail," says Mr Neely.

Released in 2004, after being held for two years, Mr Rasul and Mr Ahmed and another friend from Tipton had been captured in Afghanistan on suspicion of links to the Taliban. The three said they were beaten by US troops although this was disputed by the US government at the time.

After all that, the Facebook communique was a shock to Mr Rasul.

Last-minute nerves

"At first I couldn't believe it. Getting a message from an ex-guard saying that what happened to us in Guantanamo was wrong was surprising more than anything."

To Mr Neely's astonishment he received a reply and the pair began an exchange of e-mails. It was at this point that the BBC asked if both sides would be prepared to meet in person.

They agreed.

Guantanamo: Jailer and jailed remember opening

Several months later the ex-inmates were sitting in the TV studio waiting to be reunited with their former jailer. But Mr Rasul was having doubts. He was feeling conflicted.

"There's a few people in my family who have said what do you want to meet someone like that for, the way he treated you, you stay away from him," says Mr Rasul. "They say because if it was me, I'd want to beat him up."

Mr Neely had also been feeling uneasy.

He arrived at Heathrow airport ashen-faced, pensive and reluctant to speak much before the meeting.

Mr Rasul and his normally gregarious friend were notably quiet as they sat in front of TV cameras waiting for Mr Neely to enter. No-one knew what to expect, and the atmosphere was tense.

After an initially awkward exchange about caps and jump suits, the conversation turns to the reason for the visit. Mr Neely says he'd thought about the moment a million times. He'd wanted to say how he'd felt complicit in their detention, and acknowledge the wrong they were subjected to.

Smoking dope

But what were the pair doing in Afghanistan in 2001?

They explain that, being in their late teens and early twenties at the time, they had made a naive, spontaneous decision to travel for free with an aid convoy weeks before a friend's wedding, due to take place in Pakistan.

Mr Ahmed admits they had a secret agenda for entering Afghanistan, but it wasn't to join al-Qaeda.

"Aid work was like probably 5% of it. Our main reason was just to go and sightsee really and smoke some dope".

Does their former prison guard believe them? Yes, says Mr Neely, who says he thinks it was a case of "wrong place, wrong time".

Both sides are beginning to bond, yet towards the end, Mr Neely has a confession of his own. It threatens to destroy the mood of reconciliation.

He is deeply ashamed of an incident in which he "slammed" an elderly prisoner's head against the floor.

Mr Neely recalls that he thought he had been under attack because the man kept trying to rise to his feet. But weeks later he discovered the prisoner thought he was being placed on his knees to be executed and believed he was fighting for his life.

Mr Ahmed is speechless, then evidently conflicted as he wrestles in his mind with whether or not he can forgive. Eventually, he says he can.

But should Mr Neely be prosecuted for his actions? Mr Ahmed pauses again.

"He's realised what he did was wrong and he's living with it and suffering with it and as long as that he knows what he did was wrong. That's the main thing."

Afterwards, each say they had genuinely found some sort of closure from meeting. The sense of relief in all their faces speaks volumes, and they leave the meeting closer to one another.

Religious Realism and New Realities

2010-01-07T13:42:00.000-08:00

This article was taken from here.

by Robin W. Lovin
One important thing that religion brings to politics is a certain kind of realism about human nature and human possibilities.
In private life, we all exaggerate our own virtues and expect too much from our own plans. Faith helps us to keep our pride in check, and we can depend on friends and family to do it if our faith falls short.

What is America?

2010-01-07T12:34:00.000-08:00