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Colorado Media Matters, - May 30, 2007
Boyles continued trend of anti-Muslim
rhetoric by Denver Clear Channel hosts
Summary: Peter Boyles of 630 KHOW-AM is the most recent Denver-based Clear Channel Communications host to engage in anti-Muslim rhetoric, telling a caller on his May 30 show that "the enemy" is "radical, crazy, religious Islam." Boyles also agreed with the caller's suggestions that the United States should bar "Islamic immigration" and that Islam should be declared "a political ideology."
During a discussion about "radical, crazy, religious Islam" on his May 30 broadcast, 630 KHOW-AM host Peter Boyles agreed with a caller's suggestion that the United States "need[s] to say, 'No more Islamic immigration.' " Boyles also agreed with the caller's assertion that "for our purposes" Islam should be declared "a political ideology." Boyles' statements represent the latest in a recent trend, documented by Colorado Media Matters, of conservative, Denver-based Clear Channel Communications Inc. radio hosts engaging in anti-Muslim rhetoric.
Challenging the caller's assertion that Islamic extremism derives from the Quran, Boyles asked the caller why "when the United States was locked in the Cold War in my lifetime, we didn't see" Islamic extremism. Boyles then compared Islam to communism, concluding that "from the time of the revolution, the Soviet revolution, communism is a religion. The comparison [between Islam and Soviet communism] is striking."
Later, Boyles said to the caller: "There's 1.4 billion Muslims in the world ... how do you beat that birthrate?" The caller explained, "[T]he West, at this point, needs to just worry about saving itself," to which Boyles responded, "I agree." The caller then proposed that "we need to say, "No more Islamic immigration.' "
The suggestion that the United States needs to cut off "Islamic immigration" echoed the comments of Newsradio 850 KOA host "Gunny" Bob Newman, who on his May 8 broadcast asserted that it was "time for a little moratorium on Muslim visas, period." Newman also said that "every Muslim immigrant to America who holds a green card, a visa, or who is a naturalized citizen [should] be required by law to wear a GPS tracking bracelet at all times." He added, "If they don't like the idea, or if they refuse, throw their asses out of this country."
Newman's remarks on KOA -- which, like KHOW, is owned by Clear Channel -- prompted statements of condemnation from the Colorado chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Mountain States chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, and the American Friends Service Committee. In addition, his statements prompted the progressive group ProgressNow Action to launch a public action campaign that as of May 30 reportedly had resulted in four advertisers removing their ads from Newman's program.
Colorado Media Matters has documented numerous instances in which Denver-based, conservative Clear Channel talk show hosts and their guests have denigrated Muslims and the Islamic faith. For example:
- On May 14, Boyles smeared Islamic culture as "corrupt" and agreed with a caller who stated, "That is one culture I do not want to be associated with."
- Discussing the Iraq war with a caller during his November 9, 2006, show, Boyles said, "I don't think that there's friendly Muslim nations out there by any stretch of the imagination."
- During the September 6, 2006, broadcast of KHOW's The Caplis & Silverman Show, co-host Dan Caplis stated: "[I]f I'm sittin' on an airplane and there's somebody who looks like one of the 9-11 hijackers and they are sitting there praying out loud as we taxi, that airline darn well better remove that person."
- On the February 16 broadcast of Caplis & Silverman, right-wing pundit Debbie Schlussel made baseless attacks while discussing a shooting rampage at a Salt Lake City shopping mall perpetrated by a Muslim refugee from Bosnia. Schlussel stated that "[e]ven though some [Muslims] are nice and some may seem moderate, everybody is part of a religion where the dominant spokespeople ... are extremists who support terrorism."
- KOA host Mike Rosen, apparently referencing a May 22 Investor's Business Daily opinion piece, distorted the findings of a recently released Pew Research Center opinion poll of U.S. Muslims. Rosen incorrectly claimed on his May 23 show that, according to the poll, 55 percent "of all U.S. adult Muslims" don't "support the war on terrorism." In fact, the Pew poll didn't ask respondents whether they supported the war on terrorism; it asked, "Is [the] U.S.-Led War on Terrorism a Sincere Effort to Reduce Terrorism?"
- On the January 26 broadcast of The Gunny Bob Show, guest host Lou Pate claimed that Islam is "a violent religion" that "condones the killing of innocents." ……..
http://colorado.mediamatters.org/items/200705310001
The Age – June 1, 2007
A hatred of Islam will not aid reform
Hanifa Deen
I have always admired disobedient women, especially dissenting women who speak their minds. I'd like to think that I, too, belong to the tribe of rebellious females, something that I remember my devout Muslim father complaining about to my mother as he rolled his eyes, waved his hands and looked up to the heavens for assistance. But there are times when a certain style of protest alienates the very people it supposedly represents.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali writer now touring Australia, is right to cry out against female genital mutilation. This cruel tribal custom, still rife in some East African societies, needs to be denounced by every Muslim. It is dreadful that many victims are told that it is an Islamic custom when it is nothing of the sort. It is doubly distressing that often an entire female network of women - grandmothers, mothers, mothers-in-law and aunts - believe that to be a decent Muslim woman you must be circumcised. There are times when we can't blame men for everything.
The fact remains that the Koran does not contain any mention or justification for female circumcision. In most Muslim countries it is an alien custom that is not practised.
Long before Hirsi Ali came on the scene, Muslim women around the world were struggling to break free from customary laws. Many progressive Muslim men have joined them in their struggle, for not all Muslim men are "bastards" as some anti-Islamic campaigners would have us believe. Neither are they the one-dimensional villains lurking inside the covers of many "harem-horror" novels sold in our bookshops.
Unfortunately, Hirsi Ali's continual trashing of Islam alienates many Australian Muslim women activists who also see themselves as agents of change but who are not prepared to turn their backs on what gives meaning to their lives. They will not join in what they see as "Muslim bashing". The bitterness they hear in Hirsi Ali's voice overwhelms them and they observe how her unrelenting message — that Islam is brutal and uncompassionate — is avidly received. In the end, they circle their wagons in defence of Islam, their capacity to be self-critical lessens and they are diverted from the main game of questioning misogynistic traditions. The Muslim women I know don't want to be pitied — they want to be understood — yet unintentionally Hirsi Ali's denunciations have the effect of silencing them.
Hirsi Ali campaigns on behalf of persecuted Muslim women but her awareness-raising strategies appear to be directed exclusively to a conservative Western audience; they play right into the hands of neo-cons reliving the Crusades. As a woman I empathise with Hirsi Ali: her pain becomes my pain, but I cannot share her hatred.
In my travels through Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, the women I meet do not see themselves as victims to be pitied: most are engaged in an uphill battle of renegotiation, working hard at self-emancipation. They are shocked by the anti-Islamic sentiments they hear and the intentions of well-meaning Westerners who want to "save them". Even women who are not particularly religious find their identities constructed for them by strangers and begin to feel defensive. Hirsi Ali, of course, is no stranger to Islam but where she and I part company is in her denunciation of all things Islamic.
Hirsi Ali argues that Islam and modernity are incompatible and implies that you cannot be a reformer unless you have "given up" on Islam. As Muslims living in Western countries know, you can follow Islam while still living within a secular society: there is no inherent conflict between being a Muslim and an Australian citizen. Today Catholics are still Catholics even though Catholicism, over the centuries, moved from papal autocracy to accepting a modern democracy. Neither did Christianity reach the Enlightenment, that Hirsi Ali is so fond of alluding to, in the twinkling of an eye.
The only interpretation of Islam that Hirsi Ali can imagine is dogmatic and fundamentalist. She excludes any possibility of a reforming Islam. Muslim modernists argue that reform will come from Muslims living in the West who can enter a dialogue with the secular state and liberal Christians. Today, in a similar manner, a Muslim majority country such as Turkey is interacting with the European Union it seeks to join.
Hirsi Ali is a woman of contradictions who tells the Islamophobes what they want to hear. In some respects, Hirsi Ali has much in common with the Bangladeshi feminist writer Taslima Nasreen who, in the mid-1990s, was labelled "the female Salman Rushdie". In her day, Nasreen's story was a media fantasy come to life: fanatics, fatwas, death threats, bodyguards, banned books, freedom of expression. At the time I was taken by her plight until I asked myself why the feminists in her own country were not supporting her.
It took years of research to find the answers. Taslima Nasreen was right to criticise the inequalities she witnessed in Bangladesh but she was wrong in isolating herself from the women in her own society doing daily battle and fighting for change from the inside.
She lost the support of her natural allies. I suspect the Hirsi Ali story may be just as complex.
Time will tell if Hirsi Ali will suffer the same fate; this is a disappointing outcome for women who are passionate campaigners but find themselves largely repudiated by the very women they need to co-opt as partners.
Hanifa Deen is a Melbourne-based author whose latest book The Crescent and the Pen: The Strange Journey of Taslima Nasreen is published by Praeger.In my travels through Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, the women I meet do not see themselves as victims to be pitied: most are engaged in an uphill battle of renegotiation, working hard at self-emancipation. They are shocked by the anti-Islamic sentiments they hear and the intentions of well-meaning Westerners who want to "save them". Even women who are not particularly religious find their identities constructed for them by strangers and begin to feel defensive. Hirsi Ali, of course, is no stranger to Islam but where she and I part company is in her denunciation of all things Islamic.
Hirsi Ali argues that Islam and modernity are incompatible and implies that you cannot be a reformer unless you have "given up" on Islam. As Muslims living in Western countries know, you can follow Islam while still living within a secular society: there is no inherent conflict between being a Muslim and an Australian citizen. Today Catholics are still Catholics even though Catholicism, over the centuries, moved from papal autocracy to accepting a modern democracy. Neither
did Christianity reach the Enlightenment, that Hirsi Ali is so fond of alluding to, in the twinkling of an eye.
The only interpretation of Islam that Hirsi Ali can imagine is dogmatic and fundamentalist. She excludes any possibility of a reforming Islam. Muslim modernists argue that reform will come from Muslims living in the West who can enter a dialogue with the secular state and liberal Christians. Today, in a similar manner, a Muslim majority country such as Turkey is interacting with the European Union it seeks to join.
Hirsi Ali is a woman of contradictions who tells the Islamophobes what they want to hear. In some respects, Hirsi Ali has much in common with the Bangladeshi feminist writer Taslima Nasreen who, in the mid-1990s, was labelled "the female Salman Rushdie". In her day, Nasreen's story was a media fantasy come to life: fanatics, fatwas, death threats, bodyguards, banned books, freedom of expression. At the time I was taken by her plight until I asked myself why the feminists in her own country were not supporting her.
It took years of research to find the answers. Taslima Nasreen was right to criticise the inequalities she witnessed in Bangladesh but she was wrong in isolating herself from the women in her own society doing daily battle and fighting for change from the inside.
She lost the support of her natural allies. I suspect the Hirsi Ali story may be just as complex.
Time will tell if Hirsi Ali will suffer the same fate; this is a disappointing outcome for women who are passionate campaigners but find themselves largely repudiated by the very women they need to co-opt as partners.
Hanifa Deen is a Melbourne-based author whose latest book The Crescent and the Pen: The Strange Journey of Taslima Nasreen is published by Praeger.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/a-hatred-of-islam-will-not-aid-reform/2007/05/31/1180205422227.html
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