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AMP Report - October 21, 2007
Islamophboia week at US campuses
Spreading hatred under the guise of patriotism
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
Borrowing from President Bush’s terminology ‘Islamo-Fascists,’ a notorious band of ultra-right wing Arabphobes and Islamophobes is embarked on a new project to spread fear and hatred under the guise of patriotism and freedom.
Packaged as “Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week,” David Horowitz, a neo-conservative polemicist, is leading the Arab/Muslim-basing efforts at campuses across the nation.
In the past, David Horowitz, the self-appointed chief of the new campus thought police, has organized witch-hunts against progressive academics and attempted to introduce legislation to enforce “codes of conduct” that would silence “left-wing” voices on campus. This time his target of the Oct. 22-26 Islamo-Fascist Week are Islam and Arabs/Muslims.
Horowitz asks students participating in the campaign to disseminate presentations, such as “The Islamic Mein Kampf,” (meaning the Quran). He also tries to connect Islam with fascism and Arabs and Muslims with Nazis. He proclaimed that Palestinians are the “quintessential Islamo-Fascists” and that their cause is “genocidal.”
Horowitz’s personal Web site is home to comments such as, “There is no distinction in the American Muslim community between peaceful Muslims and jihadists,” and, “Put a complete stop to Muslim immigration, and find creative ways to deport all Muslim non-citizens. These two measures would be accompanied by the creation of an environment where the practice of Islam is made not easy but difficult.”
Tellingly, Horowitz’s mission is not much different than another Islamophobe group known with the acronym SANE: the Society of Americans for National Existence that seeks to banish Islam from the US by making "adherence to Islam" punishable by 20 years in prison. It also seeks a ban on Muslim immigration to the US.
A petition from the so-called David Horowitz Freedom Center demands that “students and faculty...declare their allegiances: either to fighting our terrorist adversaries or failing to take action to stop our enemies.” In a throwback to McCarthyism, right-wing students are encouraged to issue press releases condemning those who refused to sign. It means either you are with us or with our enemy.
But just who are the “Islamic fascists? According to Horowitz’s FrontPage magazine, they include the Muslim Student Association, which has chapters on hundreds of U.S. campuses--and the Council on American Islamic Relations, which advocates for civil rights and tracks hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims.
As part of the "Islamo-Fascism Week," Horowitz visited Princeton University, New Jersey, on Oct. 16, the last day of Eid al-Fitr, the holy Muslim holiday celebrating the end of the month of Ramadan. Interestingly, due to his less-than-gleaming reputation, the event had to be kept somewhat of a secret.
In his tirade against Muslims he persistently connected the religion of over 1.5 billion people to fascism, lumping together a diverse array of ethnic and political groups by using terms such as "Islamic Nazis," "barbarians" and "Islamo-fascism." Alarmingly, Horowitz made the claim that groups like al Qaeda and Hamas are comparable to American organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Students Association (MSA).
Perhaps unknowingly, Horowitz negated his own claims by citing an inaccurate and selective history of the Middle East. He denied that the Arab-Israeli conflict centers on the issue of land and state and insisted that no Palestinian lands had ever been annexed. He also made the apocalyptic statement that Christians in the Middle East are "vanishing," a startling claim considering the existence of over 8 million Coptic Christian Egyptians, 1.4 million Lebanese Christians and 300,000 Christians in the West Bank.
There is a collection of bigots and crackpots that Horowitz has recruited to speak for Islamophobia week.
Ann Coulter is one. After September 11, she was fired from her job at the highly conservative National Review for her comment that the U.S. “should invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” In 2004, on Fox’s Hannity and Colmes, Coulter reiterated her stance. When asked if she would still “like to convert these people all to Christianity,” Coulter replied, “The ones that we haven’t killed, yes.” “So no one should be Muslim?” Alan Colmes asked. “They should all be Christian?” Coulter replied, “That would be a good start, yes.”
Other luminaries include: Rick Santorum, a former US Senator, who has compared homosexuality to incest; Robert Spencer who claims Islam is "the world's most intolerant religion"; and noted anti-Arab commentator and Islamophobe Daniel Pipes who once said that "Palestinians are a miserable people…and they deserve to be."
Some other well-known Islamophobist speakers are: Dennis Prager, Sean Hannity and Wafa Sultan. More intellectual takes will come from such neoconservative icons of Middle East policy as Michael Ledeen who seeks to apply Machiavellian principles to the modern world: if we win, everyone will judge our methods to have been appropriate; if we lose, they will despise us. Strike decisively, get it over with quickly. The diplomats will always say that we can achieve our goals with a little bit of nastiness and a whole lot of talking, but they are wrong. It is better to be feared than loved.
Surely such a notorious lineup of racist, bigoted, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic and Machiavellian speakers will serve not to educate but to promote hatred and spread misinformation and lies.
Let us not forget that these are the same lies that have lead, and continue to lead, to hate crimes and attacks against minorities including African-Americans, Jews, Muslims, homosexuals, and others based on stereotypes.
Events such as Islamophobia week do not seek to further the discussion in a peaceful manner, but rather contribute to the prejudicial anger and hatred targeted against Arabs and Muslims in the US. The post-9/11 America has seen a dramatic increase in hate crimes targeted against Arabs and Muslims or those perceived to be so. It has already been well-documented that the Arab-American and Muslim-American communities and anyone perceived to be a member of the communities have been the targets of hate crimes and discrimination. The FBI has reported that such crimes increased by a reported 1,600 percent after the horrific terrorist acts of Sept. 11.
For a sign of how easily rhetoric about the Middle East can escalate, consider George Washington University, where authorities discovered hundreds of posters last week that said: “Hate Muslims? So do we!” A “typical Muslim” is then portrayed, with features identified such as “venom from mouth” and “suicide vest.”
Surely this event is a celebration of hate speech and intolerance in order to promote hate and bigotry. It will be an opportunity to Arab/Muslim-bashing under the auspices of “fighting terrorism.”
CAIR bulletin - October 21, 2007
‘Islamo-Fascism’ week speaker
meets with european 'neo-nazis'
Robert Spencer is main speaker for Islamophobic campus tour
WASHINGTON, D.C., October 21, 2007- The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) revealed today that the main speaker for an upcoming series of "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" lectures at university campuses nationwide recently offered a keynote address at a European gathering that included representatives of racist or "neo-Nazi" political parties.
Author Robert Spencer, who is scheduled to appear beginning next week at universities such as Brown, DePaul and Dartmouth, is regarded by American Muslims as one of the nation's worst Islamophobes. His virulently anti-Islam website promotes the idea that life for Muslims in the West should be made so difficult that they will leave.
Spencer recently spoke at a so-called "Counterjihad Brussels 2007" conference in Belgium attended by those with links to far-right parties such as Filip Dewinter of Vlaams Belang (Belgium) and Ted Ekeroth of Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden). Both parties have been accused of either having a racist platform, a neo-Nazi past or having links to neo-Nazis and other racists.
Vlaams Belang is the successor to the Vlaams Blok party, which was banned in 2004 for being an illegal racist political faction. (Vlaams Belang's founders were Nazi collaborators in World War II.)
Of Sverigedemokraterna, the International Herald Tribune wrote: “Sverigedemokraterna, or the Sweden Democrats, have been part of this country's political landscape for almost 20 years, but they were considered too close to the Nazi-inspired far-right to contend for large numbers of votes.” (7/7/06)
Robert Spencer's Jihad Watch Board Vice President "Hugh Fitzgerald" wrote on that hate site: "Only one group, only one belief-system, distinguishes itself by appearing incapable of fitting in. And that is Muslims, and Islam ... if one really knew what Islam contained ... then how could any decent person remain a Muslim?"
He also recommended that western nations be "Islam-proofed the way a house is child-proofed," compared Muslims to Nazis and urged that they be boycotted: "[I]t should not be hard to find ways to limit the spread or practice of Islam. And if in addition to whatever local, state and federal government officials do, private parties simply conduct their own boycott of goods and services offered by Muslims, in the same way that they would have refused to buy, in 1938, a German Voigtlander camera..."
Other speakers on the "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" tour include Ann Coulter, who refers to Muslims as "rag heads," and Daniel Pipes, a supporter of the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II and of the views of French racist Jean-Marie Le Pen.
“All those who value religious tolerance and diversity should be concerned about the growing links between European racists and American Islamophobes,” said CAIR Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper.
Publicity for the tour got off to a bad start when it was revealed that the poster promoting the campus events used a photograph that purportedly showed a Muslim woman being stoned to death, but which was in fact an image from a fictional movie.
Read also:
European Organizations Gather in Brussels to Organize Resistance to Islamization and Shariah
Court Rules Vlaams Blok is Racist
North County Gazette - October 25, 2007
Attacking Islam undermines religious freedom
By Charles C. Haynes
Halloween arrived early this year in the guise of “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” held Oct. 22-26 on hundreds of college and university campuses across the nation. Scary speakers like Ann Coulter fanned out to warn students about the lies organizers say are being taught about the war on terrorism in institutions of higher learning.
The “protest week” is organized by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an organization dedicated to promoting the ideas of, well, David Horowitz (a 1960s leftist who now describes himself as a conservative).
If the purpose were only to wake Americans up to the threat of extremists who commit terrorist acts in the name of Islam, then who could object? I suspect, however, that most of us are already fully awake to the terrorist threat – including the many Muslim Americans now serving in our armed services, as well as the many Muslim soldiers fighting with them in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But the real target behind the “Islamo-Fascism” rhetoric appears to be Islam itself. Horowitz is convinced that the “academic left” censors the truth about the Islamic roots of terrorism and thereby creates “sympathy for the enemy.”
That’s why many of the week’s campus events don’t focus on terrorism, but rather on topics like the “oppression of women in Islam.” And that’s also why the featured speakers are not experts on terrorist groups. They are, instead, people like author Robert Spencer, who argues that Islam is “the world’s most intolerant religion,” and Coulter, who refers to Muslims as “rag heads” and describes the Quran as “tied to a Stone Age culture.”
To the extent that political correctness on college campuses chills debate about the true nature of the terrorist threat, I’m all for replacing empty clichés such as “Islam is a religion of peace” with an open and honest discussion about the history and teachings of Islam. As a student of world religions, I’m well aware (as are most Muslims) of the extremist voices within Islam today and in history. (Similar voices are heard in the history of every world faith.)
But my own study of Islam convinces me that a fair, scholarly assessment of Islamic theology, history and civilization would refute the canard that Islam is inherently violent and intolerant. And it would expose al-Qaida and other terrorist groups as preaching a perversion of Islamic teaching.
Beyond demonizing Islam, it’s hard to understand what Horowitz, Coulter, Spencer and company hope to accomplish with their campus protests. If they are genuinely interested in defeating Islamist terrorists, why don’t they reach out to the vast majority of Muslims who share their rejection of extremism instead of pushing them away with blanket condemnations of their religion?
As journalist Peter Bergen points out in this week’s New Republic, “the American Muslim community has overwhelmingly rejected the ideological virus of radical Islam.” This explains, he argues, why we have been spared “the scourge of home-grown terrorism.”
Just when we least need to inflame religious differences and most need to work together as American citizens, along comes “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” with its not-so-subtle hostility toward the Islamic faith.
Far from waking people up to terrorism, these campus events are likely to cause a spike in hatred toward American Muslims, already a growing problem in many parts of the nation. To make matters worse, the anti-Islam rhetoric will be a propaganda boon to al-Qaida, already busy working to convince Muslim youth that the West is at war with Islam.
Explain it to me again, Mr. Horowitz: How, exactly, does attacking Islam advance the fight against terrorism?
Charles C. Haynes is senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, 1101 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, Va. 22209. Web: firstamendmentcenter.org. E-mail: chaynes@freedomforum.org.
http://www.northcountrygazette.org/news/2007/10/25/attacking_islam/
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