I lived in Davis, California for a long time. I went about 20 miles across the causeway from Sacramento to attend the undergraduate program at UC Davis in 1979. Upon graduation from law school six years later, I stayed in the adjacent city until I moved back to Sacramento in 2005. During my time there, the population grew from about 30,000 to just over 50,000 today. There is one important thing about Davis that you need to know. Regardless of what you might think, there is no bigotry in Davis of any kind because there are always other explanations for acts that would be considered bigoted elsewhere, such as this ongoing campaign of harassment against the Islamic Center. My impression is that the first training that cops hired by the city go through is how to come up with alternative explanations for criminal acts motivated by racial and religious bigotry.

Labels: California, Islam, Police, Religion

UPDATE 1: Oh, by the way, if you are a woman, and show silent support for a woman wearing a niqab, you'll get arrested, too:

Halima, a 53-year-old mother from Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, who wears a normal headscarf, was detained by police for standing silently with the niqab-wearers at Notre Dame. She said: This is the first time I've ever protested over anything. I'm not in favour of the niqab, I don't wear it myself. But it's wrong for the government to ban women from dressing how they want. Islamophobia is on the rise in France. First it's the niqab, then they'll ban the jilbab, then it will be plain headscarves outlawed.

She was, you see, participating in an unauthorized protest.

And, then, there's the Saudi exception:

Shop-owners said luxury fashion boutiques near the Champs Elysées were unlikely to call the police to detain female tourists in niqabs from the Gulf. This would create a two-tier system between rich tourists and poor French people, one trader complained. Emmanuel Roux from the police union, Syndicat des Commissaires de la Police Nationale, said the law would be infinitely difficult to apply and infinitely little applied.

Roux no doubt understands that the poor Muslim women of France are the precisely the intended targets of this measure. After all, Hugo would have appreciated the care with with which the authorities drafted it:

The law is worded to trip safely through legal minefields: The words women, Muslim and veil are not even mentioned. The law says it is illegal to hide the face in the public space.

While Italy also has a law against concealing the face for security reasons, France's law was the first conceived to target veil-wearers. Sarkozy said he wanted a ban, and that the veils are not welcome in France.

INITIAL POST: The more things change, the more they stay the same. The French Communist Party, the PCF, supported the war in Algeria in the 1950s, and, now, if media reports are reliable, the French left supported the ban on the niqab as well. The level of police harassment associated with enforcement of the ban is ludicrous, consider, for example, the following:

The guide sent out last week to police notes that the burqa ban does not apply inside private cars, but it reminds officers that such cases can be dealt with under road safety rules.

The police presence in front of Notre Dame today, where 12 women participated in a protest against the ban, was predictably over the top:

Scores of plain clothes police, a riot van, several police vans and long police buses drivn in to take away 2 small women in a niqab

Sarkozy certainly spares no expense when it comes to street theatre for the purpose of entertaining the racist, sectarian part of his base. Women who wear the niqab now attract more cops than anarchists! The use of plain clothes police is particularly interesting. Will we soon be hearing of an effort to infiltrate the niqab movement by female undercover officers wearing the niqab themselves? All of this effort because of between 350 and 2,000 women in France who wear it. As Chuck D. of Public Enemy rapped decades ago, it takes a nation of millions to hold us back.

More seriously, though, there is a subtext here. And, you've probably already figured it out. In France, people like Sarkozy put forward the sinister notion that liberty, fraternity and equality are uniquely French, uniquely the creations of the European enlightenment. So much so, that, if necessary, they can be imposed upon balky people from purportedly feudal cultures, like those in the Islamic world, for example, by the police. Or, on a more international scale, they can used to justify the subjection of civilian populations in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan to military violence. No wonder that Sarkozy took the lead in launching airstrikes in Libya.

Labels: Eurocentrism, Europe, France, Islam, Libya, Police, Religion, Sarkozy

Sadly, the Angry Arab, As'ad Abukhalil is correct, the crowd of protesters would have been larger if Peretz weren't primarily known for his bigotry towards Muslims. But, a more serious question is how such a loathsome person rises to such a position of prominence in this society.

Labels: American Empire, Islam, Neoconservatives, Palestine, Racism, YouTube, Zionism

From today's Guardian:

In a speech at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the pope also praised Britain for its role in fighting Nazi Germany and forging the postwar consensus, but warned again of the dangers of what he termed aggressive secularism.

The pope said that even in his own lifetime, Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live.

Driving home a point that is expected to be central to his four-day visit, Benedict went on: As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the 20th century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a 'reductive vision of the person and his destiny'.

The quote was from his own encyclical on social and economic issues, Caritas in Veritate, published last year.

In what might be regarded as a less than warm endorsement, the pope noted that the UK strove to be a modern and multicultural society. In this challenging enterprise, may it always maintain its respect for those traditional values and cultural expressions that more aggressive forms of secularism no longer value or even tolerate. Let it not obscure the Christian foundation that underpins its freedoms.

His choice of words echoes controversial comments made yesterday by a senior Vatican adviser who claimed Britain discriminated against Christians, and likened arriving in multicultural Britain to visiting a third-world country.

Apparently, Benedict internalized the values that he encountered during his brief participation in the Hitler Youth than has ever been publicly acknowledged. Within the British context, and, perhaps, to a lesser degree in the American one as well, multiculturalism is primarily identified with the social acceptance of Muslims. His condescending remarks about the cultural diversity of British society, as well as those of his advisor, Cardinal Kasper, are thinly concealed expressions of racism and Islamophobia. They are providing spiritual sanction for those in Europe and the US who perceive Muslims as a threat that must be denied the civil liberties granted to the rest of the populace. Beyond this, Benedict and Kasper are suggesting that Europe has been spiritually degraded by the immigration of non-whites from around the world in recent decades. As Benedict ages, and becomes even more cantankerous, we can anticipate even more baldly bigoted statements from him.

Benedict's remarks about aggressive secularism should be equally alarming. In them, we see echoes of the Nazi condemnation of the Weimar Republic. Nazis described the republic as a cesspool of decadence, fouled by the activities of avant garde artists, Jews, Communists and sexual deviants. He perceives similar perils in atheism, feminism, publicly accepted homosexuality and, in substitution of Judaism, Islam. His Freudian slip of exhorting Britain to fight secularism with the zeal that it displayed against the Nazis makes the association explicit. Of course, the notion that there has been an exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life is preposterous, yet another example of how some intolerant Christians describe themselves as victims of oppression if not permitted to impose social norms on everyone else.

Labels: Christian Fundamentalism, Europe, Islam, Pope Benedict XVI, Racism, Religion, United Kingdom

More from Chris Brooke (again, best read from the bottom up):

Blair, p. 653: I met a very bouncy Sarkozy at the start of his Presidential campaign and told him that he sounded like Napoleon.

Blair, p. 645: And on social exclusion, you shd concentrate on dysfunctional families, not on poor people or young people in general.

Blair, p.644: in these speeches I gave lessons to my successors, eg that to deal with the criminal underclass you need draconian powers.

Blair, p. 634: Twice I thanked God for the independence of the British judiciary, over cash for honours and the Hutton inquiry.

Blair, p. 607: Putting campaign donors in the Lords is a murky business, but it is the system as it has operated for a long, long time.

Blair, p. 602: But it wasn't that I didn't get public opinion on Lebanon, nor that I cdn't have articulated it... I didn't agree with it.

Blair, p.600: If I condemned Israel, it wd be more than dishonest; it wd have undermined the worldview I had come to hold passionately.

Blair, p. 598: In Sept 2006 I visited Beirut... Unsurprisingly, I was not popular with many Lebanese people.

Blair, p.597: The occupation of Palestinian land may be an injustice, depending on yr viewpt, but this is a region w plenty of injustices.

Blair, p. 596: Israel is a government with a well-armed & well-trained army & air force. They do not target civilians.

Blair, p. 594, on the Israel / Lebanon war in 2006: That event, & my reaction to it, prob. did me more damage than anything since Iraq.

Blair throws around stupid metaphors, p. 592: the bazooka of outrage, the blowpipe of ridicule.

Blair, p. 591: Politicians shag around bc of the supreme self-control you have to exercise to be at the top.

Blair, p.585, thinks abt pensions, wanting a framework that over time wd...tilt the responsibility for provision from state to individual.

Blair, p. 577: Academies were great, because they were freed from extraordinarily debilitating & often politically correct interference.

After wading through these tweets, I have a number of observations. First, Blair's reflexive support for Israel, and, by extension, state violence generally, as expressed in similar remarks about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is remarkable. One gets the sense that there is no act of state violence that he would condemn, including the use of nuclear weapons. Although he apparently does not address it, Blair's perspective on the wars in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan suggest he believes that the US use of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was appropriate, and would probably support their use again, such as, for example, in an attempt to destroy Iran's nuclear research and power program.

Second, Blair reveals himself to be an autocratic figure in the tradition of late 19th Century and early 20th Century progressives as it relates to the working class and lower income people. He believes that workers should pay their own pensions with no state assistance, placing him squarely among those in the US who want to reduce Social Security and Medicare benefits, and consistently describes the lives of many low income people in pathological terms. Recall his comment, posted here yesterday: The right-wing phrase, underclass, was ugly, but it was accurate. People at the bottom had dysfunctional lives, full stop. Today, we get more elaboration: to deal with the criminal underclass you need draconian powers.

In this, Blair brings to mind the perpetual urban renewal efforts of the last century, most prominent in the 1930s and 1960s. Such efforts were usually justified by reference to the purported urgency of eliminating blight, an antiseptic term that identified lower middle income and low income communities as disease infested, crime ridden areas that must be destroyed so that they could be replaced by modern middle class neighborhoods. As a result, many vibrant lower middle income and lower income communities were forever lost, with their residents cast to the winds. Most recently, as noted by Yusef, the same sad transformation has taken place in post-Katrina New Orleans.

But Blair is more aggressive in his approach as he approved the installation of public surveillance equipment, greater police power and increased criminal penalties. In this, he again acted upon his adoration of the US, which has pioneered such measures as a solution to social disorder. Hence, he perceives the state as beset by threats from within and without, an international Islamic insurgency that will take decades to overcome, and an internal class of lumpenproletarians that invariably threaten to disrupt the lives of its citizens if not strictly controlled. While not explicit, he seems to perceive immigration as something that intensifies both threats, as he elsewhere states that the post-Holocaust asylum policy was no longer tenable. In effect, Blair possesses an extreme vision of a utopian, middle class consumer society, perhaps even more extreme than the one promoted by Thatcher and Reagan, as Blair lacks the residue of libertarian values, however slight, that motivated them. Of course, it can only be implemented by recourse to coercion and violence, which he readily embraces.

Labels: "War on Terror", American Empire, Iraq War, Iraqi Deaths, Islam, Neoconservatives, Neoliberalism, Police, Postmodernism, Racism, Religion, Tony Blair, United Kingdom

From the New York Times:

On Sunday, one day after a fire at the site of a planned Islamic center and mosque in the Nashville suburb of Murfreesboro, Muslim community members reported hearing gunshots as they inspected the damage.

Saleh Sbenaty, an engineering professor at Middle Tennessee State University who is on the the Islamic center’s planning committee, told The Daily News Journal of Murfreesboro that nine shots, in two volleys, were fired near the property while he and female family members looked at construction equipment burned in the fire. Mr. Sbenaty, who has lived in Tennessee for three decades, said, It was nothing like a hunting rifle.

If the religious right campaign of demonization of Muslims continues, the next Baruch Goldstein won't be traveling to Israel to perpetrate his crimes. And, he probably won't be Jewish, either. It is impossible to overstate the severity of this situation. We are close to the eruption of pogroms against Muslims in this country. It remains to be seen whether there will be a sufficient backlash to prevent it.

Labels: Islam, Political Violence, Racism, Religion, Sleeper Cells

UPDATE 2: More than 250 people cheered when the city of Mayfield, Kentucky denied a Somali group’s petition for a mosque.

Here's one local response:

I live in mayfield, Ky. where the proposed mosque was turned down. I am glad it was turned down! No one should critize us until you have lived here with these somalis, I have witnessed first hand their rude and disrespectful behavior toward the women here not just their women! You should also know that a somali was arrested here today for kidnapping, he tried to force a 12 year old girl into his car he is in jail as we speak. Just because they rape at will in their country they think it is ok to do so here, it is their religion to discipline women as they see fit. Their religion is not a peaceful religion. I wish they would all go back where they came from. They have cussed out utility workers and anyone who might cross them. So whoever said shame on us for not letting them worship, and that their door was open anytime for them, be careful what you wish for, you just might get 150 of them at your door, I sure wouldnt want that.

UPDATE 1:

I feel like I belong here, (like) I was born here. I've been here for a long, long time, he said. This city must be safe for everyone...All color, races, all religions. Everyone. We live here side by side, peacefully. Lovely.

But this is precisely the problem. The people opposing the mosques don't want to live side by side with Muslims, anymore than earlier generations wanted to live around Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos and Asians.

INITIAL POST: From Democracy Now!:

Ahmed Sharif picked up a passenger who hailed him at 24th Street and Second Avenue, and he was going toward Times Square. And, you know, the ride started out very smoothly. I mean, the man said, As-salaam Alaikum. And then, you know, he started asking questions: Where are you from? How long have you been here? How long have you been driving? Are you a Muslim? And then he asked him questions about Ramadan: Are you fasting? And then his questions about Ramadan were very disrespectful, and he started to mock, you know, the holy month. And at that point, Mr. Sharif just stopped talking to him. He realized something was up. He started just concentrating on the driving.

So, on Third Avenue, about 39th to 40th Streets, all of a sudden, after being quiet, the perpetrator got very loud, and he started screaming and started cursing at Mr. Sharif. And he said to him—you know, he said to him, Salaam Alaikum. Consider this a checkpoint. And Mr. Sharif was like, Checkpoint? You know, what do you mean, checkpoint? He said, Consider this a checkpoint. I need to bring Abdullah through the checkpoint. And then he took the knife out, and through the crack in the partition window, Mr. Sharif could see that, you know, he went to cut him across the neck.

So half of his neck is completely cut up. And as he tried to fight him off, he also has defensive wounds on his hand and on his shoulder. And the cut on his shoulder is extremely deep. And he has also one more wound on his face, on his upper lip. So, he’s bleeding profusely.

The assailant got out. He started running. Mr. Sharif was just screaming, Help! Help! Help! And then, you know, the car was moving slowly, and he kept moving the car. About two blocks later, he saw a police officer around 42nd Street and Third Avenue. He got out, and he told the police—and he’s bleeding. He told the police officer, Stop that man. He stabbed me. When the police officer caught him, he said, What happened here? And this guy said, I was trying to rob him. Mr. Sharif said, No, he wasn’t trying to rob me. You know, he said all of these hateful things to me about being Muslim, and that basically he wanted to teach him a lesson. And so, then the police were able to apprehend him, and they took him in at that point.

When I talked to Ahmed, you know, when he was still in his hospital bed, when we first saw him, you know, he couldn’t speak. When he was able to speak and I was able to talk to him, the first thing he said to me was we have to get the message out, because we can’t let this escalate, drivers need to protect themselves. He said the environment right now is very serious. There is no doubt in our minds that the fear mongering and the ignorance and the hatred that has been spewing around this Islamic cultural center—which has erroneously been called the Ground Zero mosque—we have no doubt that it’s that hatred that’s risen to the surface and that’s led to this violence.

The clock is ticking. Will people come together to resist the intensification of the demonization of Muslims in the US before it is too late?

Labels: Islam, Political Violence, Racism, Religion, Sleeper Cells

Assalamu alaikum — consider this a checkpoint!

No Temple for the God of terrorism at Ground Zero. ANB

A small explosion occurred about 9:35 p.m., just after the man was seen outside the mosque.

The vandals also cut a pipe, allegedly thinking that it was a natural gas line.

Back in the day, I participated in clinic defense in Davis and Sacramento when the religious right targeted clinics that provided abortion and birth control services. There was an arson of a clinic across from McKinley Park in East Sacramento. But that was mild compared to what happened elsewhere. Throughout much of the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a concerted campaign of anonymous threats and violence directed towards driving abortion clinics out of much of the country, and the perpetrators succeeded.

Now we are reliving the same experience, except that this time, Muslims are the target of the religious right. Just as its previous participants concluded that reproductive rights services could be eliminated by threatening the employees of such facilities and vandalizing them, the current generation is focusing upon mosques as a means of pursuing the goal of driving Muslims out of their communities. The methodology is a common one on the right, the populist instigation, with the the mainstream media serving as a megaphone, of factually unconnected acts of violence and intimidation in the service of a broader effort to prevail through fear.

Accordingly, in this instance, the media characterizes it primarily as a conflict in various places around the country over the construction of new mosques, a zoning dispute, as it were, with the so-called Ground Zero Mosque being the most highly publicized instance. But the question posed in relation to the proposed Islamic community center in New York City, how far away from Ground Zero is acceptable, get to the heart of the matter, because the answer is increasingly outside the United States, as opposition to two other mosques in the greater New York City region, as well as the eruption of opposition to mosque projects in other parts of the country, indicates.

So, through a combination of religious right intimidation and media hyperbole, the Islamic community center has already been reduced to the status of an the architectural equivalent of a Guantanamo detainee. Upon release, the US finds it difficult to find any country, including the detainees' country of origin, willing to accept them, and there is no location within the city in which the proponents of the community center can seek to construct it without vehement opposition. By concentrating on the conflict in Manhatten in the Hearst tradition, the media has participated in the intensification of more hostility towards Muslims even as it fails to connect the opposition to new mosque construction with the nascent effort to get rid of existing ones.

Hence, for the larger public, an emerging nativist campaign, reminiscent of the ones that resulted in the forced deportion of Latinos in 1930s and the subsequent internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s, remains largely unrecognized, allowing its religious right participants to manipulate populist sentiment to generate more support while ensuring that only the targets of its effort, Muslims, know their true intention. In fact, when one combines the opposition to new mosques with the vandalism directed towards existing ones, it becomes evident that the campaign can be summarized with the slogan Get Rid of the Muslims by Getting Rid of the Mosques. As the attack upon the taxi driver today suggests, we may be about to enter a more violent phase marked by random assaults upon Muslims consistent with the dramatic increase in hate crimes against them after 9/11.

Labels: Islam, Mainstream Media, Political Violence, Racism, Religion, Sleeper Cells

Yikes! Even a revered, internationalist Trotskyite like Tariq Ali has joined the abstentionist movement:

When asked if the experience of being a storyteller has softened the rigidity of his stance on the relationship between art and politics, he begins to talk again about his move "sideways" into films and Channel 4. Is he ever troubled by self-doubt? Yes I am. To be fair to myself . . . we had doubts even at the time. I never had any illusions about Stalinism or that style of society. What we hoped was that it would be replaced by something much better, instead of being a total regression. But that didn't happen.

His early non-fiction is stamped with the mark of total self-belief, and faith in the ideology for which he was fighting, which can lead to moments of unintended humour now. In Street Fighting Years, Ali describes how he asked Jagger to write out the words of Street Fighting Man, to be printed in facsimile in the Black Dwarf. He agreed immediately. We photographed the sheet of paper and I threw the original into the wastepaper basket. No one in the office thought this was sacrilegious. The cult of the individual is always a substitute for collective action.

Ali's intention on Thursday was not to vote – for the first time. I can't vote for New Labour, and of course the question of voting Conservative doesn't arise. I'll probably go and spoil my ballot, just so as not to be passive.

In the article, James Campbell describes Ali's decision to write fiction, especially the Islam Quintet, in light of the recent publication of the final novel in the series, Night of the Golden Butterfly:

He has not forsaken his opposition to neoliberal economic policies (capitalism, in a word) but is resigned to the fact that the predicted disintegration of the system has not occurred. It's a problem people have had to come to terms with at different times in history: what do you do in a period of defeat? In his case, the realignment took an unexpected form: he turned to writing fiction. The second act of the drama of Tariq Ali opened after the collapse of the Berlin wall in 1989.

I had already begun to shift my priorities, which were totally political until the early 1980s, by forming Bandung Films. Jeremy Isaacs, who was then head of Channel 4, asked me to make some programmes. Time to move off the streets and be on the other side, in terms of looking at people and not being one of them. But writing fiction, which involves months of solitary endeavour, was a new sort of commitment. Ali's first novel, Redemption, a roman à clef about feuding Trotskyites in London, was published in 1990. The next year he worked on an entirely different sort of story, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, which entered an imaginative realm no less important to him, the historical world of Islam. It depicts the conflict between Christians and Muslims at the end of the 15th century, during the Spanish inquisition, and was to be the first of a five-part series called the Islam Quintet. It is concluded with the publication this month of Night of the Golden Butterfly.

Having read the previous installments of the Quintet, I recommend them, and hope that Night of the Butterfly is up to the standard of its predecessors. Ali deserves credit for reinvigorating the tired genre of historical fiction with his own subjective vision of the past. All four are excellent, but I found the poignancy of the The Stone Woman, a novel set during final years of the Ottoman Empire, wherein the collapse of the old world is about to unleash the genocidal demons of a new one, particularly compelling. If there can be said to be a dominant theme that runs through all the novels, it is the horrible consequences that invariably ensue from religious intolerance.

Labels: Islam, Religion, Tariq Ali, Vote or Die

If you want an insight as to why US and UK forces have done so poorly in Iraq and Afghanistan, and why so many civilians have been killed, consider this from Britain:

Government names most influential 'pro-Islamic' bloggers was the headline on yesterday's story about a new report from the Home Office's counter-terrorism information unit, RICU. So, they've been rumbled at last, you might think.

But look more closely and you'll find that the man identified in the report as Britain's third most influential pro-Islamic blogger is actually an atheist based in the United States. As'ad AbuKhalil, a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State University who blogs as The Angry Arab is furious about it. How ignorant are the researchers of the Home Office? he writes. How many times does one have to espouse atheist, anarchist, and secular principles before they realise that their categorisation is screwed up?

He suspects that his blog was included because of its name. He rarely talks about religion on his blog, except when mocking the fatwas issued by reactionary clerics.

In this instance, Abukhalil is being uncharacteristically naive. A more plausible explanation is that one of the primary reasons for the placement of a blog on the Home Office list is his vehement espousal of anti-Zionism. So, if the blog appears to be written by someone from the Middle East, and rejects Zionism, then it must be pro-Islamic. One wonders how Electronic Intifada evaded discovery.

Anyone who has read Abukhalil's blog over the years immediately recognizes the absurdity of this designation. For example, look at this post from 2005:

Sunday, August 21, 2005

Angry Candidate? No way. I had made a cryptic reference to this. Peter Camejo of the Green Party asked me 2 weeks ago to consider running for the US Senate in 2006 against Sen. Diane Feinstein. Today, I sent him this letter:

"Dear Peter: I owed it to you, and to the progressive movement that you are a strong part of, to give the most serious consideration to a very flattering offer, although I never ever thought of running for any office, not even for the local district Commissioner of Potatoes. There were undeniable temptations, especially on a ticket of the party that is closest to my views and ideas. There would have been a great platform, and an opportunity to go against a demagogic and highly ambitious establishment senator, whose views on domestic and foreign policies are anathema to mine. I also would have liked to have contributed to the progressive movement in California that the Green Party, and you personally, has energized especially in recent years. But then there were the negatives: I have had an aversion, since childhood--if not before--to any signs of outside influences, control, and management of my person and my views--particularly in the way that I express them--even from a party that is as progressive as the Green Party. And this control and management are inevitable in a campaign--small or big. I also could not with a clear conscience go around the state asking people for their votes knowing that I myself would not vote for myself, or for anybody for that matter. I probably at some level also feared that appealing to people's support may change me, or moderate me. That would be scary, for me. Furthermore, I do not, as an anarchist, believe in the American political and electoral systems, and thus do not harbor hopes, or illusions, of change "from within" so to say, although I remain optimistic of the prospects for progressive change on a global scale, affecting us here in the US. For this reason, and others, I will kindly decline the offer but hope that we manage to maintain contact and dialogue, and to cooperate on future projects. Greetings to all, and I express my gratitude for thinking of my name. I shall continue to play my small and modest role, from the very outside of the system, as an angry contrarian and counter-contrarian and counter-counter-contrarian.
As`ad"

And, of course, there are the numerous posts ridiculing the Saudi royal family and various Islamic religious figures, especially those associated with Lebanon.

Humorously enough, turns out one blogger did acknowledge that his blog was, in fact, pro-Islamic, but didn't find the designation very useful:

So, this is not a very useful piece of research. Its main flaw is that it’s out of date, and blogs are usually individual efforts which come and go as the author sees fit. The most successful are the group blogs such as Muslim Matters, but that site (which has commented on British political and community matters on a number of occasions) isn’t mentioned on the report. While it’s nice to get recognition and to get my blog mentioned in the Guardian, the ranking really doesn’t mean anything given the lack of valid and current data to back it up.

Shoddy research displeases everyone, apparently.

Labels: "War on Terror", Alternative Media, Anarchism, Islam, Palestine, United Kingdom

No, the New York Times isn't talking about a Tory, some especially obnoxious backbencher known for making inflammatory comments to turn out his Olde England base. No, it's Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party:

The occasion was the appearance on “Question Time,” the BBC’s flagship politics program, of Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party, whose goal to “take back Britain” includes incentives that encourage the mass repatriation of Britain’s nonwhite immigrants, coupled with a deep hostility to Islam, which Mr. Griffin has described as “a wicked and vicious faith.” He has also spoken of his “repugnance” for lesbians and gays, and advocated the end of civil contracts for same-sex relationships.

His record includes having denied the Holocaust, suggesting that some of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau were built after World War II for the purposes of Jewish propaganda, and conceding, under questioning by a biographer, that Hitler may have made some mistakes. “Yes,” he said, according to the biographer, Dominic Carman, “Adolf went a bit too far.”

Awfully big tent they have over at the Times, one that accidentally supports the conflation of Anglo American imperialism, both domestically and abroad, with racism, religious intolerance and homophobia. One can only imagine what Jack Nelson would have said about it. After all, the Times couldn't even describe Griffin accurately in the headline as a racial separatist, but, I guess that designation is reserved for black nationalists. As to the larger, more troubling problem regarding the legitimation of the BNP as a respectable political movement, lenin, over at Lenin's Tomb, has addressed it extensively over the last month or so.

Labels: Islam, Mainstream Media, New York Times, Racism, United Kingdom

Today is one year after the London bombings, and Britons observed the grim anniversary by paying tribute to the victims:

At Edgware Road, where six innocent people died, the station manager organised a floral tribute of irises and carnations for the bereaved families.

Susannah Pall, 25, a City broker who was on the Circle line train which had a number of carriages destroyed in the blast, said she returned to the scene as part of the healing process.

Ms Pall, who has not travelled on the Underground since the bombings, said: "I've been building up to this day. I was going to stay away but decided to come.

"You've got to do these things. Until I do it, I can't move on - it's all part of the catharsis process."

At Aldgate, poems and messages of support were added to a burgeoning floral tribute outside neighbouring St Botolph church.

A book of condolence was placed on a lectern by the gates for passers-by and those affected by the tragedy to sign.

Carrie Taylor, a 24-year-old finance officer at the Royal Society of Arts, was killed in the blast. She came from Billericay in Essex.

A message from her relatives read: "Carrie, we will never forget you, rest in peace. Anne, Danny, May, Dave and David."

At Russell Square the station fell silent as transport staff, police officers and passengers remembered the 26 people who lost their lives on the Piccadilly line train last year.

Relatives and survivors who gathered outside the station tearfully hugged one another as they laid floral tributes to their loved ones.

But why was London a target of such gruesome violence? Anti-terrorism specialists have briefed Scotland Yard officers in a way that points to the inescapable truth:

After the London bombings, British counter-terrorism officials intensified their efforts to understand why some Muslims turned to violence. The document, which has been seen by the Guardian, is the product of that work, and was completed within the past three months before being distributed to senior officers across London. The document says in a headline introducing one section: "Foreign policy and Iraq; Iraq HAS [its emphasis] had a huge impact."

It continues: "Iraq is cited many times in interviews with detained extremists but it is over-simplistic to describe terrorism as the result of foreign policy. What western foreign policy does provide is justification for violence ..."

It says changing jihadist attitudes is a long term issue: "Whatever preventative measures are taken or discussed around the world, none are comprehensive and early results are not expected. Many jihadists do not feel that 'winning' is important because God will see to that eventually - what is important is 'taking part'."

The report says the removal of grievances the jihadists use to justify violence will take time: "What will change them - gradually - is argument, the removal of justifying causes (Palestine, Iraq), the erosion of perverted beliefs and day-to-day frustrations."

Of course, it is beyond the pale of acceptable discourse to state that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has so angered Muslims around the world that they are now willing to act violently against the perpetrators of them. It is, as the report states, oversimplistic, evading the fact that terrorism in Britain, prior to the invasion, was not the province of Muslims. Conversely, Davey D. of Hard Knock Radio had no difficulty finding people in the crowd along Edgeware Road, during the afternoon after the bombings, who recognized that the bombings were a direct response to the war in Iraq.

So, the authors of the report rely upon a fiction to convey the more disturbing truth about Iraq to its Scotland Yard audience: Jihadists are relying upon hostility towards the war and occupation of Iraq to justify violence that they have already decided to inflict upon us. No doubt there are hard core jihadists committed to taking violent action against the United States and Britain, regardless of what has transpired in Iraq, although even here, even in the case of al-Qaeda, it is highly dubious, if not erroneous, to disassociate such violent intentions from political motivations, as Pat Buchanan has correctly observed on a number of occasions.

Furthermore, this fiction leads to questions that lack credible answers. For example, if the threat of future terror attacks in London has palpaply increased, as asserted by Metropolitan Police Chief Ian Blair, how can this be possible if the people motivated to carry out such attacks had a predisposition to do so prior to the war in Iraq? It would seem that the only plausible response to this question is an absurd one, namely that Great Britain has a significant number of Muslims bent upon violence who lacked the fortitude to follow through upon their convictions until the British participated in the invasion of Iraq. It all sounds very much like the stereotypical view of Arabs promoted by Zionists and other supporters of Israel. Arabs are violent, yet cowardly, until prompted to inflict violence upon others as a juvenile emotional response to external events.

Last year, the people in the Edgeware Road crowd knew better. The bombers responded to our violence with their violence, and there is something culturally demeaning in a perspective, as implied by the authors of the report, that Americans and Britains use violence in a calculated way to achieve allegedly acceptable ends, but that Arabs and Muslims merely exploit current events to justify it. In other words, they, unlike us, lack the human qualities of anger, thought and commitment, and indeed, transformation, such that some may have concluded that they only way to confront the perpetrators of the war and occupation, in both Iraq and Palestine, is through violence.

A lamentable, tragic decision, to be sure, but no less so than the ones by Britain and the United States to invade and, apparently, permanently occupy Iraq, and the insistence of Israel to permanently colonize the West Bank and Gaza. And, of course, the dead in Gaza, Ramadi, Haditha, Jenin, Fallujah . . . they are just numbers, if reported at all, and if there have been flowers laid and tears shed, as they justifiably have been for the victims of 7/7/05, it has failed to capture our imagination.

Labels: "War on Terror", 7/7/05, Al Qaeda, Iraq War, Islam, Occupation of Iraq, Tony Blair

According to the New York Times today, the military has almost broken the hunger strike there:

United States military authorities have taken tougher measures to force-feed detainees engaged in hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after concluding that some were determined to commit suicide to protest their indefinite confinement, military officials have said.

In recent weeks, the officials said, guards have begun strapping recalcitrant detainees into "restraint chairs," sometimes for hours a day, to feed them through tubes and prevent them from deliberately vomiting afterward. Detainees who refuse to eat have also been placed in isolation for extended periods to keep them from being pressured by other hunger strikers, the officials said.

The measures appear to have had drastic effects. The chief military spokesman at Guantánamo, Lt. Col. Jeremy M. Martin, said yesterday that the number of detainees on hunger strike had dropped, from 84 at the end of December to 4.

In the article, lawyers for the detainees relate a number of harrowing stories:

. . . Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, said one of his three Bahraini clients, Jum'ah al-Dossari, told him about 10 days ago that more than half of a group of 34 long-term hunger strikers had abandoned their protest after being strapped in restraint chairs and having their feeding tubes inserted and removed so violently that some bled or fainted.

"He said that during these force feedings too much food was given deliberately, which caused diarrhea and in some cases caused detainees to defecate on themselves," Mr. Colangelo-Bryan added. "Jum'ah understands that officers told the hunger strikers that if they challenged the United States, the United States would challenge them back using these tactics."

One must ask the disquieting question as to whether US troops at Guantanamo inflict such pain and humiliation upon detainees because of contempt for their Muslim beliefs. As former Army chaplain James Yee explained:

. . . in general, there was extreme anti-Muslim hostility throughout the base of Guantanamo, not only towards Muslim prisoners, but also towards U.S. Muslim personnel. And there were a number of things that I observed that indicated this. I came across emails, for example, that referred to Muslims as quote, “ragheads.” Requests for religious accommodation of Muslims, so that they could adhere to Islamic diet and have Halal meats -- Halal meats, meat that's properly slaughtered according to Islamic guidelines -- requests for Islamic diets for Muslim soldiers was denied by General Miller. Interesting, I was able to ensure that the Muslim prisoners had Halal diets, had Islamic diets, but I wasn't able to find support to support the Muslim soldiers for their Halal diets.

There were other things. One translator, a civilian translator, he ended up resigning from his position with Titan, the civilian company that provides -- that provided civilian translators when I was down there, resigned from his job because he was being routinely designed permission to attend the Friday service prayer, obligatory on Muslims on Friday afternoons. And that disturbed him to the extent that he would quit his job.

Of course, no one should be subjected to the abuse inflicted upon detainees at Guantanamo, but it is obligatory to observe that there is strong evidence that many of them, perhaps a majority, have no connection to al-Qaeda or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Labels: "War on Terror", American Culture, American Empire, Guantanamo, Islam, Sadomasochism