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Chronology of Islam in America (2011)
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
August 2011
Allen West hosts congress screening of anti-Islam film
Aug 1: Rep. Allen West (R-FL) will host a screening of a forty-five minute anti-Islam film about 9/11 and the efforts of the anti-Muslim community to stop the building of the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque.” The makers of the film, the Christian Action Network (CAN), have been refused a permit by the City of New York to allow the film to be screened in public parks. CAN, and the American Center for Law & Justice, are now threatening a lawsuit against New York City. “We are truly honored to have Congressman West sponsor this event, and take his time to host these 9/11 family members and show his opposition to the Ground Zero Mosque,” said Jason Campbell, Projects Director for the Christian Action Network. “The film will be screened following brief remarks from Congressman West and 9/11 family members.” David Badash of New Civil Rights Movement questioned, why is Rep. Allen West hosting a film about New York City — an area not in his Florida district? And, is there a separation of church and state issue here too? (New Civil Rights Movement)
Muslims in U.S. optimistic about future, poll finds
Aug 2: Ten years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Muslim Americans are more optimistic than other major faith groups about their future, even as they report greater discrimination and less confidence in the FBI and the U.S. military, a new poll has found. In the report by Gallup, which measures American Muslims’ political, social and spiritual engagement, almost two in three Muslims said their standard of living is improving, up 18 percentage points from 2008 and higher than any other faith group surveyed. This is the same period that Muslim leaders say has been the most oppressive for Muslims in this country, with rhetoric against their faith group appearing to rise. Gallup analysts credited Muslims’ optimism in part to the election of President Obama, who has not appeared at an American mosque since taking office but has often spoken out about the need for Muslim equality and civil rights. Only 9 percent of American Muslims identify as Republicans, Gallup said. Eighty percent of Muslims in America said in 2011 that they approve of Obama, vs. 7 percent who expressed support for President George W. Bush in 2008.
At the same time, Muslim Americans are the religious group least likely to be registered to vote: 65 percent compared with 91 percent of Protestant Americans and Jewish Americans. The report’s authors speculated that this may be because many Muslim Americans are immigrants who have not yet become citizens (the poll did not ask respondents about citizenship) and because Muslim Americans tend to be younger than people of other religions, a trait associated with low voter registration levels. American Muslims were more likely than people of other religions to see the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a mistake, and they are significantly more likely to blame anti-Americanism in Muslim countries on U.S. policy, rather than on misinformation spread by those countries’ leaders and media. The report was done by the Abu Dhabi Gallup Center, a Dubai-based partnership between Gallup and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi that is meant to expand polling across the Muslim world. The study was based on several polls conducted from 2008 to 2011, including follow-up interviews with 2,482 adults, including 475 Muslims. (Washington Post)
Gaffney wonders if Norwegian terrorist’s manifesto was a ‘false flag operation’
intended to ‘suppress criticism’ of Sharia
Aug 3: Soon after the horrific terror act in Norway last month, it was revealed that the killer was neither a jihadist nor Muslim, but rather a right-wing Christian Norwegian named Anders Breivik. Breivik’s 12-minute video manifesto outlined the killer’s conservative beliefs, including that President Obama is a Marxist and that “Christian soldiers” and “cultural conservatives” should rise up against “multiculturalism” and Muslims. ThinkProgress examined the sources Breivik used in his manifesto and found, unsurprisingly, a glut of Islamophobic bloggers and pundits among the citations. ThinkProgress spoke with one of the conservative figures Breivik cited, Frank Gaffney, during the Western Conservative Summit last weekend. We asked Gaffney if it was concerning that his rhetoric was being used for violent ends. Rather than reconsidering his outlandish views, Gaffney eschewed Occam’s Razor and took a far different view: Breivik’s manifesto may actually be a hoax planted by the Muslim Brotherhood. The Center for Security Policy president called for a “thorough investigation as to whether it was in fact an authentic piece of his own creation, whether it’s a false flag operation, whether it actually was meant to do anything other than to contribute to Sharia’s efforts to suppress criticism and awareness of its agenda.” He closed by noting he could “absolutely” see the Muslim Brotherhood perpetrating this kind of fraud. (ThinkProgress)
The dichotomy between Islam and the West is fictitious,
yet it is accepted by both the Left and the Right as real
Aug 3: The systemic machination behind the demonization of Muslims as a menace to humanity is not limited to a Neoconservative and Zionist operation. When it comes to Muslims as epitome of evil, the list in fact swings all the way from the Right to the Left. The anxiety of identifying the Muslim with the Left is the anxiety of the enemy within. But when we catch the Left itself using the Muslim as a metaphor of banality and terror then we are onto something far deeper in the inner anxiety of the thing that calls itself "the West". Consider this phrase: "He is a caliph, I suppose, almost of the Middle Eastern variety." This is Robert Fisk, the distinguished British journalist, probably furthest in his political disposition from Samuel Huntington and their ilk - and this is the opening sentence of an article he wrote on July 11, 2011 for The Independent in which he shared his thoughts on Mr Rupert Murdoch at the height of the phone hacking scandal in the UK. Why that curious opening - why a "caliph", of all things, of "the Middle Eastern variety"? What other variety of caliphs do we have, anyway? Scandinavian caliphs? Australian, British? There is only one kind of caliph. The word comes from the Arabic Khalifa, meaning representative, vicegerent. It was first used in its historic meaning in the aftermath of Prophet Muhammad's death in 632 CE, when Abu Bakr, his comrade, succeeded him. Abu Bakr and his supporters opted for the humble title of "representative of the Prophet of God", not wishing to pretend they were equal to him. Other successors of the prophet followed suit and kept calling themselves "caliph", until finally the first and second Arab dynasties of the Umayyads (661-750) and the Abbasids (750-1258) were formed and they called their institution a "caliphate". Other dynasties such the Ottomans (1299–1923) also at times used that title.
Now, were some of these caliphs (as any other monarch or queen or Caesar or Pope) corrupt, authoritarian, wealthy, and such - of course they were. But why when it comes for a metaphor of corruption, banality, and tyranny, Mr Fisk cannot think of a metaphor from his own back yard: Popes, Caesars, British monarchs, perhaps, "Bloody Mary", Il Duce, Mein Führers? Why Middle Eastern caliphs - when referring to Rupert Murdoch, AC, KSG, an Australian-American global media baron - where that AC officially coming after his name stands for The Order of Australia, an order of chivalry established by Elizabeth II, Queen of Australia, and that KSC for "The Pontifical Equestrian Order of St. Gregory the Great (Ordo Sancti Gregorii Magni)" established by Pope Gregory XVI in 1831? There are plenty of metaphors to work within all of that. Why "a caliph, I suppose, almost of the Middle Eastern variety?" Why could Robert Fisk not "suppose" any of these real things and reach for "almost" something else other than a "Middle Eastern" metaphor? It is not just Robert Fisk. The syndrome is an epidemic. The Muslim is a metaphor of menace, banality, and terror everywhere - from the Right all the way to the Left.
The Muslim is a metaphor of menace
Here is another prominent example. Lewis H. Lapham, the distinguished former editor of Harper's Magazine, a singularly progressive left-leaning American critic of US imperialism, too would not hesitate for a minute invoking Islamic metaphors when he wants to denigrate and dismiss his conservative opponents. In a critical review of David Frum and Richard Perle's horrid book, An End to Evil: How to Win The War on Terror (2003), Lapham unabashedly ridicules Frum and Perle's book for having borrowed their inspirations from "the verses of the Koran", for issuing "fatwas" like Osama bin Laden, and for summoning "all loyal and true Americans to the glory of jihad" - all the while calling them "Mullah Frum", "Mufti Perle", or "the two Washington ayatollahs", concluding: "Provide them [Frum and Perle] with a beard, a turban, and a copy of the Koran, and I expect that they wouldn't have much trouble stoning to death a woman discovered in adultery with a cameraman from CBS News." If Lapham needs to invoke the best metaphor for an unquotable propaganda prose, he cannot think of a better example than the Qur'an, nor does he pause for a moment to think through the implications of what he says: “As with all forms of propaganda, the prose style [of Frum and Perle's book] doesn't warrant extensive quotation, but I don't do the authors a disservice by reducing their message to a series of divine commandments. Like Muhammad bringing the word of Allah to the widow Khadija and the well Zem-Zem, they aspire to a tone of voice appropriate to a book of Revelation.” If Lapham needs an appropriate allegory for indoctrinating hatred, and terror, Islam and the Qur'anic language are handy: “The result of their [Frum and Perle's] collaboration is an ugly harangue that if translated into Arabic and reconfigured with a few changes of word and emphasis (the objects of fear and loathing identified as America and Israel in place of Saudi Arabia and the United Nations) might serve as a lesson taught to a class of eager jihadis at a madrasa in Kandahar.” Examples abound and are not limited to Harper's Magazine. Pages of The Nation magazine, another Left-Liberal periodical in the United States, are replete with derogatory references to conservative adversaries again using Islamic metaphors: mullahs, madrasah, turbans, verses from the Qur'an, etc. The Florida pastor Terry Jones who burned the Quran is an easy target - he is just a simple and honest racist man carrying his bigoted heart up his sleeves. People with a far superior claim to progressive, liberal, left, and tolerant ideals have been at work here sustaining "the Muslim" as a metaphor of evil for a very long time. [Muslims and metaphors by Hamid Dabashi – Al Jazeera, August 3, 2011]
Muslim scholars help perpetuate the Islam-West dichotomy
The issue is how did Muslims become a singularly dominant metaphor for menace, terror, and mendacity. In thinking through that transmutation, even a larger frame of reference is at work. It is not just Europeans or Americans, and it is not just the Left or the Right, that use and abuse Islamic terms freely as metaphors of dismissal and denigration, vilification and disparagement. The practice is predicated on a more fundamental binary opposition established between "Islam and the West" - a binary that Muslims themselves have been historically instrumental in using and thus corroborating. The binary has been manufactured, corroborated, and driven home by no other Orientalist, dead or alive, more adamantly, more doggedly, more persistently than Bernard Lewis. But Muslims themselves have bought into that binary. Every time, to this day, a Muslim or Arab scholar, journalist, activist, public intellectual uncritically uses the delusional term "the West" - "the West did that" or "the West will do the other thing" - she or he is corroborating the binary between "Islam and the West" - two vastly vacuous appellations that rob reality of its paradoxes, ironies, contradictions, self-effacements. It makes no difference if you say, as Dinesh D'Souza or Niall Ferguson would, that "the West" is God's grandest gift to humanity, or reversing that and say that "the West" is the source of all horror in the world - in either case you are corroborating the amoral authenticity of a reference that ipso facto posits and negates "Islam" and thus transmutes Muslims into a solid metaphor of menace and mendacity.
As manufactured in "the West," in the battle of metaphors between "Islam and the West", "the West" is good, "Islam" is bad. "The West" is Cowboys, "Islam" the Indians. As an Arab or a Muslim you may reverse the order, but you will only exacerbate the binary opposition, the delusion that clouds reality. Arabs and Muslims are as much at fault for cross-authenticating "the West" and positing it as the primary frame of moral reference, within which Islam and Muslims are staged as metaphors of evil and banality. Where the Left and the Right come together is thus the constitution of Muslim as the civilisational other, the ontological alterity, of the sand castle that must call itself "the West" or else it will doubt and dissolve itself back into the shadow of its own nullity. In seeing through this epistemic free-play of signs, it is not sufficient, necessary, or even advisable to go back to the European history of Orientalism, to Dante's Divine Comedy (1308-1321), or Mozart's The Abduction from the Seraglio (1782), or even as far back as Aeschylus' The Persians (472 BC) on a goose chase after the origin of "the Oriental" and later its rendition of "the Muslim" as the supreme other of "the West". There was no "West" at the time of Aeschylus or even Dante - and the Orientalism of each one of these eras differs from the other.
That kind of historicism dilutes the issue and confuses the focal point of iteration through which the delusion of "the West" keeps repeating in order to continue to believe in itself. We need surgical precision as to how and when and for what purpose is the figure of the Muslim posited as the supreme metaphor of menace - for instant, knee-jerk reaction. Who benefits from this spontaneity, which invokes it, and to what effect, and with what barefaced persistence. Yes indeed, the constitution of "Muslim" as a metaphor of mendacity and menace to civility and society is predicated on older tropes. But today it is the handiwork of North American, Western European, and Israeli journalism (three specific sites for three specific reasons), and as such it is now exposed for the hideous lesion that it is on the body politics of a constitutionally flawed narrative that has perpetrated unfathomable terror on generations of Muslim children and their parents around the globe - frightening them out of their wits that there is something constitutionally wrong with who and what they are. The world is no longer at the mercy of this corrupt cacophony of power and wealth. They have analyzed and terrorized us enough. It is time to get even, expose and theorize them back. . [Muslims and metaphors by Hamid Dabashi – Al Jazeera, August 3, 2011]
Robertson and Spencer agree: Media love Islam 'Cult' because they hate America
Aug 3: Anti-Muslim activist Robert Spencer joined Pat Robertson on The 700 Club today to discuss the increased scrutiny of Spencer’s writings after it came to light that they were frequently cited by the right-wing Norway terrorist who killed scores of progressive youth activists and government employees. Robertson, whose American Center for Law and Justice worked with Spencer to organize a rally opposing the construction of an Islamic community center near Ground Zero, previously said that people who “oppose Muslims” am like himself are similar to those who fought “Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.” Spencer told Robertson, who was upset that no one in the media was telling “the truth about this cult,” that the “hard left” media hate America and Christianity, and therefore “love” radical Islam. Later in the program, Robertson blasted the “anti-American” media for embracing “something out of the Eighth Century B.C.” (note: Muhammad was born in 570 AD) and denounced Islam for supposedly endorsing violence and restricting the rights of women (things Robertson has never, ever supported). Robertson: Tell me what it is about the media today that seems to be in favor of radical Islam, why do they want to put down anybody who tells the truth about this cult? Spencer: Well I tell you I think the unpleasant truth about it is, is that the media being hard left is essentially anti-American. And so anything that’s American, that’s Western, that’s Christian, that’s Judeo-Christian, they hate. And so they see Islam and it’s non-Western and non-Christian and they love it. (Right Wing Watch)
Continued on page two
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