Sabbah Report » anti-islam

Manufacturing the Muslim Menace [Satire]

Mantiq al-Tayr — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 18:44:05 +0000

WARNING: STRONG LANGUAGE

By Mantiq al-Tayr * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

1. Today I just want to do a couple of things quickly. First of all, Skulz Fontaine has been sending me some great stuff and I've been a bit remiss in not sharing some of these with you. I like this one.

But of course the land theft continues, as does the killing – killing Palestinians being the Israeli national pass time. Plus it just seems that attacking, harrasing and shooting at Palestinians is as Israeli as assaulting the USS Liberty.

2. But I want to address something else as the main topic today. What some people like to call Islamophobia – I call it what it is – Anti-Muslim Bigotry – in the United States is getting out of hand. Our country is sick and we need to understand the source of this sickness and do something about it. One good place for you to go as you begin searching for the source is an article I've linked to before by Max Blumenthal. It is here. And here's another real interesting one. And you should read all about David Horowitz – who pays Robert Spencer something like 132k a year to write his bullshit. I strongly recommend you go to Loonwatch and do a search on David Horowitz. Oh hell, I'll do it for you.

And this brings me to:

3. But I also want to draw your attention to something else. Islamphobia is being actively supported by local, state and federal governments and law enforcement. Anti-Muslim hatemongers routinely train local, state and federal officials to hate Islam and Muslims and it looks like they get good money for it. I tell you, I am in the wrong business, but I digress.

It is very possible that these hate mongers have trained people in your community and your state and for sure some of them have been saying some real interesting bullshit to people in the federal government. I mean real wackos like Nonie Darwish and Walid Phares and Steve Coughlin.

I can hear you know, "Okay, Mantiq, prove this. How come you haven't provided one single link under this topic whereas you are always linking everything to everything else and we can't even finish your goddamn posts because we are running of all over hell's half acre reading your links?

Never, fear. Your link is here. It is to a new 80-page study of this phenomenon done by Thomas Cincotta of Political Research Associates. It is entitled:

Manufacturing the Muslim Menace: Private Firms, Public Servants and the Threat to Rights and Security. It's a nice PDF file and you can download the whole thing for free.

Here is an excerpt from the preface to the report about how effectively your public officials are being trained:

"Kill them, including the children."

That's how to solve the threat of violent militant Muslims?

The above quote is from what one official involved in homeland security said was how she understood the underlying theme of a speech by Walid Shoebat at an anti-terrorism training in Las Vegas in October 2010. Our investigator had turned around after Shoebat's speech and asked the woman seated one row back what she thought was the solution offered by Shoebat.

The report focuses on three private training outfits and the loons who work for them. They are:

A. the International Counter-Terrorism Officers Association (ICTOA)
B. Security Solutions International, LLC (SSI)
C. The Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies (CI Centre)

I like how the CI Centre (where Walid Phares plies his trade) spells centre the British way. Makes them look cool.

And the report has a section on each of the following people who work for one of the three firms mentioned above:

Mark A. Gabriel – ICTOA guest speaker
David Gaubatz – SSI guest speaker
Walid Phares – CI Centre Faculty
Clare M. Lopez – CI Centre Faculty
Tawfik Hamid – CI Centre Faculty
Stephen Coughlin – CI Centre Faculty
Nonie Darwish – CI Centre Faculty
Detective Ebrahim Ashabi – SSI Expert
Walid Shoebat – ICTOA Guest Speaker

This report is a must read and it is free. Send it to your congressmen and your state representatives and demand that your state, local and federal governments stop funding these modern-day equivalents of the Ku Klux Klan.

4. There are five million decoy Muslims in the US. They are here to trick you and then to kill you.

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drQETQ2iprU
(I bet Shas Party members won't get this.)

5. Shakira law spreads to MUST (Missouri University for Science and Technology)

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=626Z2wmieUo

* Mantiq al-Tayr is a blogger who is attempting to wake up other American citizens to the true dangers and challenges which face their country and is devoted to justice for the Palestinian people. Truth is his objective, satire is his tool. He also enjoys reading the Qur'an from time to time. See his website.

Yale University’s Pro-Israeli, Anti-Islamic Conference

Stephen Lendman — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:09:18 +0000

By Stephen Lendman* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

On August 25, Yale University ended a three day global anti-Semitism "crisis" conference promoting the notion that Israeli criticism is "anti-Semitic," no matter how justified.

Boola boola, for shame, mighty Yale displaying the same type anti-Islamic hatred virulent throughout America, raging daily in headlines over the proposed New York City Islamic cultural center, falsely called a mosque, but does it matter?

What matters is racism, hate-mongering, and persecuting Muslims for political advantage - on display at Yale for a three day propaganda hate fest. Imagine what's taught in its classrooms.

The Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA)

Calling itself "dedicated to the scholarly research of the origins and manifestations associated with antisemitism globally, as well as other forms of prejudice, including racisms, as it relates to policy," YIISA presented its conference, at a time the supposed "crisis" is more rhetoric than reality.

Yet its mission statement states:

"Anti-Judaism (or) Antisemitism is one of the most complex and, at times, perplexing forms of hatred, (emerging) in numerous ideological(ly) based narratives and the constructed identities of belonging and otherness such as race and ethnicity, nationalisms, and anti-nationalisms." In modern globalized times, "it appears that Antisemitism has taken on new complex and changing forms that need to be decoded, mapped and critiqued."

What's needed is debunking the relationship between legitimate Israeli criticism and anti-Semitism and notion of a serious anti-Jewish crisis when none, in fact, exists.

Last October 29, Reuters reported that:

"Anti-Semitic attitudes in the United States are at a historic low, with 12 percent of Americans prejudiced toward Jews, an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) survey found," based on September 26 - October 4 polling with a plus or minus 2.8% margin of error.

ADL said its level matched 1998's as the lowest in the poll's 45-year history. Yet in his 2003 book, "Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism," national director, Abraham Foxman, said he's:

"convinced we currently face as great a threat to the safety of the Jewish people as the one we faced in the 1930s - if not a greater one," contradicted by Cato Institute research fellow Leon Hadar (in the January 2004 Chronicles), saying that public opinion polls "indicate (racial and religious forms of) anti-Semitism (have) been in steep decline in most of Western Europe." The same holds for America, putting a lie to Yale's "crisis" and need for a conference to hawk it.

Badly needed are efforts to expose and denounce anti-Islamic rhetoric, actions and persecutions of people for their religion and/or ethnicity, but don't expect Yale to hold it or discuss it in classrooms.

YIISA stacked its conference with pro-Israeli zealots, omitting voices for sanity and the right of Palestinians to live free of occupation in their own land or in one state affording everyone equal rights, an apparent blasphemous notion at Yale and many other US and Canadian campuses, firing even distinguished tenured professors for supporting the wrong religion or people too vigorously.

Opening conference remarks were made by YIISA Director, Dr. Charles Small, Yale's Deputy Provost, Frances Rosenbluth, Rabbi James Ponet, director of Yale's Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life, and Aviva Raz Schechter, Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs Director for Combatting Antisemitism.

They all, of course, presented one-sided, pro-Israeli views, underscoring the notion that Israeli criticism is anti-Semetic, when, in fact, it's principled, honest and more needed now than ever to expose and halt an Israeli/Washington partnership to conquer, divide and control the Middle East by force, stealth, deceit, intimidation, occupation, and political chicanery, common tools used by rogues and imperial marauders.

Hebrew University Professor Menahem Milson was the first of several keynote speakers. He's also Chairman of the extremist Middle East Research Institute (MEMRI), whose board and advisors include a rogue's gallery of pro-Israeli right-wing zealots, including:

Its board of advisors includes:

Other YIISA presenters included (among others):

Noticeably absent were notable figures from the Palestinian community as well as US truth and justice scholars and analysts who base their views on facts YIISA wants suppressed. There was no James Petras, Ilan Pappe, Jeff Halper, Joel Kovel, Norman Finkelstein, Rashid Khalidi, Phyllis Bennis, Uri Avnery, Neve Gordon, Nurit Peled-Elhannan, Ramzy Baroud, or any of the thousands of equal justice advocates listed on a so-called "Shit List," including this writer given three unsympathetic paragraphs.

Instead, numerous speakers discussed provocative topics, including:

Final Comments

On August 25, Mondoweiss co-founder Philip Weiss discussed the conference, quoting Charlotte Kates (writer, organizer, and National Lawyers Guild Middle East Subcommittee Co-Chair) saying:

the people invited "who attack Palestinian scholars' academic freedom find conferences such as this to be perfectly acceptable and legitimate."

Weiss added that it's not "possible to understand this conference without understanding the prominence of Zionist donors in prestige institutional life." He also quoted journalist/author Ben White, specializing in Israeli/Palestine issues, saying:

"What is the role of Yale/academia in this kind of exercise?" It's particularly galling and hypocritical that "fighting anti-Semitism - an anti-racist struggle - is being openly appropriated by far-right Zionist groupings, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, lobbyists like the NGO Monitor, and Orientalist 'Arab/anti-terror experts."

It's especially disturbing that Yale lent its name to a three day hate fest, supporting:

Shamefully, presentations excluded discussions about Islam's common roots with Judaism and Christianity, its tenets based on:

Also not addressed was the right of Palestinians to live freely like Jews. Yale apparently disagrees, why students against hate and bigotry should enroll elsewhere to be taught truths excluded from Yale's curriculum.

* Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon.

The New War of the Christian Crusaders – By David Rosen

SR Editor — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:27:43 +0000

Illustration by Khalil Bendib

By David Rosen* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

The building of a Muslim community center in an abandoned building two blocks from the site of New York's former World Trade Center has become the latest controversy in America's long fought religious wars. The construction of the center, often referred to as a mosque, has become the latest rallying issue for the Christian right, Tea Party proponents and Republican operatives in their war to impose moralistic and corporatist values on America.

It is too early to know how the Muslim center issue will be resolved, but it is clear that the rantings of Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Abe Foxman (of the Anti-Defamation League) and others have played an important role pushing a local issue into the center-stage of national politics. Since the horrendous attacks of 9/11, Muslims in general and American Muslims in particular have been the targets of an undeclared religious war promoted by Christian fundamentalists and self-serving Republicans. For some among these religious zealots, Islam is a threat to their belief that the U.S. is a white Protestant nation. Over the last four centuries, Quakers, Mormons, Catholics, Jews and many others have been targets of religious persecution, often the victims of imprisonments, hangings, lynchings and other acts of violence.

Rightwing ranters might well not know the history of religious intolerance in America, but they are surely aware that they are fueling a deep-seated rage among a certain scary segment of the Christian populous. This round in the ongoing religious culture wars has yet to explode into the ugly violence that took place in the aftermath of 9/11, and one can only hope that the current controversy will not lead to attacks on Muslims.

Sadly, like the attacks the followed 9/11, rightwing ranters like Palin and Gingrich will act "shocked" by the violence if it occurs and will claim innocence as to their roles fomenting it. With a knowing sneer, they will wash their hands of the blood they have caused and seek out other innocent victims.

In an excellent article on Tomdispatch, Stephen Salisbury details the current Manhattan Muslim center controversy and the spreading anti-Muslim hysteria being whipped up around the country over the opening of new local mosques. As Salisbury opines, "The angry 'debate' over whether the building should exist has a kind of glitch-in-the-Matrix feel to it, leaving in its wake an aura of something-very-bad-about-to-happen." [tomdispatch.com, August 11, 2010]

Salisbury discusses the ongoing protests against mosques also taking place in New York's Brooklyn and Staten Island as well as in California, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee and Wisconsin. He connects these controversies to the headline-grabbing opportunist comments by Palin (in true Palin-speak, "peaceful Muslims" need to "refudiate" the center) and Gingrich (who calls on Saudi Arabia to open churches and synagogues).

He also draws attention to the pernicious role played by Rick Lazio, New York State Republican gubernatorial candidate, who assails the center as subverting the right of New Yorkers "to feel safe and be safe." Because New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York State Attorney General (and likely Democratic gubernatorial candidate) Andrew Cuomo have come out in support of the Muslim center, it will like be a major issue in the November election.

Most importantly, Salisbury provides an invaluable overview of the anti-Muslim campaign that arose in the wake of 9/11, reminding readers just how alarmingly vicious good-old Christian love can be.

Part of the "glitch-in-the-Matrix feel" that Salisbury notes is the absence of a recognition that the current Muslin center controversy is part of a long history of religious intolerance in American.

In the days following the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush, a born-again Christian, in a spontaneous and unscripted statement blurted out the unspoken truth that guided the U.S.'s initial military counter-attack campaign in Afghanistan: "This crusade," he said, "this war on terrorism." While Bush's admission was later repudiated and disappeared from the public discourse, it define the unstated goal of the ultra-reactionary Christians who were his core-constituency and knew full well what he meant.

At the heart of Bush's crusade agenda was an invocation of the "shock and awe" tradition that defined religious wars since the grand crusades of the Middle Ages and an acknowledgement that they needed to be applied in Afghanistan. The grand crusades waged by the Roman Church were against Muslims and Jews to capture and hold ancient Jerusalem and the Holy Lands, and to defeat Orthodox or Eastern Christianity. Many perished. Similar, crusaders were waged against Christian heretics, including early Protestants, and done so in the name of their absolutist god.

This tradition was brought over to the New World with the Pilgrims and other early British settlers. The worst and most sustained form of religious war in America has been waged against the Native people. For all the annual whitewashing that takes place at Thanksgiving Day parades, early Puritans fought the Pequot Indians in Eastern Connecticut until 1637 when the General Courts of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Colony launched a war of extermination against them. (Native people found that the Pilgrims stunk, literally; Europeans rarely bathed, believing it unhealthy, and seldom were naked, believing it immoral.) The white Christian race and religious crusade against Native North American people persisted for centuries.

Pilgrims also imposed religious intolerance on themselves. Early Massachusetts Bay Colony settlers were aligned with the Church of England and looked badly upon those who contested their orthodoxy. Those challenging Calvinist dogma were subject to banishment, whipping, branding, ear-lobbing and even hanging. Early leaders like Thomas Hooker, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson were banished. Early Quaker settles in Plymouth were also banished and four were hung publicly.

Over the subsequent centuries, Americans have witnessed repeated bouts of religious intolerance. Not surprisingly, these episodes were often accompanied by the same shrill rhetoric we find shouted today by those opposing the Muslim center.

The Know Nothing movement grew out of the Second Great Awakening or the Great Revival of the 1830s and became the American Party that flourished during the late-'40s and early-'50s. It got its name when members where asked the party's positions and simply said, "I know nothing." It drew together Protestants who felt threatened by the rapid increase in European immigrants and, most especially, Catholics, flooding the cities. It felt that Catholics, as followers of the Pope, were not loyal Americans and were going to take over the country. It had strong support in the North that witnessed large-scale Irish immigration after 1848. The American Party captured the Massachusetts legislature in 1854 and, in 1856, backed Millard Fillmore for president, who secured nearly 1 million votes, a quarter of all votes cast.

The Ku Klux Klan was established in 1866 and, during Reconstruction, began a systematic campaign against freed African Americans. However, by the '80s, it had lost its way as a racialist organization. It was revitalized in the wake of the Atlanta trial of Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman who had been falsely charged and convicted of murdering Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old white Christian girl, in 1913. In 1915, after the Georgia governor commuted his sentence, Frank was forcibly removed from the state penitentiary where he was being held by a mob of white Christians and lynched. Subsequently, many of those who participated in Frank's murder came together to re-launch the Klan.

In the late-'10s, the Klan aligned with nativists, eugenicists and the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) to not only promote temperance but racialist and anti-immigrant policies. As WWI hysteria mounted, ASL's New York representative, William Anderson, equated being pro-German with being anti-American: German beer, saloons and breweries were the unnamed enemy. He had a deep antipathy toward Catholics, accusing the Church of mounting an "assault on law and order," of opposing Prohibition because it was promoted by Protestants and accusing it of engaging in "efforts to destroy [the Prohibition] victory and bring back the saloons." Anti-Catholic antipathy contributed to the defeat of the country's first Catholic nominee, Al Smith's, in the 1928 presidential election.

Many other episodes of religious intolerance have taken place since the '20s. However, John Kennedy's 1960 presidential victory marked the moment in American history when anti-Catholic appeals in national election were no longer acceptable. Similarly, the growing acceptance among Christian evangelicals of the notion of the "last days" has lead to a weird embrace of Jews and Israel and may have contributed to a moderation in anti-Semitism.

In the days before 9/11, most informed people accepted Islam as a variant within the Abrahamic tradition. However, in the aftermath of the attacks, even this claim came under suspicion. Earlier this summer, Ron Ramsey, a Republican candidate for governor of Tennessee, claimed that Islam is a "cult" that did not deserve First Amendment protection: "You can even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion, or is it a nationality, a way of life, or a cult -- whatever you want to call it... ." Challenged by a diverse assortment of Tennesseans, including traditional conservatives, Ramsey has backed off this assertion.

If truth be told, the Manhattan Muslim center is both a real issue and a fictitious spectacle. It is real in the sense that its being built at the designated site on Park Place will be a victory for religious tolerance. America is undergoing a profound economic and cultural realignment. Traditional white society is giving way to a truly multi-cultural America; conventional Protestantism is giving way a significant increase in the Catholic populous (mostly Hispanics) and growing Muslim, Hindu and Sekh communities.

The Muslim center story, like that of Michelle Obama's holiday in Spain, is a false issue, a spectacle promoting social deception. Since Obama's victory, the Republican right has implemented a very effective wrecking-ball strategy, attempting to destroy every issue considered. Its guiding principle is simple: Obama and the Democrats can do no right. To realize this goal, it did anything and everything in its power to make sure as little as possible got through Congress, got honestly assessed in the media and got to help ordinary Americans. Sadly, the Christian Republican right is succeeding and the Obama leadership remains clueless.

A century-and-a-half ago white Protestants came to accept Irish immigrants as white. While hard to imagine today, early Irish immigrants, those who came to America in the wake of the 1848 famine, were seen by many traditional Protestants as "niggers," not really different from African Americans. Faced with the inevitabilities of post-Civil War modernization, old-world Protestants changed. And with it, racism changed.

The challenge that faces today's Anglo-American Protestant descendents, those who see Muslims as "niggers," is whether then can change and accept America as a multi-cultural society.

* David Rosen is the author of "Sex Scandals America: Politics & the Ritual of Public Shaming" (Key, 2009); he can be reached at drosen@ix.netcom.com.a

Hollywood-inspired anti-Muslim prejudices

Paul J. Balles — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 13:41:38 +0000

By Paul J. Balles

Paul J.Balles considers the chronic mindset of Americans which, thanks to the racial prejudices of Hollywood, vilifies Arabs and Muslims as "'rag heads', jihadists, Islamic extremists, terrorists and womanizing sheikhs".

Many people in America have their minds set against Arabs and Muslims. That's not simply because of the identification of Arab hijackers in the 9/11 attacks. Arabs have been vilified by Hollywood for more than half a century.

As Lee Bailey noted in The National (Abu Dhabi, 16 October 2008), "Jack Shaheen, a Lebanese-American academic, has published two books documenting the representation of Muslims and Arabs in American film. One, Reel Bad Arabs, dealt with the period before 11 September, and the second, Guilty, considered films made after the attacks."

Bailey added, "...Of approximately 1,000 films that depicted Muslims and Arabs before 2001, [Shaheen] estimated that only 65 portrayed them in a positive or even-handed manner..." In other words, Americans have been brainwashed by anti-Arab propaganda for decades. More than 9/10ths of Hollywood's productions involving Arabs have made them ugly in the minds of viewers.

On 11 October 2008, James Zogby was reported as saying,

"We are disturbed by the degree to which 'Arab' has become the metaphorical mud to sling against your opponent. This week, for example, the Republican Jewish Coalition released a document in which they use the term pro-Arab as a pejorative accusation. For his part, Rush Limbaugh has joined in by declaring that Obama is in fact an Arab American. Then, on Friday, after a supporter called Senator Barack Obama 'an Arab', Senator John McCain came to the defence of his political opponent by saying, 'No, ma'am. He's a decent family man and citizen...' From this we are left to infer that an Arab man is less than a decent family man."

Zogby's right. It was the first thing that came to mind when I saw McCain remove the mike from the woman. However, Zogby missed my next thought: if McCain was the honourable maverick he claims to be, he would have said to the woman: "He doesn't have an Arab heritage but so what if he had?"

But then McCain was brought up on more than half a century of Hollywood's vilification of Arabs, so the images of "rag heads", jihadists, Islamic extremists, terrorists and womanizing sheikhs has been implanted as deep in his mind as in 250 million or more other mentally programmed Americans. Jack Shaheen's Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People and Guilty: Hollywood's verdict on Arabs after 9/11 should be required reading in the schools.

Another place where mindsets hold sway can be seen in two-party election campaigns like those going on in the US currently. Anyone following the commentators from either political party responding to moderators' questions must observe just how intractable party members are.

The malady, previously diagnosed as a case of "My mind is made up - don't confuse me with the facts", continues to affect our thinking. If someone like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez doesn't bow down to his northern lords and masters and is unafraid to criticize the US government, he becomes the object of continuing disdain and mind-setting propaganda campaigns.

A moderator, like Keith Olbermann or Chris Matthews of MSNBC, can ask a question about either McCain or Obama, and the answers can make a viewer wonder if there's anything that could make the supporter respond more objectively. In American politics, there's no such thing as objectivity. It's either "my way or no way!"

Impenetrable American mindsets inform American designation of terrorist organizations. To the blind supporters of Israel at all costs, Hamas isn't comprehended as Palestinians helping other Palestinians and resisting occupation. To resist is tantamount to terrorizing. Americans never see the occupiers who terrorized millions of Palestinians as Israeli terrorists. Clear the mind!

Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.