Showing posts with label islamofobia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label islamofobia. Show all posts

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Paul Balles: More Islamophobia in America

To generalize is to be an idiot. –William Blake

Xenophobia is a fear or contempt of that which is foreign or unknown, especially of strangers or foreign people. It includes hatred of persons belonging to a different race, or different ethnic or national origin.

The fear or hatred that makes up xenophobia involves a great deal of generalizing about “others”.

Unfortunately, if you develop a mindset about large numbers of people based on the actions of a few, you can treat whole populations badly.

British historian Thomas Macaulay said, “In proportion as men know more and think more they look less at individuals and more at classes.”

Generalizations involving xenophobia include thoughts like: “immigrants are not as worthy as natives,” and “women are not as capable as men.”

There are those in America who consider Barak Obama unworthy of being its president because of his colour, because his father was not American by birth, or because Obama’s middle name is Hussain.

The mental degradation as part of this generalizing applies to any and all who don’t belong to the tribe or group of the xenophobes.

Philosopher and author Eric Hoffer observed that “We are more prone to generalize the bad than the good. We assume that the bad is more potent and contagious.”

Thus, by faulty reasoning, if there is one bad black, all blacks are bad; and if one Muslim has committed a crime, therefore all Muslims must be criminals.

A special name – Islamophobia – applies to xenophobia involving Muslims; and Islamophobia has been growing alarmingly in America recently.

A knife-wielding lunatic attacked a Muslim taxi driver in New York City. Why? The driver admitted to a drunk lunatic that he (the taxi driver) was a Muslim.

The attacker reasoned from the specific (an attack attributed to Muslims on 9/11) to the general (all Muslims were responsible).

A mosque under construction in Tennessee suffered an arson attack. Why? Comments by Islamophobes like Newt Gingrich have incited a general hatred of Muslims.

Newt Gingrich, once the speaker of the US House of Representatives, would naturally have others attaching greater credence to what he says.
How many people has Gingrich fed anti-Muslim thinking with his inflammatory public remarks about Islam? The false generalization: if one Muslim is bad, all Muslims must be bad.

Florida Pastor Terry Jones’ planned to burn copies of the Quran on the anniversary of 9/11. Why? He generalized from Muslims alleged to have been responsible for 9/11 to all of Islam.

Documentary film-maker Michael Moore pointed out, “Blaming a whole group for the actions of just one of that group is anti-American. Timothy McVeigh was Catholic. Should Oklahoma City prohibit the building of a Catholic Church near the site of the former federal building that McVeigh blew up?”

Protesters have been assailing the building of an Islamic cultural centre – including a mosque – near Ground Zero in New York. The protestors disregard the fact that before Ground Zero became Ground Zero, it had two mosques.

The problem: general and increasing Islamophobia. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll, 49 percent of all Americans say they have generally unfavourable opinions of Islam. A larger percentage opposes the cultural centre.

Poet Ezra Pound wrote “Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.” In other words, if the money isn’t in the bank the cheque is worthless.

Applied to the generalizations about Islam, if they don’t fit Muslims generally, they are worthless expressions of xenophobia and the ignorant fear called Islamophobia.
http://www.intifada-palestine.com/2010/09/paul-balles-more-islamophobia-in-america/

Monday, September 13, 2010

Photos from the New York SIOA protest


Richard Bartholomew provides a useful roundup of websites featuring photos of the Stop Islamization of America demonstration in New York yesterday.

As predicted, the threat by Geller and Spencer that only American flags would be permitted on the demonstration and that signs would be "confiscated" was widely ignored.

In addition to posters with the word "Sharia" in dripping blood and flyers reading "No Obama's Mosque", slogans included "What God Do You Kill For?", "Cordoba=Conquer, Not Here!", "Muhummad was the First Radical Muslim: Osama bin Laden is Following Directions" and "Transform Islam, Not America". One man carried a placard with the word "Toilet Paper" and a Qur'an attached to it.
http://www.islamophobia-watch.com/islamophobia-watch/category/usa

'US responsible for anti-Islam crusade'

A senior Iranian cleric says the desecration of the holy Quran is the symbol of a "crusade" by enemies of Islam, holding the US government responsible for the sacrilegious move.


“Although Church leaders say the criminal who in the name of priesthood ordered the Quran burning is a lunatic and worthless person, the question is why the White House allows lunatics to throw their weight around,” Tehran's Interim Friday Prayer Leader Ahmad Khatami said Sunday.

"This crime symbolizes a crusade that the enemies of Islam have launched for some time now," ISNA quoted him as saying.

Khatami added that the enemies will lose this war as they cannot stand up to the growing power of Islam.

He went on to say US President Barack Obama and other US statesmen should be held accountable for the blasphemous decision and the desecration of the Quran by anti-Islam protesters in the US as the crime has been committed 'within their geographical borders' and there no excuse is acceptable in this regard.

Anti-Islam protesters in the US have desecrated the Quran on the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

One protester burned pages from the Muslim holy book in front of press photographers in New York.

Two evangelical preachers in Tennessee set copies of the Quran on fire and members of the group Operation Rescue tore pages from Islam's holy book.

In another incident, a man ripped out pages from the holy Quran and made vulgar gestures with them. The police did not try to stop any of the incidents.

This comes after a Florida preacher called off plans to burn copies of the Quran on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

NN/HGH/MMN
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/142220.html

Sunday, September 12, 2010

English Defence League leader refused entry into US?

Nick Lowles reports: "I've picked up a rumour this morning that EDL leader 'Tommy Robinson' has been refused entry into the United States where he was due to attend an anti-Islam rally at Ground Zero in New York. Robinson was travelling with a number of other EDL leaders when he was turned away at the Immigration desk for apparent entry form irregularities. He was taken into custody and almost immediately put on a plane back to London. His fellow EDL members were allowed to go through."

Hope Not Hate, 10 September 2010

Though Pamela Geller will no doubt be disappointed that a notorious far-right organiser of violent confrontations with Muslim communities in England won't be able to make it, she can at least take consolation in the fact that there will still be a contingent of racist Islamophobic thugs from the UK attending her anti-Muslim hate-fest tomorrow.

Update: "Tommy Robinson" has confirmed that he was turned back at JFK airport: "I arrived in new York yesterday, was held for six hours then put back on a flight, pretty shattered, I'm still glad we have representatives over there. I think the powers that be are worried about the highly influential people in the states are backing us. This trip would of concreted our relationship with many of them."
http://www.islamophobia-watch.com/islamophobia-watch/category/uk

Friday, August 27, 2010

The Taiwanese NMA Have Done It Again Islamophobia Style

The Taiwanese animation company NMA has been putting out YouTube videos on various scandals and controversies ranging from the Conan O’Brien/NBC fracas to Rod Blagojevich’s corruption trial.

They have now brought forth another video about the so-called ‘Ground Zero mosque’ and the recent wave of Islamophobia that’s been brought on, or at least encouraged, by Fox News and the far-right in this country.

This video is up-to-date with the inclusion of the Muslim New York cabbie that got stabbed incident. These animated videos, I assume, are for informative purposes. However, I dare you not to laugh.
http://www.kabobfest.com/2010/08/the-taiwanese-have-done-it-again-islamophobia-style.html

Friday, August 6, 2010

JEWS IN GLASS HOUSES

In short, if fanatical Jews insist on demonizing Islam and Muslims, they should remember that they live in glass houses.Jewish fanatics display more hatred against Muslims
By Khalid Amayreh

The dogs of Zionism leave no opportunity without emitting their venomous hatred against Islam and Muslims these days. For Zionist Jews, maligning Islam and Muslims is a full-time job. The message is on the wall, and only the blind wouldn’t see it.

In recent days, Judeo-Nazi activists have been demonstrating against plans to build a Mosque and Islamic Center in New York.

The Judeo-Nazi website Arutz-Shiva, a mouthpiece for the Nazi-minded settlers in the West Bank, on Wednesday, 4 August, quoted a settler leader as saying that building a Mosque in New York, the capital of Zionist hegemony in the western hemisphere, was “like bringing a pig into the temple.” Islam, like Judaism, considers pigs unclean animals and Muslims are commanded not to touch them, let alone eat their meat.

The settler leader was also quoted as suggesting that the US government should confine First Amendments freedoms and civil liberties to sincere “Jews and Christians” that support Israeli Nazism, and deny them to nonconformists.

There is nothing particularly wrong in protesting against any given cause. People are free to express their opinions and feelings about anything. However, what is not right, to say the least, is to demonize people and encourage hatred against them because they hold different opinions. Of all peoples in this world, Jews should be aware of this particular dimension for they have suffered so much as a result of demonization and vilification.

Two Jewish activists, a man and a woman, were photographed recently holding two signs outside Ground Zero in New York. One of the signs read “we will allow a mosque to be built near Ground Zero when Jews are allowed to build a synagogue in Mecca.” The other sign claimed that “building a mosque near ground Zero is like building a memorial for Hitler at Auschwitz.”

Needless to say, the two venomous messages have no relevance to truth and common sense. They are beyond the pale of human decency since they are totally detached from honesty.

First, as far as I know, Mecca has not a single Jewish inhabitant, so why build a synagogue there? To start a settlement enterprise there? To teach Muslims Shulhan Aruch or Chesronot Shas or other Talmudic messages?

On the other hand, New York is home to tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Muslims. And the people in charge of the project are American citizens who broke no law, committed no crime and hurt no body. Indeed, if New York Muslims were of Hitler’s ilk, as the hateful and provocative signs would have us believe, then the Jewish mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg, who supports the project, ought to be a Nazi supporter.

Yes, a nominal Muslim was responsible for a repulsive terrorist act that killed dozens of Americans nearly ten years ago, but that doesn’t make all Muslims guilty of terror any more than would a Jewish mass murderer, e.g. Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon or Baruch Goldstein, to mention just a few, make all Jews guilty of terror.

I want to go back to that Mecca synagogue thing. This really borders on a mental psychosis on the part of many Zionist Jews. Every time, Israel is criticized for her Nazi-like crimes against Palestinians, Zionist Jews invoke the Mecca synagogue analogy. These lowly dirty animals may think that this is a smart thing to do when in fact it reflects a deep mental sickness.

There are synagogues all over the Muslim world. These synagogues, some of which teach purely racist messages about Jewish superiority, are well protected by respective states, and rightly so. This is unlike mosques in the West Bank which are routinely attacked by the mad dogs of Jewish Nazism, otherwise known as settlers, who attack and torch these Muslim places of worship on instructions from their rabbis.

The second sign carried by the other Jewish protester compared the planned construction of a mosque in New York to the erection of a Hitler memorial at Auschwitz.

Again, this is a totally corrupt analogy. Hitler waged war on and destroyed much of Europe, killing or causing the death of tens of millions of people, including many Jews.

However, Osama bin Laden, assuming that his organization, al Qaida, was indeed behind the 9/11 events, killed a few hundred Americans whereas America, in her Israel-envisaged wars, killed millions of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan and Palestine.

To be sure, the vast bulk of Muslims, including this writer, expressed horror and revulsion at what happened. However, when the former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright was asked about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children starved to death as a result of the genocidal American-led sanctions on Iraq, she simply said “if it its is good for our interests, I don’t mind it.”

And unlike Hitler, who was supported by many Europeans (many Jews served in the Nazi armies), the vast majority of Muslims, probably 99.99%, firmly and vehemently oppose al Qaida on moral and religious basis. This is while, the vast majority of Jews fanatically and wholeheartedly support the Judeo-Nazi establishment in occupied Palestine, known as Israel.

So, one has to ask the following question. Who are best fit to be compared with the Nazis these days: The Muslims or Zionist Jews? Who are the ones seeking lebensraum or settlements at the expense of the native people, the Muslims or Zionist Jews? Who are incinerating men, women and children with White Phosphorus, the Muslims or the Zionist Jews? Who are carrying wars of aggression against neighboring countries, the Muslims or Zionist Jews? Indeed, which armies, the Israeli army or Muslim armies, are best fit for comparison with the Gestapo, SS, and Wehrmacht?

Even if we ignore the physical manifestations of Israeli Nazism, we still will find Hitler and his repulsive teachings alive and kicking in the religious doctrine of Judeo-Nazi groups such as Chabad, Gush Emunim and others.

Even Hitler himself didn’t claim that non-Aryans were non-humans. Read Chabad’s manuals or the teachings of Gush Emunim’s mentors and you will certainly know what I am talking about. Some Zionist Jews not only can be compared with the Nazis. In fact, they have emulated and surpassed them.

Still, if Muslims are to be made responsible, by hook or by crook, for whatever al Qaida did or does, then by the same token Jews will have to be held responsible for the millions of Ukrainians killed or starved to death by Stalin’s Jewish aides.

In fact, one could argue that in the 20th century, Jews were probably directly or indirectly responsible for killing more non-Jews than non-Jews were responsible for killing Jews.

For example, it is well known that some Jews played a central part in the Communist collectivization campaign in the former Soviet Union, especially during the Stalinist era, in which many millions of people perished as a result of hunger, major purges, expulsions, banishments, executions and mass death at the Gulags.

During that horrible era of mass terror and death, entire classes of people were liquidated or banished, including private farmers, ethnic minorities, members of the bourgeoisie, senior officers, intellectuals, artists, labor movement activists and still others.

Today, in Israel, school students complete their high school education without ever hearing the name “Genrikh Yagoda” (Genrich Grigorivc Yagoda), who is one of the greatest murderers of all time.

Yagoda diligently carried out Stalin’s collectivization orders and was responsible for the death of at least 10 million people. His Jewish deputies established and managed the genocidal Gulag system. And after Stalin no longer viewed him favourably, Yagoda was demoted and subsequently executed, and was replaced as Chief Hangman in 1936 by Yezhov, the ‘bloodthirsty dwarf’ who had a Jewish wife.

I realize that some Jews would argue that these mass murderers did what they did not as Jews, but as Soviets and as Communists, and they may have a point here. However, there is a conspicuous whiff of absurdity in this argument, since other people whose history has many dark spots could make similar arguments about their own respective mass murderers.

I am not evoking this to belittle the Jewish calamity during WWII, the Holocaust, but rather to illustrate the fact that no particular people in this world possess a monopoly on suffering and pain.

http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/2010/08/05/jews-in-glass-houses/

Monday, April 26, 2010

Virginia stamps out license to hate: plate with coded racist message is recalled

The owner of a Ford truck bearing the license plate 14CV88 will have to find a new message after the DMV on Wednesday canceled its earlier approval of that series of letters and numbers.

A photo of the truck hit the Web a few days ago, went viral on car and other blogs and finally came to the attention of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy group for American Muslims. On Wednesday morning, the group complained to the DMV that the plate contained a white supremacist and neo-Nazi statement.

A few hours later, the DMV agreed that the plate contains a coded message: The number 88 stands for the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, doubled to signify "Heil Hitler," said CAIR's Ibrahim Hooper. "CV" stands for "Confederate veteran" – the plate was a special model embossed with a Confederate flag, which Virginia makes available for a $10 fee to card-carrying members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. And 14 is code for imprisoned white supremacist David Lane's 14-word motto: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

The giveaway that something was amiss, Hooper said, was the truck itself. An enormous photo of the burning World Trade Center towers covers the entire tailgate, with the words: "Everything I ever needed to know about Islam I learned on 9/11."
http://www.islamophobia-watch.com/islamophobia-watch/category/usa

Far right candidate contests Austrian presidential election on anti-Islam platform

Austrians will go to the polls April 25 to vote for president after a volatile campaign that focused in part on right-wing extremism and raised the ghosts of Austria's Nazi past.

Incumbent President Heinz Fischer, a Social Democrat, is expected to win a landslide victory over his main rival, Barbara Rosenkranz, a regional leader of the far-right Freedom Party (FPO), which once was led by the late Jöerg Haider.

Rosenkranz, a 51-year-old mother of 10, entered the race in early March in a bid many experts saw as a test for the Freedom Party's staunchly anti-immigrant, law-and-order, anti-European Union platform ahead of regional elections later this year. The wife of a key longtime member of a now banned neo-Nazi party, Rosenkranz quickly sparked an outcry over ambiguous statements about the Holocaust and criticism of Austria's tough 1947 anti-Nazi law.

Immigrants and Muslims, rather than Jews, are the main target of the Freedom Party's rhetoric. About 500,000 Muslims live in Austria, and the party campaigns under slogans such as "The West is for Christians" and "Homeland instead of Islam." Still, Jews also feel targeted. In March, vandals defaced the Mauthausen concentration camp, where more than 100,000 people were killed, with staunch anti-Jewish and anti-Turkish graffiti.

The Freedom Party's outspoken leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, said his party's views were justified by a poll last week showing that 54 percent of Austrians believe that Islam poses "a threat for the West and our familiar lifestyle."
http://www.islamophobia-watch.com/islamophobia-watch/category/austria