Yesterday marked the opening of the international conference announced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at a high-level meeting on Islamophobia that she co-chaired, held last July in Istanbul and hosted by the Saudi-based Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). At the time, Secretary Clinton described this week’s conference as a move to implement U.N. Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18 on “combating [religious] intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization.”
This State Department conference, entitled “The Istanbul Process,” is proving to be a very bad idea. It remains to be seen whether speech limitations to protect religion generally and Islam specifically will be officially endorsed by the conference — similar recommendations have already been adopted by the OIC and by the EU conference participants — but, judging from the opening session, at least some of my misgivings seem well founded.
The three-day conference was closed to the public, but I was invited to its opening session (as well as to the closing session to be held on Wednesday) by virtue of my being a commissioner on the official but independent U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. “Chatham House Rules,” which State directed us to abide by, forbid releasing anything about a specific delegation or quoting for attribution.
To speak more generally, then: Legal and security officials of a delegation which will remain unnamed gave a sweeping overview of American founding principles on religious freedom and how they have been breached time and again in American history by attacks against a broad variety of religious minority groups — including now against Muslims. A raft of current cases were mentioned; America’s relative exemplary and distinctive achievement in upholding religious freedom in an emphatically pluralistic society was not. That same speaker reassured the audience, which was packed with diplomats from around the world, that the Obama administration is working diligently to prosecute American Islamophobes and is transforming the U.S. Justice Department into the conscience of the nation, though it could no doubt learn a thing or two from the assembled delegates on other ways to stop persistent religious intolerance in America.
Across the room, smirking delegates from some of the world’s most repressive and intolerant regimes could be spotted, furiously taking notes.
The Saudi Justice Minister was recently in the U.S. but unfortunately departed before the conference opened and won’t be making any presentation on how the Saudis stop religious intolerance. Nor will his delegation be making any apologetic mention of the Saudi ban on churches, its repression of its large indigenous Shiite population, its textbooks teaching that Jews should be killed, or its beheading yesterday of a woman for sorcery, in addition to another recent beheading of a Sudanese man for the same crime.
Meanwhile, at U.N. headquarters in New York, a new resolution following on 16/18 has been introduced by the OIC and will soon be voted on by the General Assembly, where it will no doubt passed with U.S. approval. It singles out for praise regarding the promotion of religious tolerance one state — Saudi Arabia.
— Nina Shea is director of Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and co-author with Paul Marshall of Silenced: How Apostasy & Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide.
via D.C. Islamophobia Conference Was a Bad Idea – By Nina Shea – The Corner – National Review Online.
Turk has censured anti-Islam propaganda and called on the Muslim world to show solidarity against rising Islamophobia across the Western world, Press TV reports.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, front left, speaks with Mehmet Gormez, head of Turkey's Religious Affairs Directorate, after a meeting with African Muslim religious leaders in Istanbul, Turkey, Monday, Nov. 21. 2011.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that there is a vicious propaganda campaign against Islam by some Western circles, Press TV’s Ankara correspondent reported.
Erdogan was addressing the Second Meeting of Leaders of African Continent Muslim Countries and Societies which opened in Istanbul on Monday.
“There are those who use some marginal cases, to equate Islam and Muslims with terrorism, clashes, intolerance and poverty,” Erdogan stated.
“A mistake by a member of a religion or society should not be attributed to the religion or society,” he added.
“This means that Islamophobia should be condemned as much as racism and anti-Semitism is [condemned],” the Turkish premier stressed.
The meeting was hosted by Turkey’s Religious Affairs Directorate and was attended by top state officials as well as religious leaders from many African countries.
According to reports, the Turkish prime minister also said the reason behind all problems in the Muslim world is lack of consultation among Muslim countries.
He noted that unbiased and sincere consultation would be a lasting solution for the issues Muslim countries, nations and the entire Muslim world are facing today.
GJH/MA
via PressTV – Erdogan blasts anti-Islam propaganda.
Praying in the streets of Paris is against the law starting Friday, after the interior minister warned that police will use force if Muslims, and those of any other faith, disobey the new rule to keep the French capital’s public spaces secular.
Claude Guéant promised the new legislation would be followed to the letter Photo: AFP/GETTY
By Henry Samuel, Paris
Claude Guéant said that ban could later be extended to the rest of France, in particular to the Mediterranean cities of Nice and Marseilles, where “the problem persists”.
He promised the new legislation would be followed to the letter as it “hurts the sensitivities of many of our fellow citizens”.
“My vigilance will be unflinching for the law to be applied. Praying in the street is not dignified for religious practice and violates the principles of secularism, the minister told Le Figaro newspaper.
“All Muslim leaders are in agreement,” he insisted.
In December when Marine Le Pen, then leader-in-waiting of the far-Right National Front, sparked outrage by likening the practice to the Nazi occupation of Paris in the Second World War “without the tanks or soldiers”. She said it was a “political act of fundamentalists”.
RELATED ARTICLES
Muslims praying in France ‘like Nazi occupation’ 12 Dec 2010
More than half of right-wing sympathisers in France agreed with Marine Le Pen, at least one poll suggested.
Nicolas Sarkozy’s party denounced the comments, but the President called for a debate on Islam and secularism and went on to say that multiculturalism had failed in France.
Following the debate, Mr Guéant promised a countrywide ban “within months”, saying the “street is for driving in, not praying”.
In April, a ban on wearing the full Islamic veil came into force. Holland today became the third European country to ban the burka, after Belgium, despite the fact fewer than 100 Dutch women are thought to wear the face-covering Islamic dress.
Yesterday, Mr Guéant said the prayer problem was limited to two roads in the Goutte d’Or district of Paris’s eastern 19th arrondissement, where “more than a thousand” people blocked the street every Friday.
However, a stroll through several districts in Paris on a Friday suggests that Muslims spill into the streets outside many mosques.
Under an agreement signed this week, believers will be able to use the premises of a vast nearby fire station while awaiting the construction of a bigger mosque.
“We could go as far as using force if necessary (to impose the ban), but it’s a scenario I don’t believe will happen, as dialogue (with local religious leaders) has born fruit,” he said.
Sheikh Mohamed salah Hamza, in charge of one of the Parisian mosques which regularly overflows, said he would obey the new law, but complained: “We are not cattle” and that he was “not entirely satisfied” with the new location. He said he feared many believers would continue to prefer going to the smaller mosque.
Public funding of places of religious worship is banned under a 1905 law separating church and state. Mr Guéant said that there were 2,000 mosques in France with half being built in the past ten years.
France has Europe’s largest Muslim population, with an estimated five million in total.
Turkish President Abdullah Gul has warned against Islamophobia in Europe and said he considers a modern state a multicultural one.
Gul made the comments in a joint interview with Turkey’s Zaman daily and Germany’s Die Zeit ahead of a scheduled visit to Germany.
He said that the modern state with its democratic and legal principles had developed in Europe and that he found it contradictory to see Islamophobia in this continent.
The president urged integration and said that every culture should be respected. He said it was impossible to reverse Muslim immigration to Europe and that Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and animosity toward immigrants were illnesses with difficult therapies.
Gul said he believed Islam did not play a bigger role in the Arab Spring than communication technologies and that the West was contributing to the uprising with its technology.
According to Gul, the revolution in Egypt was belated and started from the bottom upwards, as ousted Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak had delayed reforms.
Speaking about the uprising in Syria that has caused the death of at least 2,600 people according to UN estimates, Gul said relations between the two countries were close. He said that the Turkish government had warned the Syrian government to make rapid reforms and told them that authoritarian and closed regimes could not exist in this way today.
Gul also harshly criticized Israel when asked why Turkey escalated tensions with Israel in the face of the Arab Spring, and named Israel as the chief culprit in the deterioration of relations between the two countries.
Gul said Israel had attacked a Turkish ship where there were activists from 37 different countries last year, referring to the Mavi Marmara incident when Israeli naval commandos stormed an aid ship and killed nine Turkish civilians. Turkey demanded an official apology, compensation for the families of the victims and the lifting of the Gaza blockade. Israel said the soldiers had acted in self-defence.
Gul said that it was natural to expect an apology from Israel, though they had refused to give one and were behaving as though they were right. “But they violated international law,” he stressed.
Asked if it would be possible to overcome the crisis, Gul said it was possible and that Turkey was openly calling for it. “The important thing for us is that people were killed in this attack on the aid ship. But the [Gaza] embargo is not in line with international law. For this reason, the EU, Russia and the American government asked for the lifting of the embargo,” Gul said.
Asked if Germany could mediate between the two countries, Gul said despite the deep historical relations between Germany and Turkey, he did not believe there was much the EU member state could do in this regard.
Today’s Zaman
via News.Az – Turkey’s president warns against Islamophobia.
Girls wearing Islamic headscarves play in a park in Istanbul. (Osman Orsal/AP)
Girls wearing Islamic headscarves play in a park in Istanbul. (Osman Orsal/AP) Last Friday, the Center for American Progress released a report that found a group of writers and activists spent millions over the last decade to spread fear about Islam in America.
Almost $43 million from seven charitable groups went toward financing anti-Muslim campaigns, the report said, including proposed state laws to ban judges from considering Islamic laws in U.S. courts, opposition to the Islamic center near Ground Zero, and a general encouragement of anti-Muslim rhetoric in politics and elsewhere.
There’s no denying that there is anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. Only 37 of all Americans say they have a favorable view of Islam, according to a Washington Post-ABC poll taken in 2010.
However, just as some seek to fan the fires of anti-Muslim sentiment, so do others work to put them out. My Fellow American, a new online film and social media project by Unity Productions Foundation, wants to remind Americans that Muslims are “fellow Americans,” too. The project asks people to contribute stories either about themselves as Muslims, or about their Muslim friends. The group produced an unforgettable introductory film juxtaposing anti-Muslim rhetoric with images of everyday Muslims.
According to a 2010 TIME poll, 62 percent of Americans claim to have never met a Muslim. Instead, Americans shape their views of Muslims from what they hear in the media and from political rhetoric, Unity Productions Foundation says, writing on the site:
American Muslims are so often vilified as ‘the other’ that it is possible not to recognize that most were born in the U.S…[or] came seeking the same freedoms and opportunities that have always attracted people to America.
The cost of feeding the fear of Muslims is high. “Very high,” according to Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, a professor at the Chicago Theological Seminary.
“This point has been made shockingly evident in the murderous rampage of right-wing Norwegian extremist, Anders Breivik,” Thistlethwaite wrote in a column in The Washington Post last week. Breivik’s ”Manifesto” cited many of the people profiled in the Center of American Progress report.
The strongest argument against Islamophobia, Thistlethwaite writes, it that it “actually accomplishes the opposite of what its purveyors claim to want [it to].”
via Islamophobia in America: Some finance it, while others fight it – BlogPost – The Washington Post.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich speaks during the first New Hampshire Republican presidential debate at St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H. on June 13, 2011. (Jim Cole/AP Photo)
By HUMA KHAN and AMY BINGHAM
June 14, 2011
Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s comments comparing Muslims to Nazis at the GOP debate Monday night have sparked a firestorm in the blogosphere, where liberals, and even some conservatives, have pounced on the former House speaker for what they view as excessive fear mongering.
“He is appealing to the basest instincts of a very small minority of folks,” said Matthew Dowd, ABC News consultant who served as chief strategist on George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election team. “Either he is doing this for political purposes to distract people from a campaign in disarray, which is bad, or he actually believes it, which is scary.”
At the New Hampshire debate Monday night, Gingrich responded to questions about loyalty tests for administration officials, saying, “The Pakistani who emigrated to the U.S., became a citizen, built a car bomb which luckily failed to go off in Times Square, was asked by the federal judge, how could he have done that when he signed and when he swore an oath to the United States. And he looked at the judge and said, ‘You’re my enemy. I lied,’” Gingrich recalled at the debate moderated by CNN.
“Now, I just want to go out on a limb here. I’m in favor of saying to people, if you’re not prepared to be loyal to the United States, you will not serve in my administration, period,” Gingrich said to applause.
But Gingrich didn’t stop there, despite an attempt by moderators to interject. He compared hiring Muslims to how Americans dealt with Nazis in the 1940s.
“We did this in dealing with the Nazis. We did this in dealing with the Communists. And it was controversial both times and both times we discovered after a while, you know, there are some genuinely bad people who would like to infiltrate our country. And we have got to have the guts to stand up and say, ‘No,’” he concluded.
Many people have chastised Gingrich, whose senior aides resigned en masse last week, for invoking 1950s-era McCarthyism, a time during which free speech came under assault amid a heightened threat of Communism.
Muslim groups expressed outrage, saying Gingrich was merely exploiting Muslims for personal and political gain.
“It’s really reprehensible when you have a mainstream presidential candidate equate Muslims with Nazis and communists,” said Ibrahim Hooper, communications director at Council on American-Islamic Relations. “It is what we’ve come to expect from the right wing of the political faction.”
CAIR also assailed GOP candidates Herman Cain and Rick Santorum for their comments on the question of sharia law taking over the U.S. court system.
Cain, the former chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza, raised eyebrows earlier this year when he said he wouldn’t allow Muslims in his cabinet. Cain clarified the remark Monday, saying he might want to ask a Muslim person certain questions during a job interview about their loyalty to the country, a comment that Gingrich defended.
Although he might have created a firestorm, this isn’t the first time Gingrich has made such a comparison and, to many, his most recent comments are anything but surprising.
Gingrich spoke fervently in August against the proposed mosque and community center to be built near Ground Zero, saying that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to do so just as “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington,” or “we would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor.”
Gingrich brought up the same example of the attempted Times Square bomber’s loyalty at a debate in February, saying he “lied [about his loyalty to America] to get American citizenship.”
“Your generation is going to face a long struggle I believe at least as long as the Cold War,” Gingrich warned students during a debate with Howard Dean at George Washington University. “It is going to be extraordinarily dangerous and I think if our opponents get either a biological or nuclear weapon we are in real trouble and we are not today having the national dialogue that we should be having about how dangerous this is and how bad it could get.”
“We did this in dealing with the Nazis. We did this in dealing with the Communists. And it was controversial both times and both times we discovered after a while, you know, there are some genuinely bad people who would like to infiltrate our country. And we have got to have the guts to stand up and say, ‘No,’” he concluded.
Many people have chastised Gingrich, whose senior aides resigned en masse last week, for invoking 1950s-era McCarthyism, a time during which free speech came under assault amid a heightened threat of Communism.
Muslim groups expressed outrage, saying Gingrich was merely exploiting Muslims for personal and political gain.
“It’s really reprehensible when you have a mainstream presidential candidate equate Muslims with Nazis and communists,” said Ibrahim Hooper, communications director at Council on American-Islamic Relations. “It is what we’ve come to expect from the right wing of the political faction.”
CAIR also assailed GOP candidates Herman Cain and Rick Santorum for their comments on the question of sharia law taking over the U.S. court system.
Cain, the former chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza, raised eyebrows earlier this year when he said he wouldn’t allow Muslims in his cabinet. Cain clarified the remark Monday, saying he might want to ask a Muslim person certain questions during a job interview about their loyalty to the country, a comment that Gingrich defended.
Although he might have created a firestorm, this isn’t the first time Gingrich has made such a comparison and, to many, his most recent comments are anything but surprising.
Gingrich spoke fervently in August against the proposed mosque and community center to be built near Ground Zero, saying that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to do so just as “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington,” or “we would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor.”
Gingrich brought up the same example of the attempted Times Square bomber’s loyalty at a debate in February, saying he “lied [about his loyalty to America] to get American citizenship.”
“Your generation is going to face a long struggle I believe at least as long as the Cold War,” Gingrich warned students during a debate with Howard Dean at George Washington University. “It is going to be extraordinarily dangerous and I think if our opponents get either a biological or nuclear weapon we are in real trouble and we are not today having the national dialogue that we should be having about how dangerous this is and how bad it could get.”
Although his comments from Monday have come under fire, observers say they are unlikely to significantly affect his already-fledgling campaign.
The comments Monday night are “not surprising coming [from] Newt in that he seems to have been born with a limited filter between his brain and his mouth,” consultant Dowd said. But “it’s hard to say it will really hurt his campaign when it was already taking on water and listing in the waves.”
In a sign that the campaign was taking a turn for the worst, a number of Gingrich’s top aides resigned last week, citing conflicting opinions about the direction of the campaign and what they perceive as a lack of motivation on the part of Gingrich and his wife, Callista, to do heavy, time-consuming fundraising and campaigning.
