Garbanzo Toons

Newsweek's Latest Islamic Whitewash

The latest Newsweek has a special report. It's called, Islam in America: A Special Report. The headline to the article reads,

American Dreamers
Muslim Americans are one of this country's greatest strengths. But they're vulnerable as never before.

Right off, one has to ask, how are they a strength? The article begins,

Fareed Siddiq is a successful businessman and a father of two. He lives in Chagrin Falls, Ohio—a 19th-century mill town built on a river and known for its scenic waterfalls and dams—in a five-bedroom house he recently paid for, in cash, with his savings. Prominent in local civic and religious organizations, including the Red Cross and the chamber of commerce, Siddiq was invited to the InterContinental Hotel in downtown Cleveland earlier this month along with about 400 other business leaders to hear President George W. Bush speak.

He was moved to ask his president a question: "What," he asked, hauling his 6-foot-5, 245-pound frame to the microphone, "are we doing with public diplomacy to change the hearts and minds of a billion and a half Muslims around the world?" What should he tell his friends and relatives in Pakistan about why he continues to live in the United States?

"Great question," answered the president. "I'm confident your answer is, 'I love living in America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, the country where you can come and ask the president a question and a country where—' Are you a Muslim?"

"Yes," answered Siddiq.

"Where you can worship your religion freely. It's a great country where you can do that."

It was a good answer, says Siddiq, but not enough for him—not when he, a financial adviser at a major investment bank, is afraid to use the bathroom on flights because he doesn't want to frighten his fellow passengers as he walks down the aisle. He thinks anti-Muslim sentiment in the country is getting worse, not better. "I'm not so much worried about myself," he adds. "It's the young people I'm concerned with. Those are the people we need to try—not only as Muslims but as Americans—to make them feel part of America. If you alienate the Muslim young people from America, that is dangerous."

So right off the bat, without wasting time, Lisa Miller, Newsweek's current apologist for Islam attacks us with the standard charge that Americans are alienating young Muslims. It comes with the standard warning and disclaimer that Muslim violence against us is our own fault for not reaching out and accepting every Muslim demand for special rights, thereby causing the alienation of young Muslims, thereby creating a danger to ourselves. (Don't try this at home. It only works for Muslims.) But fortunately,

America, the officials said, has so far provided relatively infertile ground for the growing and grooming of Muslim extremists. "Most Muslims in America think of themselves as Americans," says Charlie Allen, intelligence chief at the Homeland Security Department.

And yet, if we look at recent news we have the Fort Dix Six
a few cases of "Sudden Jihad Syndrome" and Islamic charities still being busted (when it's politically advantageous) for funneling funds to terrorists. Again, (as if you didn't know already) none of that is the fault of any Muslims either individually or collectively,

The alleged terror plots uncovered since 9/11 are a sign that this success cannot be taken for granted. Ire among Muslim Americans at U.S. policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories is at a peak, and thanks to satellite news channels like Al-Jazeera and the Internet, that dissatisfaction can spread like fire.

and

The relative peace that came with invisibility disappeared after 9/11. When Muslims became objects of fear, "people who had never recognized and seen themselves as Muslims had no choice but to see themselves as Muslim," says Muzaffar Chisti, director of the Migration Policy Institute at the New York University School of Law.

Again, it's our fault for wondering which ones are part of that large minority that approve of violent attacks against innocent civilians in the interest of jihad.

To combat the discrimination many were feeling, many Muslim Americans turned, in classic American fashion, to the courts. The Council on American Islamic Relations, an advocacy group, counted nearly 2,500 civil-rights complaints by Muslim Americans in 2006, a dramatic increase over the previous year. These are the kinds of stories that make news—women who sue for the right to wear the hijab in their driver's license photo—and Muslim Americans say they show how invested they are in the American system.

Somehow we are supposed to think it's a good thing that Muslims are reporting every sideways glance as a hate crime, not to mention all of the alleged attacks against Muslims that have been found to be fraudulent. The right to cover one's face on a driver's license photo, wouldn't that be classified as a special right? Like the Somali cab drivers in Minnesota who are demanding to be able to discriminate on the basis of religion? At the University of Michigan's Dearborn campus, Muslims have the right to having their footbaths paid for by student funds with the full support of the ACLU and state senator, Gilda Jacobs, who as I found out minutes ago,

“Interestingly, Jacobs was only one of two senators to vote against a bill in 2004 allowing religious and divinity students to win publicly funded scholarships. Jacobs said she was opposed to ‘funding of seminaries.’

Isn't that special? I thought equal rights were the order of the day in this country. Yet Lisa Miller (along with Gilda Jacobs) wants us to applaud the fact that Muslims want to replace equal rights for all with special rights that favor Muslims. That doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy. But wait, it gets worse,

The six imams who were pulled off a US Airways flight last fall after praying openly at a Minneapolis airport gate have sued the airline and the airport commission for civil-rights violations. "I believe in justice in the United States, and that's why we've taken this case to court," says Didmar Faja, one of the imams.

Yes, and Muslims are suing for a special right to disrupt airline flights. For those of us who need to be reminded, they were doing quite a bit more than merely "praying." Even causes for concern are minimized.

In Muslim intellectual circles, imagining ways to accommodate these young people is topic A, but the reality is somewhat grimmer. There are so few homegrown Muslim clerics in America today—and almost no institutions for training them—that prayer in most mosques is led by a scholar fresh off the plane from Lebanon, say, or Saudi Arabia, someone with no connection to America and no affinity for its culture.

[ . . . ]

More unsettling is the question of what these foreign-born imams preach. According to unofficial estimates by government investigators, at least 50 percent of American mosques may receive some funding from foreign governments or institutions, mostly Saudi Arabia. The danger is obvious: if Saudi Arabia is exporting its Wahhabi Islam to this country via imams, pamphlets, Qur'ans and buildings, how long before a warped version of this extremist ideology intersects with a vulnerable group of teenagers? So far, connections between Saudi influence and the handful of suspected terror plots hatched here since 9/11 have been tenuous, according to the public record.

Remember the Freedom House report on Saudi influence in American mosques? It was chilling, but it may be unavailable. Daniel Pipes analysis of it is here. There is a bit of bad news, but there's not much, so we shouldn't be concerned. It's tucked into the very end of the article.

The bad news, however, bears repeating: 26 percent of Muslims age 18 to 29 believe that suicide bombing can be justified. Thirty-eight percent of that group believe that Arabs did not carry out the 9/11 attacks. These data, combined with the rising religious conservatism of young Muslim Americans, have led some experts to argue that differences between Europe and America have been overblown, that affluence and education do not inoculate a society against radicalization. "This idea that all those who are middle class are exempted from extremism has always been false," says Geneive Abdo, author of "Mecca and Main Street." "The leadership of the extremist movements have always been highly educated Muslims."

Isn't that what we're told to ignore under the threat of being called an "Islamophobe?" But there's more.

It's impossible to underestimate the emotional nature of anti-Israel sentiment among Arab-American youth, argues Ismael Ahmed, executive director of the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services in Detroit. "I think the poll miscaptures what's being said," he says. "There is such a thing as legitimate resistance to oppression, and there is terrorism on both sides. It's wrong, but there's also the right to resist." The poll numbers, in his view, don't point to a threat of homegrown suicide bombers, but to a passionate defense of a resistance movement—the way, 30 years ago, an Irish-American teenager would have supported the IRA.

You gotta love that; moral relativism, combined with blame the victim, combined with a totally inverted version of the truth. Nowhere is personal responsibility accepted. I still don't understand how that contributes to American strength, do you?

But that's NOT all folks! There is also this piece of idiotic tripe. It's called, The Ideas We Share. It begins,

It's strange that the United States and the Muslim world so often seem to be in conflict. The more you know about America's basic ideals and those of classical Islam, the more similarities you see. For one thing, both the country and the religion were founded on the principle that individual freedom is a God-given, inalienable right. For another, they share a central belief in the strength that comes from embracing diversity.

Huh? The last time I checked, diversity, especially of the religious sort, was being changed into a theocratic, dictatorial, Islamic homogeneity that is actively destroying age old communities of non-Muslims, or as we are referred to; infidels.

The resemblance dates back to their beginnings. The Muslim world grew in much the same way America would, a thousand years later. As Islam spread from its birthplace in Western Arabia, its community of followers—the umma—expanded into an increasingly diverse collection of cultures, peoples and nations. Muslim rulers made a practice of welcoming and protecting people of all faiths—a tradition begun earlier but set in stone less than 10 years after the Prophet Muhammad's death, when Caliph Umar captured Jerusalem in 638 and invited 70 Jewish families to come and live there, after centuries of repeated expulsions by non-Muslims.

Of course, the Jews of Arabia were wiped out. Protection of non-Muslims involves paying a special tax, living as second class citizens, and being subjected to daily humiliations that are codified in Sharia law. There is more of the same kind of drivel you've read over the years since 9/11 all about how benign Islam is, at least according to the cherry picked quotes. Ignore the reality of 1400 years of Islamic history. Only "Islamophobes" pay attention to that.

Update: I fixed all of the links . . . if anyone is interested.

Labels: islam, Muslims, Muslims in America, Newsweek

posted by Harry @ 7:17 PM