It's not about Islam. It's about any religion, including Mormons, Catholics, and Evangelicals who not only think they own the copyright on God, but who vigorously shove their faith down the throats of non-believers.
I suspect things like this don't happen in America not because the far-right is more humane than the Islamists in Mali, but rather because we have laws against such things and they'd never get away with it here. Then again, it's not particularly safe in American movie theaters either.
Islamists in control of a town in northern Mali stoned a couple to death after accusing them of having children outside of marriage, a local official who was one of several hundred witnesses to the killings said Monday.
The official said the bearded Islamists, armed with Kalashnikov rifles, brought the couple into the center of the town of Aguelhok from about 12 miles away in the countryside. The young man and woman were forced into holes about four feet deep, with their heads protruding, and then stoned to death at about 5 a.m. Sunday, the official said.
“They put them into the holes, and then they started throwing big rocks, until they were dead,” the official said, speaking by satellite phone from the remote desert town near the Algerian border.
I wonder how Team Romney would feel about an anti-Mormon witch hunt? Would that be okay too? Or is religious bigotry acceptable in the Romney campaign only when it's focused on religions the Mormons don't like?
Today on Center for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney’s radio show, Mitt Romney foreign policy adviser John Bolton defended Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) call for the U.S. government to investigate suggestions that government employees — including a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — are affiliated with a Muslim Brotherhood plot to infiltrate the U.S. government.
[Romney foreign policy adviser John] BOLTON: What I think these members of Congress have done is simply raise the question, to a variety of inspectors general in key agencies, are your departments following their own security clearance guidelines, are they adhering to the standards that presumably everybody who seeks a security clearance should have to go through, are they making special exemptions? What is wrong with raising the question? Why is even asking whether we are living up to our standards a legitimate area of congressional oversight, why has that generated this criticism? I’m just mystified by it.
Here's the problem. Some have expressed the concern that Romney will toe the Mormon line and do what his faith wants if he wins the presidency. That would be the same thing Romney adviser Bolton, and Bachmmann (and Limbaugh and Beck) are accusing Muslims of.
So, if Romney adviser Bolton thinks it's okay to ask government agencies to make sure that Muslims in government aren't secretly following the orders of Islam-central, wherever that may be, does Team Romney think it's okay to ask government agencies to do the same with Mormon federal employees?
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This is really pretty abominable, even for Bachmann.
At a press conference Thursday, Boehner (R-Ohio) defended Huma Abedin, the deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the wife of former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.).
Boehner said he did not know Abedin well, but that “from everything that I know of her she has a sterling character. I think accusations like this being thrown around are pretty dangerous.”
Boehner is the latest high-profile GOP official to criticize the charges by Bachmann and four other GOP lawmakers that Abedin could be using her position at the State Department to aid the Muslim Brotherhood.
You see, Huma is Muslim-American, so that means she must be working with the terrorists because she's, you know, a Muslim.
Bachmann shouldn't be serving on the Intelligence committee is she's this mentally unstable.
I want to talk a little bit about Butterball turkeys. And I want to let you know [that] every single Butterball turkey sold in the United States of America has been sacrificed to Allah.
Every single turkey that Butterball sells has been ritually slaughtered according to Islamic practice and has had an Islamic prayer prayed over that bird while it is being slaughtered.
Why stop there? What about kosher food? Is this any different than all the food that's prepared according to kosher rules as well, or is that not "terrorist" food so it's okay?
This is a really outrageous story. But it has a happy ending. Not only did the jerk get arrested, but a group of women fought back in quite a unique manner. And there's video. And the arrest record is online - I'm printing it here since a number of conservatives, including PJTV, seem to be suggesting the guy never did this, nor was arrested. Here you go.
Police report showing arrest of conservative blogger
Last week, during the Netroots Nation conference in Minneapolis, local GOP blogger John Hugh Gilmore, who blogs at Minnesota Conservatives, according to multiple witnesses (dozens of people were on the street watching and helping the women), walked by two Muslim women who were attending the Netroots Nation conference, and were walking down the sidewalk after dinner. According to the witnesses, including one of the women he approached, Gilmore saw the women were wearing hijabs, or headscarves, traditional to more conservative Muslim women. He stopped and asked them what they thought of a well-known woman who opposes the headscarf. The women said they didn't agree with her, Gilmore then approached the women and continued to push the conversation, even after the women asked him to leave them alone.
The witnesses say he then started taking pictures of the women, they asked him to stop, he continued taking the photos, and first one, then both women began to cry. At some point, he reportedly told them to go back to their country - both women were American - and he either tried to call, or pretended to call, conservative activists Andrew Breitbart (this part was caught on tape). A crowd started to grow around Gilmore as several dozen Netroots Nations attendees realized the women were in trouble.
Unfortunately, not all the bystanders were American. Included in those who came out to defend the women were two female Middle Eastern bloggers invited to visit our country as guests of the US State Department. State has a media outreach program that, ironically, brings foreigners to the US to show them that, among other things, we're not really as anti-Muslim as people think. The women were Muslim, from Pakistan and Oman, and they got to watch what witnesses describe as an American man berating two women for practicing their Muslim faith. Fortunately they also got to witness dozens of other Americans defending, and protecting, the two women from the man.
A St. Paul blogger faces misdemeanor charges after he allegedly harassed two Muslim women last week in downtown Minneapolis.
Minneapolis police say John Hugh Gilmore, 52, who writes a blog called Minnesota Conservatives, caused a scene Thursday night on Nicollet Mall. Sgt. Bill Palmer, a police spokesman, said Gilmore appeared to be drunk when he confronted the two women wearing the Muslim headscarf known as the hijab.
"Mr. Gilmore made some comments that he didn't believe the women should be in the United States, and that he thought that they were ruining America," Palmer said.
In response to the provocation by the conservative blogger, a group of women attending the Netroots Nation conference, both Muslim and non-Muslim, decided to hold a "hijab flash mob" at the GOP blog conference being held at the Minneapolis Hilton (the conservative bloggers routinely hold their conference every year in our hotel). With less than an hour's notice, the women descended on the hotel, donned hijab scarves, and marched their way up to the conservative blog conference.
That's when things got interesting.
A guard wouldn't let the women in to the conference. They asked me what to do - I was there covering their flash mob - and I told them that we had security at our conference as well, so they should abide by the security's wishes. A few reporters were present, and asking questions, so one of the women began to explain why they were there.
Suddenly, a man from "PJ TV" stuck a microphone in front of the lead woman and started to question her. He got increasingly upset, and basically charged her, and me, with lying about the incident with the GOP blogger the other night, simply beacuse the woman couldn't recall the name of the GOP blogger who had been arrested. You can watch the beginning of the woman's statement, and the GOP "reporter" getting more and more upset with the woman, and with me.
I then turned off my video so I could explain, on behalf of the women, what happened the other night to the two Muslim women. Understandably, the women running the flash mob were unaccustomed to conservatives aggressively shouting at them. I however, am.
JoeMyGod got the rest of the video of me answering the jerk's questions. Watch the video. Not the nicest people. And of course, as the MN public radio story, and the police report I linked to above proves, we were right - he was a conservative blogger, as I had already explained, and he was arrested for harassing the women. So much for PJ TV's brand of "if you yell it enough times, it must be true" journalism.
UPDATE: The PJTV guy, who really was a jerk, appeared on a broadcast about the anti-bigotry flashmob, with a clip showing how much of a jerk he was, and they end with a "related" story about how people are using social media to recruit homegrown terrorists. Get it? Muslim-American women are using the blogs to protest a conservative blogger's bigoted attack on Muslim women, so a "related" story is how "social media is being used to recruit homegrown Islamic terrorists." Tells you all you need to know. (As an aside, what IS she wearing?)
And here's the testimony of one of the witnesses who was present when the man harassed the women.
It's funny, I'm not a big fan of hijabs. I worry that, at least in some countries, they're part of the cultural oppression of women (especially when I see women covered in black, head to toe, in 110 degree heat, and guys wearing blue jeans and fun t-shirts. But I'm also not a big fan of men harassing women on public streets simply because they're wearing a scarf on their head, or thinking they couldn't be American simply because they're Muslim.
It's an odd way to fight the oppression of women by bullying them.
Here's some final video of John Hugh Gilmore after he allegedly harassed the women, and right before he was arrested. Video by Jeremy Ryan of DefendingWisconsin.org, published with his permission.
As a final point, I will say that, to their credit, a few of the conservative bloggers who were watching the flashmob, and with whom I was speaking, were very concerned when they heard what had happened earlier to the two women on the street. They asked me to send more information, to confirm that he was a conservative blogger, but they were legitimately not happy that someone would harass women like this.
PS As an aside, here's a still shot of the PJ TV "reporter" who was all tough-guy with the women conducting the flashmob. Note the very manly unlit cigar in his hand, and the even manlier manscaped eyebrows. The true definition of tough guy.... in the Castro.... circa 1970.
The funny thing is that Gingrich is turning out to be a bigger flip flopper than Romney, and that's saying something. From Justin Elliott at Salon:
Newt Gingrich has become one of the most vocal Muslim-baiting Republicans in the country, from his call for a federal ban on Shariah to his comparison of the organizers of the "ground zero mosque" to Nazis. But Gingrich's recent rhetoric represents a little-noticed shift from an earlier period in his career when he had a strikingly warm relationship with the American Muslim community.
As speaker of the House in the 1990s, for example, Gingrich played a key role in setting aside space on Capitol Hill for Muslim congressional staffers to pray each Friday; he was involved with a Republican Islamic group that promoted Shariah-compliant finance, which critics -- including Gingrich -- now deride as a freedom-destroying abomination; and he maintained close ties with another Muslim conservative group that even urged Gingrich to run for president in 2007.
Robertson: I was thinking, you know, if you oppose Muslims, what is said? Well, you're a bigot, right? Terrible bigotry. I wonder what were people who opposed the Nazis. Were they bigots?
Co-host: Well, in that day I think they were looked down upon and frowned upon.
Robertson: Why can't we speak out against an institution that is intent on dominating us and imposing Sharia law and making us all part of a universal caliphate? That's the goal of some of these people. Why is that bigoted? Why is it bigoted to resist Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and to say we don't want to live under Nazi Germany?
Not to nitpick here, but people who opposed the Nazis were not "looked down upon and frowned upon" as bigots. This was a few decades ago, so it's understandably a little obscure, but the United States actually went to war with Nazi Germany. There was a movie about it and everything.
There's really no other way to tell the story without lying about the facts.
President Obama unilaterally ordered the assassination of an American citizen. The weapon was a predator drone. The drone failed to kill the intended victim. The drone did kill several others.
The rest is just framing. Let me guess how they'll spin it:
■ The president is the hero who gave us the head of Osama BL on the point of a spear. Osama needed killing, but he's the exception.
■ The American was Muslim. He was a talk show host who said bad things about us on the Internet. Worse yet, he said those things in English so people would understand them. He carried kittens on the point of a spear as he walked around the house. He needed killing too. But there's only four Americans who need killing like he does. These four are the exception.
■ The guys actually killed were possibly bad. They might have needed killing too. But even if they were children, Collateral Damage. They're always the exception.
■ This will never happen to you, because you're not bad. Or standing next to someone who is. Or collateral.
Let's check to see if I got that framing right. Here's the New York Times on the story:
A missile strike from an American military drone in a remote region of Yemen on Thursday was aimed at killing Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical American-born cleric believed to be hiding in the country, American officials said Friday.
The attack does not appear to have killed Mr. Awlaki, the officials said, but may have killed operatives of Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen.
It was the first American strike in Yemen using a remotely piloted drone since 2002, when the C.I.A. struck a car carrying a group of suspected militants, including an American citizen, who were believed to have Qaeda ties. And the attack came just three days after American commandos invaded a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed Osama bin Laden, the founder of Al Qaeda.
Muslim, check. Radical, check. Death of unknown others who may have been operatives, check. Hero-killer of Osama bin Laden, check. Kittens ... the jury's still out, but JSOC has pictures.
Glenn Greenwald has exactly the right take. Please read it through. But note this:
There are certain civil liberties debates where, even though I hold strong opinions, I can at least understand the reasoning and impulses of those who disagree; the killing of bin Laden was one such instance. But the notion that the President has the power to order American citizens assassinated without an iota of due process -- far from any battlefield, not during combat -- is an idea so utterly foreign to me, so far beyond the bounds of what is reasonable, that it's hard to convey in words or treat with civility.
Did you note that Bush last tried this in 2002? Obama has revived the practice. Makes that little "predator drone" joke he made last year a little grisly, doesn't it. Or telling.
But hey, where else you gonna go? The Republicans are far worse. And besides, he's got this head on the point of his spear.
Chris Hedges is a former long-time war reporter and Arabic speaker who has covered the Middle East and was in New York for 9/11. He also covered the First Iraq War, was captured by the Iraqi Republican Guard, and in fact says jokingly, "I like to say I was embedded with the Iraqi Republican Guard." Like Robert Fisk, he's a major journalist for the region.
He recently spoke about the death of Osama bin Laden. These are just a few of his reflections:
When I was in New York, as some of you were, on 9/11, I was in Times Square when the second plane hit. I walked into The New York Times, I stuffed notebooks in my pocket and walked down the West Side Highway and was at Ground Zero four hours later. I was there when Building 7 collapsed. And I watched as a nation drank deep from that very dark elixir of American nationalism … the flip side of nationalism is always racism, it’s about self-exaltation and the denigration of the other.
And it’s about forgetting that terrorism is a tactic. You can’t make war on terror. Terrorism has been with us since Sallust wrote about it in the Jugurthine Wars. And the only way to successfully fight terrorist groups is to isolate themselves, isolate those groups, within their own societies. ...
So I was in the Middle East in the days after 9/11. And we had garnered the empathy of not only most of the world, but the Muslim world who were appalled at what had been done in the name of their religion. ... And the tragedy was that if we had the courage to be vulnerable, if we had built on that empathy, we would be far safer and more secure today than we are. [But we] responded exactly as these terrorist organizations wanted us to respond. They wanted us to speak the language of violence.
Three comments:
(1) I'm afraid of a certain dynamic. It's easy to become locked in combat with someone, a person in your life, say. Their goal is to keep you engaged, to keep you from breaking free. And your goal is to win. They are using your goal to achieve their goal.
The way to beat these small groups of so-called "terrorists" is to keep them small, to isolate them, to dis-aggrandize them. Turning the whole machinery of state against them in permanent combat gives them the credibility of being our equal. A tragic mistake, in my view. There is no way for us to win without breaking away — by making this a police action, sending in the international version of the cops, and relegating them back to their small world.
(For a local comparison, imagine how grand the Western Idaho Hyper-Jesus Poobah Militia would feel if the whole security apparatus of the U.S., all of it, were focused on them; and all they had to do to keep the glory alive was leave the occasional hand grenade in a shopping mall. We'd dance to their tune forever.)
(2) When you are locked in combat with an enemy, you mirror the enemy over time and become him. You become twins fighting. ("But don't you see? He's white on the right side of his face!")
(3) And finally, there's always a winner in the Games People Play version of "Let's you and him fight." And it's not the combatants. The people we're really locked in combat with ... is them, the real winners. Often it's the person selling tickets to the fight, for example, or the guy who owns the concession stand. Maybe we should turn our focus that way.
Yes, because I hear the Sharia added a good two points to the unemployment rate and added a trillion dollars to the debt.
These people are remarkable for their ability to lie and pander. Nothing in this country will ever get better, the world will continue to pass us by, but we at least it will be difficult to get an abortion, the gays' marriages won't be recognized at the federal level, and there won't be no Sharia stalkin' our youngins as they make their way home at night.
Pathetic. Though their voters, who consistently fall for this garbage, are possibly even more pathetic.
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We covered the meat of this story here. But this Jon Stewart take is just too well done (and yes, he really did eat the closest thing to cotton that can be labeled "cheese"):
Let's give King a break. Maybe there are good terrorists after all; like, appropriately hued or something. What'dya think?
American Muslim leaders, who have struggled to present a clear public voice or organize politically in the decade since Sept. 11, are increasingly apprehensive about the direction Rep. Pete King will take when he convenes hearings next month on the threat posed by radical Islam in America.
King, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, plans to focus on the Times Square bombing attempt and the Fort Hood shooting, both involving American-born Muslims, as well as other incidents and on what he sees as the failure of Muslim leadership to combat extremism.
"NPR defends 1st Amendment Right, but will fire u if u exercise it," Palin tweeted. "Juan Williams: u got taste of Left's hypocrisy, they screwed up firing you."
Huckabee went further in his criticism, calling on Congress to pull funding from NPR.
“NPR has discredited itself as a forum for free speech and a protection of the First Amendment rights of all and has solidified itself as the purveyor of politically correct pabulum and protector of views that lean left,” Huckabee said.
“It is time for the taxpayers to start making cuts to federal spending, and I encourage the new Congress to start with NPR,” he added.
Off topic, but doesn't anyone else think that Palin probably wrote like that even before she discovered the Internet?
“I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot,” Williams said on the "The O'Reilly Factor" Monday. “But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”
Not to be confused with the woman who wears a cross around her neck.
I get that a lot of people had "Muslim panic" in the period immediately following 9/11. It wasn't right, but I wouldn't be surprised if most people had it to some degree. But it's been almost ten years - time to get over it. And then to suggest that people "in Muslim garb" somehow identify themselves as Muslims "first," simply because of the way they dress... what should they be wearing, and how should they self-identify? As Cubs fans?). I don't dress the way I do because I'm Amurikan. You just dress according to local custom, the way you're brought up - and in the US, that involves pants and a shirt, in Saudi Arabia, it doesn't.
So if I don't put on "Muslim garb" when visiting Saudi Arabia, I'm flaunting my American-ness, and have a radical American agenda? And finally, the notion that even if one sees oneself as "Muslim first," that somehow makes that person more suspect?
I suspect a lot of Americans have had a similar experience post-9/11 - getting onto a plane and getting a bit nervous about who's on the plane with them. But Williams sounds like he's trying to justify it, rather than admitting that it's a bit of an over-reaction - and his justification, that their clothing shows they have some Muslim agenda - is just downright weird. That's what got him into trouble.
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The Department of Justice today filed an amicus brief in a lawsuit in Murfreesboro, Tenn., where opponents of a new mosque are trying to stop its construction. In the brief, the DOJ declares that Islam is a religion and is entitled to freedom of expression.
Nicholas Kristoff has written a very nice column this week in the Times. He takes the theme of journalistic balance and twists it like a pretzel to show its ugly side. I can only quote part, so I'll do the Muslim–Christian opening. But do click through; his cleverness and insight will delight.
Many Americans have suggested that more moderate Muslims should stand up to extremists, speak out for tolerance, and apologize for sins committed by their brethren.
That’s reasonable advice, and as a moderate myself, I’m going to take it. (Throat clearing.) I hereby apologize to Muslims for the wave of bigotry and simple nuttiness that has lately been directed at you. The venom on the airwaves, equating Muslims with terrorists, should embarrass us more than you. Muslims are one of the last minorities in the United States that it is still possible to demean openly, and I apologize for the slurs.
He then goes on to tell about his interaction with the editor of the the story of the Portland (Maine) Press Herald. Seems they published a "good Muslim" story on the front page, and all hell broke loose (so to speak); oops, the date was last Sept 11. Balance; gotta add more balance.
He ends with a serious point, one I share. Yes, there are horrid Muslims in the world — "theocratic mullahs oppressing people in Iran; girls kept out of school in Afghanistan in the name of religion," etc. — but there are millions of gentle Muslims as well, literally millions.
It's in fact a gentle religion; more about practice than orthodoxy (how refreshing). And that practice is prayer, five times a day, every day of your life, in which you acknowledge the primacy of an Other and humble yourself before it, again literally.
Kristoff appreciates this as well:
I’m sickened when I hear such gentle souls lumped in with Qaeda terrorists, and when I hear the faith they hold sacred excoriated and mocked. To them and to others smeared, I apologize.
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