Category Archives: Islamophobia 101

How I Almost Became a Terrorist

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Islamophobia 101, Teaching Resources, Terrorism Issue


left, 1967 cover of Life Magazine; right, Dr. Alan Singer in the classroom

How I Almost Became a Terrorist
Not Everyone Who Opposes U.S. Policy is a Fanatic

By ALAN J. SINGER, CounterPunch via Maiz Centeotl Chicomecoatl, January 7, 2010

In May 1967 I was a seventeen-year old high school senior and a not particularly religious Jew. I was born in New York City, as were my parents, although my grandparents were immigrants from Eastern Europe. My family strongly identified with the state of Israel and at the time my stepmother was visiting her brother who had emigrated there to fight for independence after serving in the U.S. army during World War II.

The survival of Israel as a Jewish state was important to my identity and the identity of my friends and family members. My friends, siblings, cousins, and I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust and we had family members who were murdered. Jews had been victims for two thousand years but the survival of Israel meant we would be victims no more.

As the crisis in the Middle East intensified Americans were evacuated. My father and I spent a night at Kennedy Airport waiting for my stepmother to return home. The next morning two friends and I went to the Jewish Agency to sign up to go to Israel as volunteers in the event of war. We hoped to fight but said we would do anything that was needed.

On June 5, 1967 Israel launched a preemptive strike. The Third Arab-Israeli War lasted six days and ended with a resounding Israeli victory. American volunteers were not needed so we never went. But we would have gone and we would have fought for the survival of Israel and of Jews, whether the United States government gave permission, looked the other way, or even if it tried to stop us.

I am no longer a Zionist and I have not supported Israeli policy, especially the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, since the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. I now see Israel as the aggressor in the region, but that is not the point. Continue reading How I Almost Became a Terrorist →

Why they hate us: You can count on it

Iraq War, Islamophobia 101, Journalism and Media

Why they hate us (II): How many Muslims has the U.S. killed in the past 30 years?(II): How many Muslims has the U.S. killed in the past 30 years?

by Stephen M. Walt, The New ForeignPolicy.com, November 30

Tom Friedman had an especially fatuous column in Sunday’s New York Times, which is saying something given his well-established capacity for smug self-assurance. According to Friedman, the big challenge we face in the Arab and Islamic world is “the Narrative” — his patronizing term for Muslim views about America’s supposedly negative role in the region. If Muslims weren’t so irrational, he thinks, they would recognize that “U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny.” He concedes that we made a few mistakes here and there (such as at Abu Ghraib), but the real problem is all those anti-American fairy tales that Muslims tell each other to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions.

I heard a different take on this subject at a recent conference on U.S. relations with the Islamic world. In addition to hearing a diverse set of views from different Islamic countries, one of the other participants (a prominent English journalist) put it quite simply. “If the United States wants to improve its image in the Islamic world,” he said, “it should stop killing Muslims.” Continue reading Why they hate us: You can count on it →

Fear of Minarets

Immigration Issues, Islam in Europe, Islamophobia 101

My compatriots’ vote to ban minarets is fuelled by fear

by Tariq Ramadan, The Guardian, 29 November 2009

It wasn’t meant to go this way. For months we had been told that the efforts to ban the construction of minarets in Switzerland were doomed. The last surveys suggested around 34% of the Swiss population would vote for this shocking initiative. Last Friday, in a meeting organised in Lausanne, more than 800 students, professors and citizens were in no doubt that the referendum would see the motion rejected, and instead were focused on how to turn this silly initiative into a more positive future.

Today that confidence was shattered, as 57% of the Swiss population did as the Union Démocratique du Centre (UDC) had urged them to – a worrying sign that this populist party may be closest to the people’s fears and expectations. For the first time since 1893 an initiative that singles out one community, with a clear discriminatory essence, has been approved in Switzerland. One can hope that the ban will be rejected at the European level, but that makes the result no less alarming. What is happening in Switzerland, the land of my birth? Continue reading Fear of Minarets →

Why Minarets?

Islam and Christianity, Islam in Europe, Islamophobia 101

Swiss voters, at least those who bothered to show up at the polls, today voted to deny any future building of minarets in their country. As reported on Al-Jazeera:

Of those who cast votes in Sunday’s poll, 57.5 per cent approved the ban, while only four cantons out of 26 rejected the proposals.

The result paves the way for a constitutional amendment to be made.

“The Federal Council [government] respects this decision. Consequently the construction of new minarets in Switzerland is no longer permitted,” the government, which had opposed the ban, said in a statement.

The minaret is, of course, a symbol, but a rather unusual choice. In one sense it is like saying that MacDonalds cannot have a high sign (as is the case in some municipalities) but they can serve all the hamburgers they want. Thus, this ban is not on building mosques, nor does it prevent Muslims from praying in mosques. Since minarets long ago ceased to have functional value, apart from perhaps holding a loud speaker, the minaret is indeed symbolic.

But why the minaret? Continue reading Why Minarets? →

Swiss Minaretxia

Immigration Issues, Islam in Europe, Islamophobia 101, Luke R. E. Publican, Terrorism Issue


Cows will no longer give milk in Switzerland if minarets are allowed to stand.

The rightwing political parties in Switzerland are up in arms, preparing for a vote on Sunday to save their alpine paradise from the dreaded cultural eyesore of mosque minarets. This proposed ban on minarets comes from the same friendly yodelers in the nationalist Swiss People’s Party that has previously campaigned against foreigners, including a proposal to kick out entire families of foreigners if one of their children breaks a law and a bid to subject citizenship applications to a popular vote. But they have the pure white chocolate science to back up their campaign this time. It is now evident from a pretentious hypothetical analysis that purebred Swiss cows refuse to give milk, even 1 percent, when they see a minaret. This spells the end of Swiss milk chocolate, a loss that would udderly ruin the Swiss economy, not to mention the sense of shame the bovine residents of the country would feel.

Save Switzerland for the pure Swiss, those wily Swiss Bankers who for decades have allowed brutal dictators to launder their money in untouchable Swiss bank accounts. Continue reading Swiss Minaretxia →

Going (after) Muslim

Anthropology/Sociology, Islam and Christianity, Islam in America, Islamophobia 101, Journalism and Media, Terrorism Issue


A picture making the news rounds of Major Hasan on the day of the shootings.

[Note: I have just published a commentary on a commentary in Forbes Magazine in which Major Nidal Hasan is said to have “gone postal” in his frenzy. This is published on Religion Dispatches. I excerpt the first couple of paragraphs here, but please go to the Religion Dispatches site, where you can post comments as well.]

If the media frenzy over the Fort Hood killings is any gauge, the ugly specter of 9/11 has again taken its psychological toll. This time, instead of the “bad Muslim” being a bearded terrorist called bin Laden, there is a US Army psychologist who was trained to be a healer of military personnel. He happens to have an Arabic ancestry and is Muslim.

Prominent American Muslim organizations issued statements right away condemning the murders. Debate in the media is now focused on his motivation. Was he a fifth-columnist wolf in military dress? Did his sympathies for innocent victims in our ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan overwhelm his common sense of decency? Should the FBI and security arms of the US military have pounced on him when they uncovered his initial links to a radical imam?

One result that I have noticed among those who study Islam, especially my Muslim colleagues, is a growing fault line over the dubious “good Muslim/bad Muslim” binary. As Mahmood Mamdani has eloquently argued, the choice is not between good and bad individuals or citizens, but about being Muslim. Major Hasan is a man who looked very much like a “good Muslim”: a military officer providing therapy to returning veterans. But, now, it seems that at some tipping point he became the “bad Muslim,” the kind who places mosque above state.

For the rest of this commentary, click here.

Daniel Martin Varisco

Reduced to a four-letter word

Ethics, Gender and Sexuality, Immigration Issues, Islam in Europe, Islamophobia 101, Journalism and Media


Tamanna Rahman: Even at home in Manchester, Tamanna is now wary of attacks

Tamanna Rahman spent two months living on a Bristol housing estate for the BBC’s Panorama programme Undercover: Hate on the Doorstep.

Here she explains her reasons for agreeing to take part in the programme and describes how it felt to be a daily target of racist abuse, both physical and verbal. Her report contains details of racial abuse.

by Tamanna Rahman, BBC Panorama, October 19, 2009

In 2000, as a 16-year-old at my culturally and racially diverse Manchester secondary school, I was asked by a local television news team examining the hopes and aspirations of the first class of the new millennium if I felt that racism in Britain was a thing of the past.

Fresh-faced, naïve and optimistic, I answered yes; racism is dead.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2009 and my answer is very different.

What changed? As part of a Panorama programme, I spent two months working undercover on a Bristol housing estate.

Over the course of our investigation I would have glass, a can, a bottle and stones thrown at me. Continue reading Reduced to a four-letter word →

Muslims after 9/11

Islam in America, Islamophobia 101, Osama Bin Laden

Muslims Widely Seen As Facing Discrimination

Views of Religious Similarities and Differences

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, September 9, 2009

Overview

Eight years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Americans see Muslims as facing more discrimination inside the U.S. than other major religious groups. Nearly six-in-ten adults (58%) say that Muslims are subject to a lot of discrimination, far more than say the same about Jews, evangelical Christians, atheists or Mormons. In fact, of all the groups asked about, only gays and lesbians are seen as facing more discrimination than Muslims, with nearly two-thirds (64%) of the public saying there is a lot of discrimination against homosexuals.

The poll also finds that two-thirds of non-Muslims (65%) say that Islam and their own faith are either very different or somewhat different, while just 17% take the view that Islam and their own religion are somewhat or very similar. But Islam is not the only religion that Americans see as mostly different from their own. When asked about faiths other than their own, six-in-ten adults say Buddhism is mostly different, with similar numbers saying the same about Mormonism (59%) and Hinduism (57%). Continue reading Muslims after 9/11 →