An ex-senator that opposes individual rights of women; a pundit that calls people "faggots" and considers Islam a "cult"; a Christian scholar who is considered a "polemicist" and an "Islamophobe" by conservative Christians themselves; and an intellectual who has received millions from "far right" organizations since 2001, are rising up for the rights of women, gays, and religious minorities in the Muslim world. This laughable spectacle is called the Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. It will be coming to a university near you on October 22 - 26.
Why are they going to universities? Why not these people go to Saudi Arabia or Pakistan and tackle extremism directly? Simple: They consider the university "the institutional base of the left." The same left which "is the enabler and abettor of the terrorist jihad."
In order, thus, to attack the left, these crusaders will be seeking to purposefully trap and target Muslim student groups at various universities. Mathrew Yglesias describes their tactics as follows: "In short, the main goal of the 'David Horowitz Freedom Center' here is to write up a petition deliberately designed to be unlikely for Muslim groups to sign and then to use Muslim groups' failure to sign the petition as evidence that they're on the side of 'our terrorist adversaries.'" The Petition has rightly been described in the blogosphere as akin to The Great Loyalty Oath from the novel Catch-22.
These compassionate crusaders plan on making "the oppression of women in Islam" a "major theme of the week."
Yet, the reality is that the American universities are some of the staunchest supporters of the rights of Muslim women. It was at a university where I met Riffat Hassan, the well-known anti-honor killing activist from the University of Louisville. It was at a university where I met Amina Wadud, the Quran scholar, who was the first woman to lead a mixed-congregation prayer in recent Muslim history and quite courageously challenged Muslim patriarchy. It was at a university where I met Abdullahi An-Naim, the Sudanese Islamic scholar whose message calls for the equality of men and women in and whose teacher was executed in 1983 for such ideas. It was a university where I met Rafia Zakaria, the feminist activist whose commentary on issues affecting Muslim women is published in Pakistan and India. It was at a university where I heard of Laleh Bakhtiar who has now published a feminist translation of the Quran (and we know how important translations of the Quran are in the fight against extremism). It was at a university where I encountered the work of Ziba Mir-Hosseini, the Iranian activist whose speciality is Muslim divorce law, with a focus on women's rights.
It is these universities that the organizers of this initiative are calling "enablers and abettors" of terrorism.
In fact, the universities have been on the forefront of supporting many Muslim reform projects, and the area of Muslim women is not the only one they have supported.
It was at a university where Iranian dissenter and Nobel Prize Winner Shirin Ebadi went to make her speeches (where she extolled not attacking her country). It was at a university where Akbar Ganji, the Iranian dissenter, went to consult with leading left wing philosopher Richard Rorty. It was at a university where a Jewish Studies professor Deborah Lipstadt started to translate anti-holocaust-denial books into Arabic and Farsi. It was a university that gave shelter to Muslim scholars from South Africa whose homes were firebombed.
So, the question to be posed to the organizers of Islamofascism Awareness Week is this: what have they done to support any of the aforementioned academics and activists? By calling the universities "abettors of terrorism", they reveal their contempt of the aforementioned efforts, not support. With the amount of hooting and hollering they have done about women's rights in Islam, I would imagine the next step would be take some of their millions and donate the money to these activists, or better yet, to Muslim women around the world, such as this initiative belonging to Mukhtaran Mai, the survivor of gang-rape and leading feminist activist in Pakistan.
Yet, I suspect that is quite unlikely, because this "awareness" week is not about awareness at all, but using anti-Muslim animus to achieve political ends. The primary political end is to continue the war in Iraq. For example Santorum, one of the featured speakers of the week has previously urged Bush, for "public relations" reasons, to depict the war in Iraq as a greater war against "Islamic Fascism."
Further, one has to wonder what someone like Ann Coulter will be able to accomplish while discussing feminism in the Muslim world when it appears she doesn't find women intellectually capable of having the right to vote. While on the subject of Coulter I find it quite interesting that in the span of a year she has gone from calling Muslims "ragheads" to turning into a Mother Theresa for Muslim women.
Just the other day at one of our universities, a woman-hating, fundamentalist, gay-bashing, religious-supremacist, made a fool of himself, providing a hearty chuckle at his expense. In the last days of October, there will be more opportunities for such amusements. This time from some of our own. I encourage our universities to welcome these speakers.
I have heard HORROR-WITZ speak. Seems he became controversial to become better known. No one heard of him before.
Know thy enemy may have helped those in DC decide it wasn't worth it to invade IRAQ.
Professors are educated and intelligent and mostly then chose to be democrats.
Religion in our generation has done more harm than good.
These are the sorts of discussions that we promote through Muslims For A Safe America. For example, in the Religion/Identity area, we've put together "debate" handouts (one page, double-sided) on the following issues:
DEBATES ABOUT RELIGION AND IDENTITY
Why Should American Muslims Talk About American National Security?
Should American Muslims Be Loyal To America?
When Are Muslims Required to Fight, And Against Whom?
Should American Muslims Join the American Armed Forces?
Are Western Civilians Legitimate Targets in War?
Should American Muslims Work As Government Informants?
(All these handouts are available at
http://muslimsforasafeamerica.org/?page_id=49 )
Our approach is unique, because we don't present our opinions on these issues. Instead, we just present arguments on both sides of the issues, so that each Muslim can make an informed decision.
Muslim students can use such material to organize "fair and balanced" discussions about these issues. These events would actually begin to answer the real questions that many Americans have about Islam. These discussions would be a great response to the "Islamofascism Awareness Week" events that Muslim students are concerned about.
Of course, I don't expect Muslim students to actually put on these kinds of discussions in the near future, because many young Muslims have generally bought into the mentality that there is no need for us to answer people's questions as long as we say "Islam means peace." Our community’s refusal to answer questions makes others suspicious, and it allows others to dominate the discussion about Islam.
Kamran Memon, Esq.
Muslims For A Safe America
200 S. Michigan Avenue
Suite 1240
Chicago, IL 60604
(312) 961-2354
http://muslimsforasafeamerica.org/
case closed
Historical examples of fascism: Germany, Italy, Spain, Hungary, Hussein's Iraq, current Iran, Baathist Syria are but examples of how fascist ideology can be utilized to control and inspire population.
Fascist governments often are based on a particular ideology( Islam) that attempts to dominate and define the national discourse on some exclusive set of Islamic beliefs and place those beliefs above all other loyalties as well create a mobilized community to serve the dominant ideology.
Certainly, Iran fits this description and so do futile fantasies by Islamic radicals. They consider hyper-strict adherence to Islam in all aspects of life: cultural, political, scientific,racial etc as the defining ideology
of the society.
Also these fantasy-states have little resemblance to the actual historical Caliphates. The Caliphates were successful because of their flexibility and relative tolerance and practical
adoptation.
Osama, Hamas' type of ideology is quite different and imply a brutal oppression of any dissent
Hence: Islamo-fascism.
And JudyGee is in la-la land. The death ratio is 8 to 1 Palestinian children killed to israelis. Even one is horrid, but I don't hear a lot of lamenting of US weapons and tax dollars to kill those children. The overal ratio is 4.5 to 1, Palestinian to israeli.
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/
JudyGee wrote a comic book far above this post. The homes from which Jewish folks were driven inside Arab countries has long been known to be terrorized, not by the local Arab populace, but but the israeli intel and military. Ask any of the former Iraqi Jews inside israel what it was like to find out their own people a couple countries over bombed their neighborhoods to scare them out of Iraq (and other countries).
Sabra and Shatilla were real enough for the fat big aerial the brain-dead (how can they tell?) sharon to driven COMPLETELY out of the IDF. But alas, the hard-liners wanted more Palestinian blood, so they brought the varmint back.
Bottom line: israel has NEVER been attacked unless it attacked firstly. ALL former PM biographies stated this unequivocally, with pride even. This includes repeatedly crossing into Lebanon until the Lebanese finally took action, took 2 soldiers who were illegally inside Lebanon, and the rest is, just as JudyGee spouts, complete fiction from the so-called main-stream media, owned by......ta-da! The same blokes who stroke themselves and each other while vilifying anything Arabic (and Arabs are semites, BTW, while 100 percent of Ashkenazim Jews, that is, 90 percent of all world Jewry, are Ashkenazim and are NOT semites. So it's a ruse to call someone an anti-semite unless they talking about Sephardi Jews, who, by the way, are also considered 2nd class citizens inside that great bastian of democracy, israel).
1. Convert
2. Submit
3. Die
It's your choice.
This is the best laugh I've had in a long time.
So those of us who do not believe the mythology or accept the "sacredness" of the book it is written in (a book written by mortal men and then recopied by other men for thousands of years), must refute the nonsense whenever we can. However we can. And not fight wars to preserve nonsense.
But I've heard it all, or similar, before. What I haven't heard ... what I am still NOT hearing, is any LOUD NOISE ... any mass protest or attention getting display of disgust from Muslims or the Muslim leaders of the world condemning terrorism and savagry in the name of Islam.
Where is the jihad against the jihadists?
Where is the fatwah against bin Laden, et al?
It went missing the day we invaded Iraq. It's a bit of a tough sell to say to a Middle Easterner "Hey, will you help us stop the killing while we're killing your family? We want to stop the killing, you see, and we need you help us stop the killing while we're busy killing."
Like I said, a bit of a Tough Sell
The actions of my own government disgust me. In the last seven years I've developed an almost Pavlovian middle finger response to the mere image of George Bush. The sound of his voice makes me ambidextrous.
The fact that this government, any government, doesn't understand and accept the clear fact that terrorism can never be defeated by force boggles my mind.
But I still hear nothing. Nothing from Muslims, nothing even about Muslims killing Muslims. This is not a Sunni vs Shiite football game. This is religious civil war. Muslim children are being slaughtered at the hands of Muslims. Where are the Muslim voices of reason at least regarding that?
The only Muslim voices I hear, the only video messages I see, are those of the terrorists. Where are the rational peace loving Muslims and why are they so quiet?
When the west starts pulling its influence out of the Middle East, then your question might begin to have some legitimacy. But as long as we are there, in their face with extraordinary political and military presence in places like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan - Arab and Persian extremists will always have a solid argument to justify their war against us. Having a need for their oil doesn't justify invasion, subversion of governments, or the support of ruthless dictators - period.
Your comment is a familiar and tired tactic used by the Israeli appeasers. Muslim clerics have no basis with which to argue against the jihadists even if they wanted to. America has no inherent right to occupy Saudi Arabia and give support to its ruthless dictatorship. Neither did we ever have a right to interfere with the government of Iraq or Iran. Jihadists can only be marginalized or silenced if we stop fueling their animosity by cutting our support of inhumane governments and pulling our mercenaries...ahem....I mean soldiers out of their countries.
I agree. And when pigs fly we'll all be swimming peacefully in Blissful Bay.
I don't pretend to have nor see any solution to the greed or ruthlessness or idiocy of it all.
I don't even know what an Israeli appeaser is.
I'm just saying I'm not hearing any messages to Muslims in general from influential Muslims who aren't terrorists.
I'm absolutely loving the West's top-down approach to "global feminism", and of course, singling out Muslim women as the poster children for the "cause" is so counterproductive and archaic, not to mention xenophobic, Orientalist, and racist, but really, who's counting the ways?
Having these "scholars" talk about Islamo-fascism and Muslim Women's rights is like having an historian give a keynote address on quantum physics.
WE MUST ALLOW THEM TO SPEAK- but no one has to listen- that's freedom !!
I find my intellegents is always regarded as 'child like' by these 'shut 'em up crowds'. Waht makes them think and act as if they know a damn thing more than I- it's all opinion and opinions and everybodys got one". Freedon of Speech is the right to make an idiot out of yourself in public- even if no one is listening. Laugh, turn 'em off, walk away, tell them off- but NEVER take away their ability to speak their minds (no matter how small). It's amazing how something you've said sounds stupider when it comes out of someone else mouth (perspective-could be a tool to enlightenment). But even more importantly if you shut them up- you too will come under the same restriction. Let them be in MSM, let them run for a political position. If nothing else others will see and hear unpopular their thoughts are and good ol' capitolism will force the 'money' folks to reconsider their 'product'. WE JUST AIN'T BUYING IT !!
The Amero-Fascists are the ones who operate under the radar and who need attention.
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Does anybody here know what the definition of fascism is?
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Small 'f' fascism is rather more vague, though historically fascist states (or states that are at least largely deemed to be fascistic) have tended to have the following characteristics.
A central focus on the nation state above the individual.
Corparitist economic policies.
A strong tendency towards racial, ethnic of national supremacy.
Intolerance towards those deemed mentally or physically weak.
Belief that struggle and conflict are ends unto themselves.
None of the above have any real relevance to Islamism, even in its most militant form, as Islamists follow a religious and not a nationalistic ideology, Islam is neither racially nor ethnically exclusive, most Islamists consider themselves the 'little guy' fighting against the brutal western superpowers and however brutal their means (and they are often extremely brutal) they are typically aiming for a specific set of political goals.
The douche bag was a participant in the radical left 60's until he realized there was more money to be made kissing up to Reagan
And a man who is''nt a conservative by the time He's forty has no head.