FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

Our local Islamic Center is holding a 9/11 memorial program tomorrow. They’ve invited a woman whose sister-in-law was murdered on 9/11, who will speak about it from an anti-war point of view. They are certainly entitled to do this.

I’m sure she will bring up the subject of dislike and prejudice against American Muslims. She will suggest that there is a massive amount of it since 9/11, but she will actually be wrong. Here is a table of hate crime statistics from the FBI for 2009:

Of the 1,575 victims of an anti-religious hate crime:

71.9 percent were victims because of an offender’s anti-Jewish bias.
8.4 percent were victims because of an anti-Islamic bias.
3.7 percent were victims because of an anti-Catholic bias.
2.7 percent were victims because of an anti-Protestant bias.
0.7 percent were victims because of an anti-Atheist/Agnostic bias.
8.3 percent were victims because of a bias against other religions (anti-other religion).
4.3 percent were victims because of a bias against groups of individuals of varying religions (anti-multiple religions, group).

There are perhaps three times as many Jews as Muslims in the US. But a Jew is almost nine times as likely to be a victim of a hate crime than a Muslim (nevertheless the example of a hate crime victim on the FBI site is a Muslim). Keep in mind that the large Muslim organizations like CAIR have been aggressively encouraging Muslims to report ‘Islamophobic’ incidents as hate crimes.

Think about what happened to innocent Jews in Arab countries when those countries lost a war that they started against the new state of Israel. Talk about hate crimes! Comparatively, the US has done remarkably well in its treatment of American Muslims since 9/11.

‘Islamophobia’ is used quite loosely not only to mean prejudice against Muslims, but any criticism of Islam. For example, I recall a meeting with several Muslims when the name of Daniel Pipes came up. “Oh, he’s Islamophobic,” the Muslims agreed.

Pipes actually is neither prejudiced against Muslims nor anti-Islam: his position is that the religious texts can be — and are, by some — interpreted in an aggressive, expansionist or violent way, and that there is presently a struggle in the community of Muslims between traditional Muslims and the radicals. But because this implies that Islam is not perfect in all respects, he is considered ‘Islamophobic’.

In the UN, the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) has been working with some success to criminalize ‘defamation of religion’, an effort which some see as legitimizing anti-blasphemy laws in Islamic countries. Lately, the effort appears to be receiving some support from the Obama Administration. Of course, the Western position until now has always been that individuals have rights which must be protected, not religions:

The administration is taking the lead in an international effort to “implement” a U.N. resolution against religious “stereotyping,” specifically as applied to Islam. To be sure, it argues that the effort should not result in free-speech curbs. However, its partners in the collaboration, the 56 member states of the OIC, have no such qualms. Many of them police private speech through Islamic blasphemy laws and the OIC has long worked to see such codes applied universally. Under Muslim pressure, Western Europe now has laws against religious hate speech that serve as proxies for Islamic blasphemy codes.

Last March, U.S. diplomats maneuvered the adoption of Resolution 16/18 within the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC). Non-binding, this resolution, inter alia, expresses concern about religious “stereotyping” and “negative profiling” but does not limit free speech. It was intended to — and did — replace the OIC’s decidedly dangerous resolution against “defamation of religions,” which protected religious institutions instead of individual freedoms.

But thanks to a puzzling U.S. diplomatic initiative that was unveiled in July, Resolution 16/18 is poised to become a springboard for a greatly reinvigorated international effort to criminalize speech against Islam, the very thing it was designed to quash.

Liberal Jewish leaders in the US also seem to be worried about the threat of Islamophobia:

“Ten years after 9/11, it has somehow become respectable to verbally attack Muslims and Islam in America,” Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the president of the Union of Reform Judaism, said Thursday at the Washington event organized by Shoulder to Shoulder, a group founded a year ago during a period of intensified anti-Muslim rhetoric.

“There are very real consequences when entire populations are represented in the public imagination by their worst elements, when the sins of the few are applied to the group as a whole. I have watched in astonishment as prominent politicians, including candidates for president of the United States, have found it politically opportune to peddle divisive anti-Muslim bigotry.” — JTA

I am not sure which candidate(s) Rabbi Yoffie is talking about, or what “bigotry” they are peddling. But I think we are moving dangerously close to stifling free speech when we create a psychological no-go zone around critical discussion of Islam. After all, the 9/11 attacks were committed against us by Muslims in the name of Islam. As I wrote yesterday, it isn’t enough to just blame “al-Qaeda.”

The word ‘Islamophobia’ is a bad choice to describe anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic prejudice, because etymologically it should mean “fear of Islam” (a better word would be ‘misislamy’ or something similar, but it’s almost unpronounceable). It seems, though, that while Muslims are strongly opposed to criticism of Islam, the radical ones at least are quite happy to promote fear of Muslims. There is a reason that random attacks against civilians, like 9/11 or Hamas’ missile attacks on Israel, are called ‘terrorism’. They are intended to demoralize a population by creating fear.

Fear of terrorism is a very real thing. But especially in the culture of the West in the last 50 years or so, fear of being called a ‘bigot’ is also real. And just as we need to defend our people and civilization, we need to defend our ability to speak freely and openly about forces that threaten them.

Technorati Tags: Islamophobia

TV transmission antenna on the North Tower of the World Trade Center

As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 draws near, much is being said about it — ‘where was I when’ stories, political lessons to be learned, stories of great personal loss (the husband, daughter, son that never came back), and more. It’s impossible to escape in local and national newspapers, the radio and TV, the internet.

“Everything changed,” many say. But what changed isn’t the same for every one of us.

What stands out the most for me is this: 9/11 thrust itself in the most concrete way possible — interposed astonishing cruelty, massive destruction and widespread pain — between the politically correct discourse that had come to characterize our national conversation, and the reality that exists beyond it.

It’s as if Osama bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Mohammed Atta, et al, struck a powerful blow which propelled us into their world, a world in which honor and shame are the primary determinants of behavior, in which you get points for gratuitous cruelty (except it isn’t gratuitous), and in which ideology is far more important than economic benefits. In this world, the ‘other’ is often your enemy, and what you do to enemies is kill them.

It’s an uncivilized world, and many of us still don’t know how it works or how to survive in it.

We started fighting a ‘war on terror’, not always against the correct targets, and even today our government is capable of saying only that they are fighting ‘al-Qaeda’ — a relatively small piece of the coalition of radical Islamists that has declared war on us. Even when it was obvious that they were trying to kill us because we were their enemies, government officials insisted that “terrorism is caused by poverty” and similar ridiculous explanations (even your average teen-age gang member understands killing enemies).

We have finally — after 10 years — figured out how to kill members of al-Qaeda, starting with bin Laden, and that organization is staggering today. But apparently our administration still doesn’t see that the coalition of convenience of radical Islamic powers — which includes Iran, Syria, Hizballah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and (more and more) Turkey — is lined up against us, despite their considerable differences.

It’s the ideology, stupid

The cooperation of Shiite Hizballah and Sunni Hamas to threaten Israel should be instructive to us. Until we understand, for example, that Turkey can be preparing to invade Syria and challenging Iran for domination of the region, while still cooperating with those powers to push out US influence, we will continue to miss the point that we are fighting an ideology, not terrorist militias.

The danger of home-grown terrorism is not reduced when we insist that those who practice jihad without explicit connections to al-Qaeda are mentally disturbed or otherwise irrelevant. The facts that there are mosques in the US where radical Islamic views are preached, that some of the largest and most influential Muslim organizations espouse Islamist ideologies, and that many Muslims feel that piety is proportional to radicalism — these are things that we can’t afford to ignore.

Muslim organizations would like us to think that the biggest problem resulting from 9/11 is a ‘wave of Islamophobia’, a backlash against innocent Muslims. Actually, although prejudice against Muslims does exist, it is almost negligible — far less prevalent than antisemitism. But if every expression of concern about radical Islamism, every suspicion that some organization or mosque is imbued with Islamist ideology is forbidden on the grounds that it constitutes an unacceptable form of prejudice — then we will be defenseless against this ideology, which, frankly, wants to kill us.

This should be the main lesson of 9/11: enmity based on ideology is not obsolete. We are at war with an ideology, one closely bound up with religion in the most dangerous way possible. We need to name the enemy, fight it abroad and suppress it at home.

I have to agree with the bumper sticker:

Everything I need to know about radical Islamism I learned on 9/11.

Technorati Tags: 9/11, radical Islam

Turkey's Islamist Prime Minister Tayyip ErdoÄŸan. Can he climb down?

Israel’s enemies often characterize her as warlike, or a ‘bully’. In fact, Israel’s diplomacy is often excessively conciliatory — especially in the Middle East, where attempts at compromise and conciliation are often seen as weakness or surrender, and where the goal of Israel’s enemies is not to solve problems but to create them.

However, the award for the most childish display of belligerence in the region has to go to Turkey. After the publication of the Palmer Report, in which the UN (for once) had the audacity to admit that Israel was actually justified in blockading Gaza and boarding the Mavi Marmara, Turkey expelled the Israeli ambassador, ended military and trade cooperation and announced that it would support Palestinian statehood in the UN.

All very nice, but the icing on the cake was Turkey’s threat to escort future flotillas to Gaza:

“The eastern Mediterranean Sea is not a region unfamiliar to us,” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Tuesday in his first public comments on measures that Turkey was taking over Israel’s failure to apologize for killing nine Turks on a Gaza-bound aid ship last year.

Turkish forces stationed at naval bases in Aksaz and Ä°skenderun are capable of patrolling regional waters and escorting civilian ships in the Mediterranean, ErdoÄŸan told reporters.

“Certainly, our ships will show up more frequently in these waters. We will see them [there] very frequently,” he said. “So far, Israel has always played the role of a spoiled boy in the face of U.N. resolutions concerning Israel, thinking that it would carry on with this role.”

On Friday Ankara last said it would take action to ensure the safety of maritime navigation in the East Mediterranean as part of measures against Israel that included also the downgrading of diplomatic ties to the second-secretary level. — Hürriet Daily News (Turkey)

Emanuele Ottolenghi has pointed out that ErdoÄŸan ought to read some of the details of the legal case found in the report (which he demanded that the UN produce in the first place):

Because the Palmer Report has recognized an on-going state of war exists between Israel and Hamas; that Israel has a right to self-defense in this context; that the blockade is a legitimate instrument to meet Israel’s security requirements; and that therefore Israel’s blockade is legal; any attempt by Turkish ships to breach the blockade would be an act of aggression. Israel, provided it follows the rules of engagement (prior warning, ascertainment of the vessels’ intentions, non-violent means, proportionality etc.) laid out in the Palmer Report, is entitled to board, capture or otherwise use force to prevent Turkish ships from getting to Gaza.

This is more than childish — it’s extremely dangerous. Does Turkey really want war with Israel?

One of the requirements for a blockade in international law is that it be ‘effective’. You can’t make exceptions and still have a legal blockade. Israel simply can’t afford to have ships carrying tons of arms and ‘volunteers’ or who knows what landing in Gaza. So Israel will enforce the blockade, even if it means using force against a Turkish warship.

Turkey is a member of NATO. Article One of the NATO charter reads as follows:

The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.

Turkey’s warlike threats  obviously contradict the NATO charter. Since the Islamist AKP’s ascendance to power in 2002, ErdoÄŸan has pushed Turkey away from the West and closer to those dark forces which NATO, from its activation in 2001 as a result of the 9/11 attack on the US, has fought against.

Turkey opposed sanctions on Iran, courted Hamas (which ErdoÄŸan does not consider a terrorist group), and is presently trying to ensure that the replacement for Assad’s terror-supporting regime in Syria will be a Sunni Islamist terror-supporting regime that he controls.

It’s clear that Turkey’s NATO membership and the amount of military hardware it has received as a result was a mistake.

Technorati Tags: Turkey, Israel, NATO