A FEW MODEST PEACE PLANS THAT ARE WORKING

I have been called "anti-semitic" more than once for the contents of this blog. Let the following  set of articles answer that charge. The three options  below cover communications, education, humour as ways to heal the breach between these two people, were enough to participate and engage in them, alas highly unlikely on all sides. More actions like these three present are what I would wish to see. I know there are more such wonderful people on this planet doing such things. Look for them and engage yourselves! With all my heart and soul, I would wish such peace on all of humanity.

The founders of FACE2FACE caught at a serious moment of deliberations.

The above image can be seen on both

Palestinian and Jewish sides of the Wall.

Men think in herds; 

they go mad in herds;

they recover their senses slowly ~ one by one

Here is just a pleasant little example of what is possible. Naive? A little. Successful? Yes. In many cases I have known that the "fear of the other" as part of indoctrination as often as not, is all that divides different groups.  Especially young Palestinians and Israelis growing up on opposite sides of the green lines.  In a nurturing environment, empathy for the other is being created in a small way and seems to make changes one individual at a time.

A MODEST PEACE PLAN THAT IS WORKING

"Our campus is home to the same Israeli-Palestinian debates that happen elsewhere. But their tone has been remarkably civil."

Duke University,

Originally published June 10, 2010

By Imam Abdullah Antepli and Rabbi Michael Goldman

November 26, 3010

Note to readers: Imam Abdullah Antepli and Rabbi Michael Goldman are chaplains for Muslim life and Jewish life, respectively, at Duke University. This op-ed ran in the Washington Post.

More on Rabbi Goldman here. 

Please read: Imam Abdullah Antepli confesses, at Seton Hall, to being a recovering antisemite

DURHAM, N.C. 

Jews: want to fight anti-Semitism? Muslims: want to challenge islamophobia? There's an easy way to do it: have coffee with one another.

Last week, the two of us, the rabbi and imam of Duke University, did just that. Not that meeting at a café is such a rare occurrence; we work together, we like each other and our children play together. But last week, amidst the tension between Muslims and Jews caused by the violence off the coast of Israel and Gaza, our coffee date felt like a political act. The fiasco aboard the Mavi Marmara hit close to home for our imam who, like several of those killed in that raid, is Turkish.

We typically steer away from politics not because we feel uneasy on that turf; we know that we disagree on many core issues surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian controversy and are quite comfortable with that.

We steer clear of this controversy 

because we are working to belie the fallacy

that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

is all that a Muslim and a Jew would have to talk about.

Muslim-Jewish conversations on university campuses, and elsewhere, often get corralled into this narrow zone. A two-state solution, or one? War crimes, or ordinary combat? Recognize Hamas, or not? Such debates are necessary. But it is too easy for our students to get into the habit of seeing every member of the other group as a political sparring partner. 

When political discourse becomes the dominant mode

~- or the only mode ~ 

something essential may be lost: empathy.

Due to  the bond of motherhood, for example, women often bond together on an empathetic level despite politics raging around them.  Or, as above, students at  Hand in Hand.  More here. 

Reasonable people see that behind the stridency of hard-liners from both the Israeli and Palestinian camps lies historical pain. The Nazis slaughtered the Jews while Europe and America largely stood by. The Jews displaced and killed Palestinians in their quest for a home away from Europe. If militants on both sides could know the depth of the other's loss, a door might open.

But what are the chances of getting a Jewish settler and a Hamas activist in the same room together? Even regular kids who grow up in Israel and Palestine today do not know anyone living across the green line. One of our students, a young woman from the West Bank, confessed that before coming to Duke she had never spoken with a Jew, except when being interrogated at a checkpoint. Our Jewish students also arrive here knowing not a single Arab or Muslim, let alone a Palestinian.

That's where coffee comes in. Not only do the imam and rabbi meet, but we also create opportunities for our students to do so. During recent years, the Muslim holiday of Ramadan has coincided with the Jewish High Holy Days, giving us a chance to share a meal that has come to be known as Muslim-Jewish Iftar ('iftar' is the breaking of the Ramadan fast at sunset). For us as chaplains, the content of such programs is far less important than the very fact that our Muslim and Jewish students are doing that mundane but magically humanizing activity of sitting down together and sharing a hummus platter.

We see it working. At one such event, our rabbi happened to overhear a spontaneous conversation involving one Jewish student whose grandparents had narrowly escaped the Nazis, another Jewish student whose grandfather had fled Tunisia after the anti-Jewish riots of 1953, and a student of Palestinian descent who shared how in 1948 Israeli soldiers had sacked his grandparents' village and forced them to leave for Jordan. There was no tone of rancor or one-upmanship in these three young people's conversation; they merely wanted to share family histories.

I have always loved this photograph. It truly is timeless.

Our campus is home to the same Israeli-Palestinian debates that happen elsewhere. But their tone has been remarkably civil. We believe this is because the disputants have eaten together, studied religious text together, and even done social action projects together.

Both of us, imam and rabbi, have received angry letters from coreligionists, accusing us of naiveté, and sometimes worse, of betraying our respective communities. It's a strange world we live in where the sight of a Jew and a Muslim at a café could provoke such suspicion. But the fact that this happens means our friendship is a powerful thing. Our modest peace plan is working.

© 2010 Office of News & Communications

615 Chapel Drive, Box 90563, Durham, NC 27708-0563

(919) 684-2823; After-hours phone (for reporters on deadline): (919) 812-6603

THEN  I found THIS brilliant concept. I must say, I love these two gentlemen's expressions. And wonder why we have not heard more of them....

FACE2FACE PROJECT

Posted on 22 March 2007 by Alberto Masetti-Zannini 

 Face2Face hits the wall

An extraordinary project, bringing together ordinary Israeli and Palestinian citizens in a journey rediscovery of their common humanity. Check it out. [via Patrick]

When we met in 2005, we decided to go together in the Middle-East to figure out why Palestinians and Israelis couldn’t find a way to get along together.

We then traveled across the Israeli and Palestinian cities without speaking much. Just looking to this world with amazement.

This holy place for Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

This tiny area where you can see mountains, sea, deserts and lakes, love and hate, hope and despair embedded together.

After a week, we had a conclusion with the same words: these people look the same; they speak almost the same language, like twin brothers raised in different families.

A religious covered woman has her twin sister on the other side. A farmer, a taxi driver, a teacher, has his twin brother in front of him. And he his endlessly fighting with him.

It’s obvious, but they don’t see that.

We must put them face to face. They will realize.

We want that, at last, everyone laughs and thinks when he sees the portrait of the other and his own portrait.

The Face2Face project is to make portraits of Palestinians and Israelis doing the same job and to post them face to face, in huge formats, in unavoidable places, on the Israeli and the Palestinian sides.

In a very sensitive context, we need to be clear.

We are in favor of a solution for which two countries, Israel and Palestine would live peacefully within safe and internationally recognized borders.

Before the arrival of political Zionism, this was a common sight in the disputed land of Palestine. Christians, Muslims, Jews, all together and co-existing in peace.

All the bilateral peace projects (Clinton/Taba, Ayalon/Nussibeh, Geneva Accords) are converging in the same direction. We can be optimistic.

We hope that this project will contribute to a better understanding between Israelis and Palestinians. 

Today, “Face to face” is necessary.

Within a few years, we will come back for “Hand in hand”. 

ISRAEL COULD NOT POUR PEACE OUT OF A BOOT

ISRAEL COULD NOT POUR PEACE OUT OF A BOOT…

WITH THE DIRECTIONS ON THE HEEL

By Phil Tourney

STAFF WRITER

VETERANS TODAY

November 16, 2010

As a boy, there was a statement (similar to the title of this piece) I always heard my elders use when they wanted to describe someone so incompetent that even the laws of gravity and physics wouldn’t work in their favor.

Now, a much older and wiser man, I can see how that statement applies in other matters as well, and particularly the daily news dealing with Israel. As the old saying (sort of) goes, Israel “couldn’t pour peace out of a boot with the directions on the heel”. 

Peace in the Middle East? 

Not as long as Israel is there, and definitely not as long as Uncle Sam is feeding her addition to the tune of $30 million a day, to say nothing of al the political protection she gets from us when fleeing the wrath of an outraged world. 

As the bible said in describing a future time of seemingly never-ending conflict, “Men cry ‘peace, peace,’ but there is no peace”, and so it goes with Israel. Funny, we never hear Israel’s favorite preachers in America such as John Hagee citing THAT verse when he is busy bearing false witness in propping Israel up as the apple of God’s eye.

And so it goes with Israel. Not a minute of peace since the day she slithered her way back into the Middle East and corrupted the politics of the land of the free and home of the brave. Whether it has been the hundreds of Palestinian civilians she has killed, the 34 friends of mine she murdered aboard the USS LIBERTY or the 5,000+ American servicemen who lost their lives fighting Israel’s wars for her, peace is as elusive as warm days in January.

Those who would disagree should take a short stroll with me down memory lane. Israel gets a state for her people, and what does the world get in return? 

War, war, and more war. 

A billion Muslims and a billion Christians

at war with each other.

Economic destitution.

Political corruption. 

Senators and Congressmen bought off 

like the politicians living in Al Capone’s Chicago.

Israel got what she got by pure theft and terrorism. Massacre after massacre of Arab civilians ~ women and children just like those in the supermarkets and malls of America ~ by Jewish terrorist groups such as the Stern Gang and the Irgun, and yet we hear nothing about it.

And what is the justification for all this? 

Because Jews suffered during WW II. Because they suffered, we all must as well.

Because they have no peace of mind when remembering what took place 60 years ago, the rest of the world must forfeit its peace of mind also.

Newsflash!  Israel and her supporters ~ 

MILLIONS OF PEOPLE SUFFERED IN WWII

Those other deaths are of non Jews. Remember, if you are not Jewish, according to the Talmud, foundation tome of Israel, you are not human. Therefore, your pain and agony are negligible.

In fact, if we are to do the numbers, you are the low man on the totem pole when compared to the tens of millions of others who suffered and died. 

According to WIKIPEDIA:

Some nations in World War II suffered disproportionally more casualties than others. This is especially true regarding civilian casualties. The following chart gives data on the number of dead for each country, along with population information to show the relative impact of losses. Military figures include battle deaths (KIA) and personnel missing in action (MIA), as well as fatalities due to accidents, disease and deaths of prisoners of war in captivity. Civilian casualties strategic bombing, Nazi persecution, Japanese war crimes, population transfers in the Soviet Union, Allied war crimes and deaths due to war related famine and disease. Jewish losses in the Holocaust are listed separately for each nation, since they are known. 

The proof that Israel desires peace like an infection desires antibiotics is simple history. It has been nothing but war ever since 1948 and even before. And in order to keep war going, Israel had to make sure that gas is always on hand to throw on the fire.

The Lavon affair ~ Israeli agents snuck into Egypt with plans of blowing up American buildings in order to blame it on Muslims, just as they later tried to do with the attack on my ship, USS LIBERTY. She tried denying it, but when one of the bombs went off in the pocket of one of the terrorists, the gig was up. There was no punishment from America ~ who would have been the victim of this act of terror, and in later years, those who had been sent to kill Americans were given medals of honor in Israel.

Am I saying that Israel should not have a homeland? No, I’m not saying that. But if she wants to join the family of nations, she needs to start behaving like civilized nations behave, which means living in peace with your neighbors, and respecting boundaries, just as has been set fourth in many UN resolutions mainly, 242.

Israel has gotten by with the murder of my shipmates aboard USS LIBERTY June 8 1967. Any other country had done what she did and the only evidence of that country’s existence would be in history books. For Israel however, she got a free pass from the United States ~ the very country whose men were murdered and has been rewarded with billions of dollars.

And lest some think that the Lavon Affair and the LIBERTY were isolated events ~ they weren’t. The 1983 bombings of the Marine barracks in Beirut that killed almost 250 brave Americans as they slept in the bunks, one day closer to going home ~ Israel knew about it and refused to warn us, saying, “The Americans wanted to stick their nose into this thing, let them pay the price…” 

We can just imagine what we would all be subjected to if the US had information on a terrorist attack against Israel and refused to warn them about it. They would demand apology after apology accompanied with even more of our treasure and blood.

I could go on and on with examples from history, but the best proof of Israel’s aversion to peace is what is going on now. Simply listen and watch. Peace is an unwanted pregnancy for the Jewish state and we all know how unwanted pregnancies typically end up, and that is what we are facing, only in this case it is not just a stillborn baby, but rather millions of people in the Middle East and beyond DEAD.

Israel knows how to make peace ~ it’s as easy as pouring you-know-what out of a boot with the directions on the heel. At this point, the world wants peace as much as that you-know-what wants to come pouring out of the boot when it’s turned over. It ~ the world’s desire for peace ~ is a matter of gravity at this point, simply allow it and it will come, unless of course you are Israel.

THE LIES OF ISLAMOPHOBIA

Campbell boy: Sharia law has taken over the American food industry!

Campbell girl: At least Muslims won't insist on Halal certification and taxation!

The PTB just love religions. If people are involved fighting each other, they will not unite and find basically we are all the same and be stronger against the enforcement of the NWO.  Religions hatched within the Arabic world, Christianity, Islam and Judaism are especially susceptible to this spiritual poisoning. 

What better way is there to fractionalize people, rile them up, and twist love of their god into hatred of each other? ~ to demonize "the other" the group is portrayed as agents of evil, with the worst of intentions for all who do not agree with their beliefs. This is of course simplifying the matter but basically holds true. People do not seem to see that America and her love of freedom today are the modern equivalent of the Islamic world in the eyes of the PTB several hundred years ago.

In the 1800's, as Imperialism was doing its best to take over the Middle East, 
a spy wrote this to his superiors in London. 
(http://www.sunna.info/antiwahabies/wahhabies/htm/spy1.htm):  

"Muslims are extremely devoted to Islam. Every individual Muslims is as strongly attached to Islam as a priest or monk to Christianity, if not more. As it is known, priests and monks would rather die than give up Christianity. Islam presents insurmountable obstacles in front of our purposes.

They were the kind of people who would never compromise their principles to the tiniest extent because they had turned against the transient pleasures and adornments of the world and fixed their eyes on the Paradise promised by Qur'aan al-kereem."

This resistance has never changed no matter how much the West has meddled in Muslim business over the centuries. As with the freedom-loving people of America today, Muslim refusal to assimilate into the New World Order, is something that the PTB deal with ruthlessly. Even when they DID comply, as in Iran when they elected a fine leader democratically in the past, the West, not pleased with their choice, through manipulations, removed that leader and installed one of their choosing.It is that incident that greatly led to the situation we are in today with that country.

There are degrees in every religious system as we all know. We have fervent Roman Catholics who follow all the tenets of the religion, no meat on Fridays, follow the fasting periods and times of self denial of Lent and Advent, and then we have lapsed Catholics who have not been inside a church for years except maybe for Christmas or Easter. Ask either what religion they are and both will say "Roman Catholic". Are they the same?

You will find this same variation of levels of devotion in every religion. There are fundamental Christians, Catholics and Muslims. And of course Jews. Sectarian and extreme levels exist in all creeds. You have Christians who bomb abortion clinics and Christians who protect their rights to murder their own babies. You have Jews who dress Western; you have Jews who spit on them and treat them as they would any Christian or Muslim, with great scorn and hatred. And so on and so on.

All illustrations, links and green writing are my own $.02 worth of Snippits and Snappits although in this piece it is more like $20 worth I would be thinking!

Despite these facts, the Western world has deemed all Muslims to be extremists just waiting to blow up another mall, steal their daughters, and take a scythe to everyone else who refuses to eat pig. Ignorant of the varieties of Islam, they cannot tell a Wahhabi from a moderate; ignorant of  Muslim politics and the cultures, they think the atrocities of perhaps only one group, pertain to all Muslims. Nor do they realize that these "insurgents" are doing what they themselves would do under similar circumstances, defending their homes and loved ones from invaders. Westerners seem to not realize that even within Islam there is much discussion about practices that are not part of true Islam, both cultural and religious. 

These blanket misconceptions in the West, strongly enforced by our media for the last hundred years or so, have never been more viciously propped up before the public than they are today. Islamophobia is rampant in the West, even as the homelands and traditions of these peoples are being destroyed on all levels.Would Americans fight back under such circumstances? You bet your booties they would!

Above is an excellent example of modern media Islamophobia in action. Last year photographs of the above event in Palestine flashed around the world claiming these young "brides" were being forced to wed much older fighters of Hamas usually with snide references to the 72 virgins of Paradise.

As Islamic custom decrees, the brides sit in the rear of the photo but the caption still read,"I am not sure if  the children are brides, Islam allows child brides."

Westerners did not have access to the original bylines of the photos and much hatred was generated against Muslims and their "obscenities". Hamas Hamas Hamas! Mohamed, Aisha still lived! The truth? This was a mass wedding but these girls were siblings of the bride or the groom there to serve as the equivalent of ring bearers!

 THE LIES OF ISLAMOPHOBIA

 

November 9, 2010

By John Feffer,

islamophobiatoday.com

The germs of Islamophobia in this video game showing the Muslims to be demons and Satanic beings, bloodthirsty and treacherous, falling under the sword of the valiant  Christian Knight.

The Muslims were bloodthirsty and treacherous. They conducted a sneak attack against the French army and slaughtered every single soldier, 20,000 in all. More than 1,000 years ago, in the mountain passes of Spain, the Muslim horde cut down the finest soldiers in Charlemagne’s command, including his brave nephew Roland. Then, according to the famous poem that immortalized the tragedy, Charlemagne exacted his revenge by routing the entire Muslim army.

The Cheyenne survivors of the Sand Creek massacre slept on their reservation at Washita River in Indian territory. As they lay sleeping  at dawn on November 22 1868 Custer and his 7th U.S cavalry charged the peaceful village and massacred them all. This was more acceptable since it was done by a Westerner? 

The Song of Roland, an eleventh century rendering in verse of an eighth century battle, is a staple of Western Civilization classes at colleges around the country. A “masterpiece of epic drama,” in the words of its renowned translator Dorothy Sayers, it provides a handy preface for students before they delve into readings on the Crusades that began in 1095. More ominously, the poem has schooled generations of Judeo-Christians to view Muslims as perfidious enemies who once threatened the very foundations of Western civilization.

The problem, however, is that the whole epic is built on a curious falsehood. The army that fell upon Roland and his Frankish soldiers was not Muslim at all. In the real battle of 778, the slayers of the Franks were Christian Basques furious at Charlemagne for pillaging their city of Pamplona. Not epic at all, the battle emerged from a parochial dispute in the complex wars of medieval Spain. 

Only later, as kings and popes and knights prepared to do battle in the First Crusade, did an anonymous bard repurpose the text to serve the needs of an emerging cross-against-crescent holy war.

Jeremy Scahill, expert on Blackwater, explains the crusaders aspect of the organization, and its goals against "the scourge of the planet, Muslims". As I have said before, Bush was serious when he called the Iraq war the Crusades, but Prince felt him to be too moderate against the Muslim people..

Similarly, we think of the Crusades as the archetypal “clash of civilizations” between the followers of Jesus and the followers of Mohammad. In the popular version of those Crusades, the Muslim adversary has, in fact, replaced a remarkable range of peoples the Crusaders dealt with as enemies, including Jews killed in pogroms on the way to the Holy Land, rival Catholics slaughtered in the Balkans and in Constantinople, and Christian heretics hunted down in southern France.

How many Westerners know that, in Islam, Jesus and His Mother are spoken of with in great respect and given high honour? Every time He is mentioned, He is given the rare "may peace be upon Him" only bestowed upon the greatest of the great holy men? Hint, ask a Jew for exact wording of what is said about Jesus in their holy books and insist upon seeing those words for yourself. Do not just accept what you are told.

Much later, during the Cold War, myth makers in Washington performed a similar act, substituting a monolithic crew labeled “godless communists” for a disparate group of anti-imperial nationalists in an attempt to transform conflicts in remote locations like Vietnam, Guatemala, and Iran into epic struggles between the forces of the Free World and the forces of evil. 

In recent years, the Bush administration did it all over again by portraying Arab nationalists as fiendish Islamic fundamentalist when we invaded Iraq and prepared to topple the regime in Syria.

North Americans have been steered towards such attitudes since Hollywood, founded by Jews, began to make movies. However, the sneakiest by far was Walt Disney. His Arabs have always been stereotypical villains and displayed negative behaviours.

The Arabs are not "special" in this regard, Disney was an equal opportunity manipulator in that he portrayed all races in a way to emphasize "different self", Chinese, Black, Indian, Arab, American Natives. He did this to every one but for one race and I am sure that you, dear reader, will never guess who was saved from such treatment. If you insist, I will tell you, the Jews were spared such treatment.

THE ARABS RUN HOLLYWOOD AND I CAN PROVE IT
http://snippits-and-slappits.blogspot.com/2010/10/arabs-run-hollywood-and-i-can-prove-it.html

Similar myth making continues today. The recent surge of Islamophobia in the United States has drawn strength from several extraordinary substitutions. A clearly Christian president has become Muslim in the minds of a significant number of Americans. 

The thoughtful Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan has become a closet fundamentalist in the writings of Paul Berman and others.

And an Islamic center in lower Manhattan, organized by proponents of interfaith dialogue, has become an extremist “mosque at Ground Zero” in the TV appearances, political speeches, and Internet sputterings of a determined clique of right-wing activists.
.

This transformation of Islam into a violent caricature of itself ~ as if Ann Coulter had suddenly morphed into the face of Christianity ~ comes at a somewhat strange juncture in the United States. Anti-Islamic rhetoric and hate crimes, which spiked immediately after September 11, 2001, had been on the wane. 

No major terrorist attack had taken place in the U.S. or Europe since the London bombings in 2005. The current American president had reached out to the Muslim world and retired the controversial acronym GWOT, or “Global War on Terror.”
.

All the elements seemed in place, in other words, for us to turn the page on an ugly chapter in our history. Yet it’s as if we remain fixed in the eleventh century in a perpetual battle of “us” against “them.” Like the undead rising from their coffins, our previous “crusades” never go away. Indeed, we still seem to be fighting the three great wars of the millennium, even though two of these conflicts have long been over and the third has been rhetorically reduced to “overseas contingency operations.” 

 Blackwater men, seasoned killers all, 
ready to eradicate Muslims simply for not being Christian.

The Crusades, which finally petered out in the seventeenth century, continue to shape our global imagination today. The Cold War ended in 1991, but key elements of the anti-communism credo have been awkwardly grafted onto the new Islamist adversary. 

And the Global War on Terror, which President Obama quietly renamed shortly after taking office, has in fact metastasized into the wars that his administration continues to prosecute in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere.

Those in Europe and the United States who cheer on these wars claim that they are issuing a wake-up call about the continued threat of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other militants who claim the banner of Islam. 

The only difference between these two and any Western couple is the scarf and the fact they save sex until married.These are the real enemy in the eyes of the West because they threaten the libidinous lifestyle being used to corrupt our once moral lifestyle, and they do not fit the image of terrorism. Imagine how that could change if businesses accommodated Muslim needs within their various offerings. They are losing a chance for great profit.

However, what really keeps Islamophobes up at night is not the marginal and backwards-looking Islamic fundamentalists but rather the growing economic, political, and global influence of modern, mainstream Islam.

Examples of Islam successfully grappling with modernity abound, from Turkey’s new foreign policy and Indonesia’s economic muscle to the Islamic political parties participating in elections in Lebanon, Morocco, and Jordan. Instead of providing reassurance, however, these trends only incite Islamophobes to intensify their battles to “save” Western civilization.

As long as the West's and Israel's unfinished imperialistic wars still burn in the collective consciousness ~ and still rage in Kabul, Baghdad, Sana’a, and the Tribal Areas of Pakistan ~ Islamophobia will make its impact felt in our media, politics, and daily life.

Only if we decisively end the millennial Crusades, the half-century Cold War, and the decade-long War on Terror (under whatever name) will we overcome the dangerous divide that has consumed so many lives, wasted so much wealth, and distorted our very understanding of our Western selves.

The Crusades Continue

With their irrational fear of spiders, arachnophobes are scared of both harmless daddy longlegs and poisonous brown recluse spiders. In extreme cases, an arachnophobe can break out in a sweat while merely looking at photos of spiders. It is, of course, reasonable to steer clear of black widows. 

What makes a legitimate fear into an irrational phobia, however, is the tendency to lump all of any group, spiders or humans, into one lethal category and then to exaggerate how threatening all arachnids are. Spider bites, after all, are responsible for at most a handful of deaths a year in the United States.

Islamophobia is, similarly, an irrational fear of Islam. Yes, certain Muslim fundamentalists have been responsible for terrorist attacks, certain fantasists about a “global caliphate” continue to plot attacks on perceived enemies, and certain groups like Afghanistan’s Taliban and Somalia’s al-Shabaab practice medieval versions of the religion. 

Again, Western ignorance acerbates the situation. Because they do not accept the different levels of Islam, they do not see that the Wahhabi fundamentalists of Saudi Arabia, a "good friend of America", encourage these movements to deliver their extremist religion to us all. So they alienate ALL for the favour of hating a few. And is it not Western greed for Arabian oil that is at the base of much of this? Follow the money trail.
 
But Islamophobes confuse these small parts with the whole and then see terrorist jihad under every Islamic pillow. They break out in a sweat at the mere picture of an imam.
.

"Hospitality of barbarians to Pilgrims" What is not mentioned in writings of the Crusades is the hospitality of the Muslims to tired and ailing Christians. It is not well known that extreme levels of courtesy are a mandatory component of traditional Islamic life in all levels of Arab society.

Irrational fears are often rooted in our dimly remembered childhoods. Our irrational fear of Islam similarly seems to stem from events that happened in the early days of Christendom. Three myths inherited from the era of the Crusades constitute the core of Islamophobia today: Muslims are inherently violent, Muslims want to take over the world, and Muslims can’t be trusted.

The myth of Islam as a “religion of the sword” was a staple of Crusader literature and art. In fact, the atrocities committed by Muslim leaders and armies ~ and there were some ~ rarely rivaled the slaughters of the Crusaders, who retook Jerusalem in 1099 in a veritable bloodbath.  

"Godfrey Enters Jerusalem". People do not seem to be aware that the Christians slaughtered Jew and Muslim alike. Enlarge this thumb for an excellent visual by Dore.

Heaps of the dead presented an immediate problem for the conquerors,”writes Christopher Tyerman in God’s War. “Many of the surviving Muslim population were forced to clear the streets and carry the bodies outside the walls to be burnt in great pyres, whereat they themselves were massacred.” 

Jerusalem’s Jews suffered a similar fate when the Crusaders burned many of them alive in their main synagogue. Four hundred years earlier, by contrast, Caliph ‘Umar put no one to the sword when he took over Jerusalem, signing a pact with the Christian patriarch Sophronius that pledged “no compulsion in religion.”

This myth of the inherently violent Muslim endures. Islam “teaches violence,” televangelist Pat Robertson proclaimed in 2005. “The Koran teaches violence and most Muslims, including so-called moderate Muslims, openly believe in violence,” was the way Major General Jerry Curry (U.S. Army, ret.), who served in the Carter, Reagan, and Bush Sr. administrations, put it.

The Crusaders justified their violence by arguing that Muslims were bent on taking over the world. In its early days, the expanding Islamic empire did indeed imagine an ever-growing dar-es-Islam (House of Islam). By the time of the Crusades, however, this initial burst of enthusiasm for holy war had long been spent. Moreover, the Christian West harbored its own set of desires when it came to extending the Pope’s authority to every corner of the globe. Even that early believer in soft power, Francis of Assisi, sat down with Sultan al-Kamil during the Fifth Crusade with the aim of eliminating Islam through conversion.

St. Francis of Assissi and the Sultan al-Kamil.

Today, Islamophobes portray the building of Cordoba House in lower Manhattan as just another gambit in this millennial power grab: “This is Islamic domination and expansionism,” writes right-wing blogger Pamela Geller, a viciously anti-Muslim blogger, the New York Post and the right-wing media machine who made the “Ground Zero Mosque” into a media obsession. “Islam is a religion with a very political agenda,” warns ex-Muslim Ali Sina. “The ultimate goal of Islam is to rule the world.”

How the "ground zero mosque" fear mongering began

These two myths ~ of inherent violence and global ambitions ~ led to the firm conviction that Muslims were by nature untrustworthy. Robert of Ketton, a twelfth century translator of the Koran, was typical in badmouthing the prophet Mohammad this way: “Like the liar you are, you everywhere contradict yourself.” The suspicion of untrustworthiness fell as well on any Christian who took up the possibility of coexistence with Islam.

Pope Gregory, for instance, believed that the thirteenth century Crusader Frederick II was the Anti-Christ himself because he developed close relationships with Muslims.

For Islamophobes today, Muslims abroad are similarly terrorists-in-waiting. As for Muslims at home, “American Muslims must face their either/or,” writes the novelist Edward Cline, “to repudiate Islam or remain a quiet, sanctioning fifth column.” Even American Muslims in high places, like Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN), are not above suspicion. In a 2006 CNN interview, Glenn Beck said, “I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.’”

These three myths of Islamophobia flourish in our era, just as they did almost a millennium ago, because of a cunning conflation of a certain type of Islamic fundamentalism with Islam itself. 

Bill O’Reilly was neatly channeling this Crusader mindset when he asserted recently that “the Muslim threat to the world is not isolated. It’s huge!” When Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence William Boykin, in an infamous 2003 sermon, thundered “What I’m here to do today is to recruit you to be warriors of God’s kingdom,” he was issuing the Crusader call to arms.

But O’Reilly and Boykin, who represent the violence, duplicity, and expansionist mind-set of today’s Western crusaders, were also invoking a more recent tradition, closer in time and far more familiar.

The Totalitarian Myth

In 1951, the CIA and the emerging anti-communist elite, including soon-to-be-president Dwight Eisenhower, created the Crusade for Freedom as a key component of a growing psychological warfare campaign against the Soviet Union and the satellite countries it controlled in Eastern Europe. The language of this “crusade” was intentionally religious. It reached out to “peoples deeply rooted in the heritage of western civilization,” living under the “crushing weight of a godless dictatorship.” In its call for the liberation of the communist world, it echoed the nearly thousand-year-old crusader rhetoric of “recovering” Jerusalem and other outposts of Christianity.

In the theology of the Cold War, the Soviet Union replaced the Islamic world as the untrustworthy infidel. However unconsciously, the old crusader myths about Islam translated remarkably easily into governing assumptions about the communist enemy: the Soviets and their allies were bent on taking over the world, could not be trusted with their rhetoric of peaceful coexistence, imperiled Western civilization, and fought with unique savagery as well as a willingness to martyr themselves for the greater ideological good.

Ironically, Western governments were so obsessed with fighting this new scourge that, in the Cold War years, on the theory that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, they nurtured radical Islam as a weapon. As journalist Robert Dreyfuss ably details in his book The Devil’s Game, the U.S. funding of the mujaheddin in Afghanistan was only one part of the anti-communist crusade in the Islamic world. To undermine Arab nationalists and leftists who might align themselves with the Soviet Union, the United States (and Israel) worked with Iranian mullahs, helped create Hamas, and facilitated the spread of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Though the Cold War ended with the sudden disappearance of the Soviet Union in 1991, that era’s mind-set — and so many of the Cold Warriors sporting it — never went with it. The prevailing mythology was simply transferred back to the Islamic world. In anti-communist theology, for example, the worst curse word was “totalitarianism,” said to describe the essence of the all-encompassing Soviet state and system. According to the gloss that early neoconservative Jeanne Kirkpatrick provided in her book Dictatorships and Double Standards, the West had every reason to support right-wing authoritarian dictatorships because they would steadfastly oppose left-wing totalitarian dictatorships, which, unlike the autocracies we allied with, were supposedly incapable of internal reform.

According to the new “Islamo-fascism” school ~ and its acolytes like Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, Bill O’Reilly, Pamela Geller ~ the fundamentalists are simply the “new totalitarians,” as hidebound, fanatical, and incapable of change as communists. For a more sophisticated treatment of the Islamo-fascist argument, check out Paul Berman, a rightward-leaning liberal intellectual who has tried to demonstrate that “moderate Muslims” are fundamentalists in reformist clothing.

These Cold Warriors all treat the Islamic world as an undifferentiated mass ~ in spirit, a modern Soviet Union ~ where Arab governments and radical Islamists work hand in glove. They simply fail to grasp that the Syrian, Egyptian, and Saudi Arabian governments have launched their own attacks on radical Islam. 

The sharp divides between the Iranian regime and the Taliban, between the Jordanian government and the Palestinians, between Shi’ites and Sunni in Iraq, and even among Kurds all disappear in the totalitarian blender, just as anti-communists generally failed to distinguish between the Communist hardliner Leonid Brezhnev and the Communist reformer Mikhail Gorbachev.

Turkey is not the backward country so many Westerners think; its new modernism and successes seem to pose a threat. Not to mention its political strength and alignment. After centuries of being refused acceptance by Western nations, it is now fully embracing modern ideals  in an Islamic fashion and becoming a heavy political player in the balances of  international power.
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At the root of terrorism, according to Berman, are “immense failures of political courage and imagination within the Muslim world,” rather than the violent fantasies of a group of religious outliers or the Crusader-ish military operations of the West. In other words, something flawed at the very core of Islam itself is responsible for the violence done in its name ~ a line of argument remarkably similar to one Cold Warriors made about communism.

All of this, of course, represents a mirror image of al-Qaeda’s arguments about the inherent perversities of the infidel West. As during the Cold War, hardliners reinforce one another.

The persistence of Crusader myths and their transposition into a Cold War framework help explain why the West is saddled with so many misconceptions about Islam. They don’t, however, explain the recent spike in Islamophobia in the U.S. after several years of relative tolerance. To understand this, we must turn to the third unfinished war: the Global War on Terror or GWOT, launched by George W. Bush.

Fanning the Flames

President Obama was careful to groom his Christian image during his campaign. He was repeatedly seen praying in churches, and he studiously avoided mosques. He did everything possible to efface the traces of Muslim identity in his past.

Why would a Muslim president pursue a policy of genocide against his own?

This makes no sense at all. 

His opponents, of course, did just the opposite. They emphasized his middle name, Hussein, challenged his birth records, and asserted that he was too close to the Palestinian cause. They also tried to turn liberal constituencies ~ particularly Jewish-American ones ~ against the presumptive president. Like Frederick II for an earlier generation of Christian fundamentalists, since entering the Oval Office Obama has become the Anti-Christ of the Islamophobes.

Once in power, he broke with Bush administration policies toward the Islamic world on a few points. He did indeed push ahead with his plan to remove combat troops from Iraq (with some important exceptions). He has attempted to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to stop expanding settlements in occupied Palestinian lands and to negotiate in good faith (though he has done so without resorting to the kind of pressure that might be meaningful, like a cutback of or even cessation of U.S. arms exports to Israel). In a highly publicized speech in Cairo in June 2009, he also reached out rhetorically to the Islamic world at a time when he was also eliminating the name “Global War on Terror” from the government’s vocabulary.

For Muslims worldwide, however, GWOT itself continues. The United States has orchestrated a surge in Afghanistan. The CIA’s drone war in the Pakistani borderlands has escalated rapidly. U.S. Special Forces now operate in 75 countries, at least 15 more than during the Bush years. Meanwhile, Guantanamo remains open, the United States still practices extraordinary rendition, and assassination remains an active part of Washington’s toolbox.
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 The political cartoon as a weapon of hatred against all Muslims.

The civilians killed in these overseas contingency operations are predominantly Muslim. The people seized and interrogated are mostly Muslim. The buildings destroyed are largely Muslim-owned. As a result, the rhetoric of “crusaders and imperialists” used by al-Qaeda falls on receptive ears. Despite his Cairo speech, the favorability rating of the United States in the Muslim world, already grim enough, has slid even further since Obama took office ~ in Egypt, from 41% in 2009 to 31% percent now; in Turkey, from 33% to 23%; and in Pakistan, from 13% to 8%.

The U.S. wars, occupations, raids, and repeated air strikes have produced much of this disaffection and, as political scientist Robert Pape has consistently argued, most of the suicide bombings and other attacks against Western troops and targets as well. This is revenge, not religion, talking ~ just as it was for Americans after September 11, 2001. As commentator M. Junaid Levesque-Alam astutely pointed out, “When three planes hurtled into national icons, did anger and hatred rise in American hearts only after consultation of Biblical verses?”

And yet those dismal polling figures do not actually reflect a rejection of Western values (despite Islamophobe assurances that they mean exactly that). “Numerous polls that we have conducted,” writes pollster Stephen Kull, “as well as others by the World Values Survey and Arab Barometer, show strong support in the Muslim world for democracy, for human rights, and for an international order based on international law and a strong United Nations."

In other words, nine years after September 11th a second spike in Islamophobia and in home-grown terrorist attacks like that of the would-be Times Square bomber has been born of two intersecting pressures: American critics of Obama’s foreign policy believe that he has backed away from the major civilizational struggle of our time, even as many in the Muslim world see Obama-era foreign policy as a continuation, even an escalation, of Bush-era policies of war and occupation.

A FACT DEEMED NOT WORTH REPORTING REGARDING THE SO-CALLED TIMES SQUARE BOMBING:

Here is the irony: alongside the indisputable rise of fundamentalism over the last two decades, only some of it oriented towards violence, the Islamic world has undergone a shift which deep-sixes the cliché that Islam has held countries back from political and economic development. “Since the early 1990s, 23 Muslim countries have developed more democratic institutions, with fairly run elections, energized and competitive political parties, greater civil liberties, or better legal protections for journalists,” writes Philip Howard in The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Turkey has emerged as a vibrant democracy and a major foreign policy player. Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, is now the largest economy in Southeast Asia and the eighteenth largest economy in the world.
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The best ally in the struggle against violent Islamism is moderate Islam. 

The unfounded attacks 

on the backers of Park51 and others, 

along with such sideshows 

as a pastor calling 

for the burning of Korans, 

give substance to the Al Qaeda argument 

that the U.S. is waging a war 

against Islam, 

rather than against the terrorists’ 

misshapen effigy of that religion. 

Those stirring the pot in this debate 

are casting a spell 

that is far more dangerous than they may imagine. 

Are Islamophobes missing this story of mainstream Islam’s accommodation with democracy and economic growth? Or is it this story (not Islamo-fascism starring al-Qaeda) that is their real concern?

The recent preoccupations of Islamophobes are telling in this regard.  Like a pitbull, Pamela Geller was typical in the way she went after not a radical mosque, but an Islamic center about two blocks from Ground Zero proposed by a proponent of interfaith dialogue. 

As journalist Stephen Salisbury writes,

“The mosque controversy is not really about a mosque at all; it’s about the presence of Muslims in America, and the free-floating anxiety and fear that now dominate the nation’s psyche.” 

For her latest venture, Geller is pushing a boycott of Campbell’s Soup because it accepts halal certification ~ the Islamic version of kosher certification by a rabbi ~ from the Islamic Society of North America, a group which, by the way, has gone out of its way to denounce religious extremism.

Why should we worry about Islamists commandeering airplanes when we have Israelis commandeering our entire government?

Of course Geller does not mention the Kosher tax that every American pays on every item of food they purchase in recompense of the Rabbis who bless every thing  just in case it touches Jewish lips. So we non Jews fork out money constantly at the grocer's till. But then, Muslims do not participate in USURY either!

It is difficult to figure out where to laugh or cry in the face of such total idiocy!

Sound The Sharia Alarm! Campbell's Makes Halal Soups
Campbell's Soup surrenders to Islamic juggernaut

From a Jewish site.
Kosher Food Certification is Modeled After the Mob

This is the ONLY view of Islam held by harpy Pamela Geller, influential blogger and shrill Zionist shill. Sadly she is not the only deluded and hateful public persona. She is a lot like Anne Coulter only not quite so skanky in appearance, but equally malignant in her truly undefendable hatred of others..

Paul Berman, meanwhile, has devoted his latest book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, to deconstructing the arguments not of Osama bin-Laden or his ilk, but of Tariq Ramadan, the foremost mainstream Islamic theologian. Ramadan is a man firmly committed to breaking down the old distinctions between “us” and “them.” Critical of the West for colonialism, racism, and other ills, he also challenges the injustices of the Islamic world. He is far from a fundamentalist.

And what country, by the way, has exercised European Islamophobes more than any other? Pakistan? Saudi Arabia? Taliban Afghanistan? No, the answer is: Turkey. “The Turks are conquering Germany in the same way the Kosovars conquered Kosovo: by using higher birth-rates,” argues Germany’s Islamophobe du jour, Thilo Sarrazin, a member of Germany’s Social Democratic Party. The far right has even united around a Europe-wide referendum to keep Turkey out of the European Union.

Despite his many defects, George W. Bush at least knew enough to distinguish Islam from Islamism. By targeting a perfectly normal Islamic center, a perfectly normal Islamic scholar, and a perfectly normal Islamic country ~ all firmly in the mainstream of that religion ~ the Islamophobes have actually declared war on normalcy, not extremism.
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Judaism, Christianity and Islam all claim to be religions of peace. Which one of them practices what they preach?

The victories of the tea party movement and the increased power of Republican militants in Congress, not to mention the renaissance of the far right in Europe, suggest that we will be living with this Islamophobia and the three unfinished wars of the West against the Rest for some time. The Crusades lasted hundreds of years. Let’s hope that Crusade 2.0, and the dark age that we find ourselves in, has a far shorter lifespan.