From the Sikh Coalition (via TAM): (Houston, Texas) December 8 , 2008 - A Sikh family that reported a burglary last week was handcuffed, asked about the bombings in Mumbai, and told by an officer that "he knows Muslims."
The Sikh Coalition strongly condemns the misbehavior of Harris County Sheriff's Department officers towards the Sikh family. Their behavior sends a loud message to Sikhs, Muslims, and other minorities that they are second class citizens in Houston.
Handcuffs and a Taser Gun At the beginning of the Thanksgiving weekend, the Tagore family came home to find a window broken and their master bedroom ransacked. When they called 911, HarrisCounty police officers were dispatched to investigate the crime.
But instead of pursuing the thieves, the police officers began grilling a family member, Kawaljeet Kaur, about her kirpan. Though Kawaljeet told the officer that her kirpan is an article of faith and it is her constitutional right to carry it, the officer ordered her to "shut up" and that he "doesn't care." The officer called for back up and pointed a Taser gun at Kawaljeet's head.
Kawaljeet offered to leave the house if her kirpan was bothering the officer to no avail. Soon more officers arrived at their home. Harris County officers soon began handcuffing family members, four in all, including Kawaljeet's sixty-year-old mother. None of the other family members were carrying kirpans.
Kawaljeet was forced to the ground and handcuffed by three of the responding officers and a knee was put into her back. Some officers also used extremely foul language repeatedly when speaking to the family.
An eight-year-old member of the Tagore family was in tears as she sadly witnessed her elder's treatment by police officers.
Questions About Muslims and Mumbai Officers asked the family whether they had "heard about the bombings in Bombay" and were told that they "knew about Muslims."
Family members continued to plead that they are not criminals, asking in bewilderment when they were being treated like criminals. Hours after their initial call for help, a supervisor came to their home and ordered the family members released. After hours in handcuffs, no family member was charged with a crime or arrested.
The Coalition Takes Action The Sikh Coalition has been working to demand justice for the Tagore family. The Coalition has taken the following actions in response to the incident:
- Demanded that an Internal Affairs investigation be conducted by the Harris County Police. In response in part to the Coalition's pressure, Internal Affairs officers came to the Tagore family home this past weekend to begin an investigation. The CountyPolice have stated that officers can be disciplined and even fired as a result of the investigation's findings.
- Worked with the mainstream media to place stories on the Tagore family's treatment. As a result, the Tagore family's ordeal has been reported in the Houston Chronicle and local television.
- Reported the incident to the United States Justice Department in part to ensure that all HarrisCounty police officers are trained on Sikhs and Sikh practices.
- Working with local city and federal elected officials to ensure the Department takes strong action against the officers.
We'll be seeing a lot of this in the future: attempts by right-wing hustlers with their eye on the main chance reinventing themselves as Obama Republicans.
Turning Muslims into cartoon villains, produced by David Horowitz.
Salaam writes: David Horowitz has the dishonorable distinction of being one of a dozen people in the media who was singled out by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting for their exceptional and sustained campaign to paint all Muslims with "a broad, hateful brush."
I've often heard a funny story about David Horowitz. It goes like this: D-ho, as the histrionically neurotic former 1960s far-left radical turned far-right propagandist is sometimes called, was supposedly irritated by something said by a former '60s comrade who is now a liberal, and responded to his former comrade that if the New Left had won, people like him (i.e., sellout liberals) would have been shot. The former comrade responded that if the '60s left had won, David Horowitz would still be in it.
The cat's opportunistic, in other words.
Now the man who's spend years peddling shrieking right-wing lunacy about Democrats is all about debunking shrieking right-wing lunacy about Democrats. Here, he publishes an effective debunking of conservative claims that the Community Reinvestment Act caused the financial crisis. Here, he takes on right-wing attempts to claim Obama is not a natural-born citizen.
This is how he explains his present task: keeping conservatives from "acting like unpatriotic sore losers and attacking the legitimacy of the new commander-in-chief."
Wait, that's only the second half of the sentence. The whole formulation is: "It seems like I've taken on the thankless task of keeping conservatives from behaving like liberals, acting like unpatriotic sore losers and attacking the legitimacy of the new commander-in-chief."
We'll be seeing a lot of this in the future: attempts by right-wing hustlers with their eye on the main chance reinventing themselves as Obama Republicans. We'll be following it here on the Big Con.
Around 500 Tamils took part in the Pongku Thamizh (Tamil uprising) rally in Milan in Northern Italy this summer.
Anti-immigration Northern League Party of Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni is seeking a moratorium on the building of mosques as a preventative measure to future terrorist attacks.
The demand for blocking mosque building comes as a reaction to the recent arrest of two men suspected for planning attacks in Milan, Italy's northern financial hub.
La Stampa, a local Italian newspaper quoted Maroni on Thursday stating that "Islamist terrorism" runs deep in Italy and must be stamped out.
"These arrests show that Islamist terrorism is entrenched in Italy, and that we must be vigilant," Maroni told the paper.
"Unfortunately it is not easy to distinguish between places of worship and those that recruit terrorists and finance the planning of attacks," he added.
Ally of the conservative Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the Northern League began a motion in the lower house of parliament banning the construction of places of worship for Muslims and cultural centers in Italy.
The motion comes as a preliminary step to curb the increasing number of mosques until parliament passes an official law on their establishment.
Abunoor at Talk Islam writes: I'm not going to link to it, but I found it interesting that Robert Spencer's new book "Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs" (so I guess Mr. Spencer now subscribes to the idea that jihad does not necessary refer to military or violent activities) is currently the No. 1 bestseller on Amazon's Books> Nonfiction > Current Events > Conspiracy Theories. I didn't even know there was such a category.
The 66 university students who played the video game -- 35 of them female -- were significantly more likely to shoot at Muslim targets. The targets who received the highest number of hits were Muslim-looking, non-Caucasian males.
Image from a much different video game: "Iced" which allows you to step inside the shoes of one of five immigrant teens, each of a different ethnicity and immigration status. The game teaches how immigration laws deny due process and violate human rights to all immigrants.
The character at the far right is Ayesha, a 16-year-old Muslim Indian girl and self-described "hip hop head" who gets detained by the FBI in a detention center in Pennsylvania hundreds of miles away from her family after she writes a school essay about the Patriot Act.
Go to www.icedgame.com
"Islamophobia," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said Wednesday at a two-day United Nations interfaith dialogue, "has emerged as a new term for an old and terrible form of prejudice."
When rumors began circulating during the recent presidential election that Barack Obama was a Muslim, observers from former Secretary of State Colin Powell to comedian Jon Stewart responded by asking, "Why would it matter if he was?" But whoever was circulating that misinformation was playing into a widely held prejudice -- one that has infected even the minds of sophisticated, educated Westerners. At least, that's the conclusion of two recently published studies, which detected anti-Muslim bias in two very different settings.
The first is "The Turban Effect," published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology by a team from the University of New South Wales in Sydney. It suggests that simply noticing someone is a Muslim increases aggressive tendencies on the part of non-Muslim Westerners.
Psychologists Christian Unkelbach, Joseph Forgas and Tom Denson modified a pre-existing computer game in which participants are instructed to shoot at subjects carrying weapons, but hold their fire when they spot someone who is unarmed. The target subjects were of both genders and a variety of races, but, most importantly for this study, some were given a Muslim appearance -- that is, they wore a turban or the hijab.
The 66 university students who played the game -- 35 of them female -- were significantly more likely to shoot at Muslim targets. The targets who received the highest number of hits were Muslim-looking, non-Caucasian males; the fewest hits were for non-Muslim, Caucasian females.
Follow this link to see the signs at the Islamic Workplace blog. Laws today do protect Muslims from discrimination based on religion, so you won't see any such signs in a workplace expressing an official policy.
Salaam writes: I see this as another example of the results of extremism and the hostility it has wrought. I believe that prior to 9/11, this is the kind of project where Americans would have been welcoming and accommodating.
The Henrico County Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 last night to deny a rezoning request for a Muslim community and worship center at a 3.6-acre site on Impala Drive in the Dumbarton area.
It would have been called the West End Muslim Community Center.
The request was to rezone the property from office to residential use, which county planners said was inconsistent with the county's land-use plan.
Salaam writes: Helen Philpot blogs with her octogenarian friend at Margaret and Helen, their blog (Harold is Helen's husband). The two woman are direct, blunt and immoderate in their criticism of John McCain and the thing the Republican party has devolved into. Their blog has also become very popular. Caution: Sometimes they use strong language and metaphors.
Helen also references 'moral codes.' In a pew poll of Muslim Americans, almost two-thirds of US Muslims prefer an intrusive government that will police morality in society (something like the 'moral codes' Helen mentions perhaps) compared to only one-third of the general public. I do not support moral codes at all. The potential for persecution and abuse is too great. Would you like to see a Sarah Palin version of this in America?
Harold isn't a Muslim either
Harold isn't Muslim. He's Catholic. I'm Methodist. Somehow we've managed to live peacefully married for 57 years. We didn't get married in the church. As far as I am concerned that was no great loss. A short ceremony meant I got to eat cake sooner.
And just like Harold, Barack Hussein Obama isn't a Muslim either... unless of course you attend a McCain rally where they think he's either Muslim, a terrorist sympathizer, or not a United States citizen. Most recently they are calling him a socialist. They probably think that is some type of religion too. Smart ones those McCain supporters. One week they want to beat him up for something Rev. Wright said and the next week they want to hate him for being Muslim. For crying out loud people, he's Christian. But exactly what would be the issue if he were a Muslim?
There are 2.1 billion Christians in the world today, and almost half of those are Catholic. There are also 1.5 billion who practice Islam. And there are almost 3 billion people in the world who don't belong to either of the aforementioned groups, including about 1.1billion (that's billion with a B) who consider themselves to be secular or nonreligious. And guess what folks? There are good and bad in each group. Let's take the Republican base for example...
Just because you go to church doesn't mean your s--- doesn't stink. Just ask Joe the Plumber. Pray when you want, to whomever you want, wherever you want. That is what is so great about our country. But remember, freedom of religion is a double edged plunger. When you start attacking people from a different religion, you open the door to people who attack you because they think their religion is better than your religion. And while we are on the subject of people who think their religion is better than your religion have you paid attention to what Governor Palin believes?
Palin has called on people to pray for the cooperation necessary to build a natural gas pipeline across Alaska, referred to the U.S. mission in Iraq a "task that is from God" and argued that students should be taught creationism in public schools. She would rather do away with sex education all together. As an evangelical of the Pentecostal persuasion, she supports a strict adherence to moral codes- no tobacco, no alcohol, no sex outside of marriage... well two out of three ain't bad anyway. Oh gosh, there I go throwing stones while living in a glass house.
Don't get me wrong. I don't have an issue with her being a religious woman. I just have concerns with her ability to understand the diversity of the world today. Imagine what decisions you might make if you believe the end of days is on tomorrow's menu. You'd probably still order breakfast, but you just might consider things like conserving natural resources to be irrelevant. Drill, drill, drill. After all, what would be the point in saving the earth?
I can't say I know when the end of days will be, but one thing I know for sure: When religion gets in bed with politics, we all wake up with regrets. Well, except of course for Sarah Palin.
WASHINGTON - A University of Texas poll to be released today shows Republican presidential candidate John McCain and GOP Sen. John Cornyn leading by comfortable margins in Texas, as expected. But the statewide survey of 550 registered voters has one very surprising finding: 23 percent of Texans are convinced that Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is a Muslim.
Obama is a Christian who was embroiled in a controversy earlier this year about his two-decade membership in Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ. Yet just 45 percent of those polled identified the Illinois senator as a Protestant.
The Obama-is-a-Muslim confusion is caused by fallacious Internet rumors and radio talk-show gossip. McCain went so far at one of his town hall meetings to grab a microphone from a woman who claimed that Obama was an Arab.
The Texas numbers are unusual because most national polls show that just 5 to 10 percent of Americans still believe Obama is a Muslim - less than half the number of Texans who buy into the debunked theories.
The UT poll shows McCain running ahead of Obama statewide, with a 51 percent to 40 percent margin. Cornyn, a first-term Republican from San Antonio, leads Rick Noriega, a state representative from Houston, 45 percent to 36 percent. Another 14 percent of voters remain undecided in the contest.
Santa Fe faith leaders spoke out Tuesday condemning the acrid anti-Muslim ideas that have surfaced during the presidential election campaign.
Imam Aziz Eddebbarh, leader of Taha Mosque on Cordova Road and president of the Santa Fe Interfaith Leadership Alliance, said he wanted to voice concerns about a statement by an organizer of Otero County Republicans calling Muslims "our enemies" and religious attacks that have appeared on television and the Internet.
"American Muslims share our American ideals and have been a vibrant and contributing segment of our society," said Eddebbarh, who spoke at a press conference at United Church of Santa Fe.
Later, Eddebbarh said the mosque where he worships with other Muslims has been targeted with phone messages and visits he describes as "hostile." But he's more worried about what young Muslim children hear from classmates at school about their faith. "It's having a effect on all Muslims across the nation ... especially the silence and what has been allowed to be said. It's also the subtle message; it makes you feel like Muslims are second-class citizens," he said.
Eddebbarh said he supported statements from former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell last week that condemned hate speech against Muslims.
Other leaders reported that churches have been inundated with faxes, mail and other materials that contain fear-mongering messages about Islam. In addition to the Otero County organizer statement, a widely circulated DVD called Obsession that reinforces prejudice against Islam has been disseminated here by a group called The Judeo-Christian View, said United's Rev. Talitha Arnold.
Joining Eddebbarh and Arnold were leaders from some of the more than a dozen area churches who have signed on to "an interfaith statement of support for Muslims" including Lutherans, Catholics, Quakers, Greek Orthodox, Presbyterians, Jews and Methodists.
"If all Muslims are truly our enemies, what is next? Round them up and put them in camps so we can keep an eye on them? That's ludicrous," said Rabbi Marvin Schwab. "We must as a nation stand against prejudice and intolerance and hate. And if we don't, we have to question why we even exists as a nation."
Shades of the Unibomber: The rightwing 'Society for American National Existence' is probably a lone individual publishing manifestoes out of his mother's basement somewhere in the 'burbs.'
Manifesto scrawl of the lone nut: A remarkable likeness in overuse of the royal "we." Pictured: Ted Kaczynski.
Salaam writes: To the best of my ability, I've searched for evidence of the existence of the 'Society for American National Existence' in the US and I can't find it.
The Liberal Democrats are at loggerheads with centre-right think tank Policy Exchange over a Muslim conference set to take place on Sunday.
Policy Exchange, which was co-founded by shadow schools secretary Michael Goves, has been trying to link the Global Peace and Unity 2008 event with Islamic extremism.
Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has written to the think tank's director, Neil O'Brien, calling on him to stop attacking the event.
"Your attempt to raise a boycott of this event by privately briefing against it is bizarre and underhand behaviour for a think-tank supposedly interested in open public debate," he wrote.
According to the Lib Dems, Policy Exchange is using evidence quoted from the Society for American National Existence, a radical organisation which seeks to make the practise of Islam an offence punishable by 20 years in prison.
"The information you are disseminating is extremely narrow in focus and as a result tars with the brush of extremism the tens of thousands of Muslims who will be in attendance," Mr Clegg continued.
"The sad truth is you play into the hands of the men you seek to discredit, driving further the alienation of the majority of Muslims who see themselves mischaracterised everywhere they turn as would-be terrorists."
Organisers say the event is aimed at promoting dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims.
ALAMOGORDO, N.M., Oct. 22 (UPI) -- Accusations by a New Mexico Republican that Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama is "a Muslim socialist" are offensive and wrong, critics say.
In a letter published in the Tuesday in the Alamogordo (N.M.) Daily News, Otero County, N.M., Republican Women Chairwoman Marcia Stirman professed a belief "in a sovereign God who sometimes gives us what we deserve," adding that "Muslims are our enemies" and saying, "I agree with a two-party system, but Obama isn't a messiah or a Democrat. He's a Muslim socialist."
The letter has sparked an outburst of negative reaction from around the country, The Albuquerque Journal reported. Rabbi Joseph Black of Congregation Albert said the GOP leader's comments were worse than ignorant, telling the newspaper, "I'm sickened. History has taught us the dangers of mindless hatred based on religious affiliation. Absolutely -- they're dangerous."
Some who e-mailed the Daily News, however, supported Stirman. She refused to retract her comments in an interview with the Journal, saying, "It's pretty strong, but it's exactly how I feel. And it's exactly how a lot of people I know feel. They just wish they had been able to say it."
It resemble's Mao's use of rural peasants as "authentic" and politically pure, whereas urbanites and educated citizens were suspect and required retraining.
Mao: Fount of Republican campaign strategy.
Sarah Palin at a recent campaign rally:
"We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation."
Ahistoricality writes: In response to a Sam Crane comment on Maoist guerrilla tactics as a metaphor for McCain's rural strategy (which has intensified, since), I said
More to the point, it resemble's Mao's use of rural peasants as "authentic" and politically pure, whereas urbanites and educated citizens were suspect and required retraining. This woman really does worry me.
I still wasn't going to make a big deal of it, but this attempt to claim that the recession is just "some regions of the country not doing as well as others" has a direct parallel in the Maoist obfustication of the Great Leap Forward Famine. At that time, official reports claimed that the Great Leap Forward was going very well, producing record amounts in both agriculture and industry, while the reality was that both agricultural and industrial production were dramatically undercut by the Maoist program.
Famine across most of China resulted in roughly thirty million deaths, but the vast majority of the Chinese people believed -- and many still believe -- that the Great Leap Forward was generally successful except in their districts.
This propoganda sleight of hand effectively shifted the blame for the famine away from central planners (or planner) to local officials and a "failure of revolutionary zeal" among the population. That gave the regime cover for the Cultural Revolution, a political purge and self-destructive "renewal" that killed millions more and set Chinese intellectual and cultural life back decades.
Blame shifting is a natural human act, not a particularly fascistic or Republican one. But the cumulative effect of the specific tactics is suggesting to me an affinity with extremist politics which is deeply unsettling:
• Shifting blame away from the center
• Blaming minorities (especially for the mortgage crisis; also immigration issues and Islamophobia)
• Calling for a renewal of lost "authenticity"
• Excluding large segments of the population from membership in the "the nation"
It never ceases to amaze me that right-wing radicals can get away with much more than left-wing ones, but there has to be a line somewhere....
Salaam writes: She's the former chair of the New Mexico Otero County Republicans and current chair of the Otero County Republican Women. And she said it in an op-ed in the local newspaper.
CNN host Rick Sanchez: 'I'm mystified why they wouldn't embrace him for his actions.'
CNN host Rick Sanchez said he was "mystified" by a last minute decision by the McCain campaign to pull a Muslim grassroots organizer from appearing on his show.
The aide, Daniel Zubairi, had been scheduled to appear on Sanchez's mid-day program after he was caught on video talking down an anti-Muslim protester outside a McCain rally in Woodbridge, Virginia. But, even after telling the network that an interview was "good to go," the McCain shop pulled Zubairi at the last minute, leaving Sanchez in limbo on live TV.
"Wouldn't you think they would have wanted him to come on?" the CNN host would later tell the Huffington Post. "What the guy did was courageous. I called him heroic. I'm mystified why they wouldn't embrace him for his actions. Maybe they didn't like the story, but I'll tell you. I thought it was presented it in a very transparent way, if anything I kind of gushed philosophically about how impressive and real his reaction was to the protester's hateful message. It seemed to show some of the best of McCain supporters, didn't it?"
The American News Project captured Zubairi this past weekend intervening when a racist McCain supporter got into a heated exchange with rally attendees over the anti-Muslim literature and message that he was promoting. We don't "endorse that behavior" said Zubairi. The tiff ended with the man walking away from the rally with his pamphlets and bumper stickers in hand.
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