The Pentagon brass are condemning a course on Islam taught at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Va., which mischaracterized mainstream Muslim persons and organizations as radical, violent extremists, and called for treating the Muslim civilian populations the way the Japanese at Hiroshima were treated. Those who took the class were encouraged to think of themselves as a ‘resistance movement to Islam.’ A review has been ordered of that class and of hundreds of others taught within the Department of Defense.
Note that there are 1.5 billion Muslims and only 310 million Americans, and Muslim countries like Turkey and Indonesia are now in the G20, so this is not a fight you’d want to pick with the Muslim mainstream.
What is odd is that the US military is deeply dependent on Muslim allies, and Muslim officers train all the time at places like Ft. Bragg, where I have met them. That is, American officers and Muslim ones are most often colleagues and do a lot of things together. How could they sit there and listen to Lt Col Matthew Dooley’s bull crap?
In my experience, the US officer corps is made up largely of very bright people and most of them are well informed, about the Muslim world and many other subjects. I’ve had the privilege of addressing them myself at think tank events in Washington DC on subjects such as al-Qaeda’s recruitment videos and the fringe groups’ ideas about cosmic war. But since there are lapses in any organization, here are some helpful suggestions to the military about courses on Islam:
1. Such courses should be taught by people with academic credentials in the study of Islam. Many officers do a Master’s degree in Middle East studies at major universities (I’ve taught them at Michigan). They have the training to teach. But why not also bring in civilian university teachers with Ph.D.s from good universities?
2. Bringing in the Imam of the local mosque, or better, doing a field trip to a mosque, should be an essential part of such a course. Meeting living breathing American Muslims is necessary if Americans are to understand Islam.
3. Some bigot who happens to have been stationed somewhere in the Muslim world, has read Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes and Brad Thor fiction, and has a lot of crazy ideas is not a proper teacher of such a course.
4. The less our officer corps sounds like Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, the better.
5. Deliberately killing civilians is a war crime. Officers who openly advocate such a course of action should be cashiered.
6. The Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt now has the largest number of seats in parliament in Egypt. It is not an extremist, violent organization, and US political relations with Egypt now depend on Washington getting up to speed in understanding it. A kindred group, the Nahdah or Renaissance Party, has the prime ministership in Tunisia. Officers who provoke international incidents with foreign governments by making false allegations against their parliaments should be drummed out of the service.
7. If you can’t say it about Jews or Catholics, you can’t say it about Muslims.
8. The one thing that would guarantee a century-long war of religions and massive terrorism against the United States would be for it to bomb Mecca. Why Muslim-haters are fixated on this tactic baffles me. Would Christianity disappear or be weakened if someone nuked the Church of the Nativity? Sunni Muslims don’t have a pope-like figure or a central bureaucracy, and neither is at Mecca. It is just a place they visit on pilgrimage. The Kaaba or cube-shaped building that they walk around has been destroyed many times by flash floods and they have just rebuilt it. By destroying it, you’d just enrage them (the very threat enrages them) and provoke them to revenge on the US, without weakening them in any way.
9. If intelligent officers sit through a course in which the teacher seems to be a maniac and says hateful and implausible things, they should, like, object.
10. The Iraq War is over. The Afghanistan War is winding down. The US military is unlikely to be fighting ground wars against Sunni Muslims in the next decade. Turkey is a NATO ally that the US is sworn to defend from attackers. Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Pakistan, Bahrain and Afghanistan are non-NATO allies of the United States. An officer advocating war on mainstream Muslims is making policy that only a president and a Congress can make. He should be drummed out of the service.
The bad economy in France and outgoing President Nicolas Sarkozy’s refusal to do a stimulus program, preferring instead “austerity,” were the primary reasons he lost the election to Socialist Francois Hollande. That and Sarkozy really is an annoying, strutting peacock who wore out his political welcome among voters.
But some of the margin of his defeat came from his pandering to the discourse of the French anti-immigrant far right, which he did especially vocally after he was forced into a run-off against Hollande. Sarkozy said there are too many “foreigners” (he meant immigrants) in France, that police should have greater leeway to shoot fleeing suspects, that the far right are upstanding citizens. He even talked about “people who look Muslim.”
Many observers in France argue that Sarkozy stole so many lines from the soft-fascist National Front of Marine LePen that he mainstreamed it, and made it impossible for the Gaullists of the Union for a Popular Movement (Sarkozy’s party, French acronym UMP) to argue that LePen and her followers should be kept out of national government because they were too extreme. (The irony is that Sarkozy himself is the son of a Hungarian father and his mother was mixed French Catholic and Greek Jewish; and he postured as Ur-French!)
Sarkozy tried to depict the French Left as so woolly-headed and multi-cultural that they were coddling and even fostering the rise of a threatening French Muslim fundamentalism that menaced secular, republican values. The infamous daily hour set aside by the mayor at a swimming pool in Lille for a few years for Muslim women to swim without men present was presented as emblematic of this threat. But it was all polemics. Some Gaullist mayors did the same thing, and for longer.
And, Sarkozy showed much less dedication to Third-Republic-style militant secularism than most Socialists (only 10 percent of the French go to mass regularly and almost all vote for Sarkozy’s UMP, so the Catholic religious right is his constituency). But, he did support the Swiss ban on minarets and he banned public Muslim prayer in France, and the wearing of the burqa’ full veil (popular mainly in the Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and worn by like 4 women in France aside from wealthy wives of emirs in France on shopping sprees).
Sarkozy’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and punitive laws in the end drove centrist Francois Bayrou to repudiate him. Bayrou, leader of the Democratic Movement party, had run for president on a platform of reducing the national debt and reining in public spending, and was more center-right than center. He got about 9% of the votes in the first round of the presidential election.
Late last week, Bayrou made the astonishing announcement that Sarkozy’s obsession with “frontiers” just seemed to him a betrayal of French values, and that he was throwing his support to Hollande. Sarkozy’s political platform, he thundered, “is violent” and is “in contradiction with our values, but also those of Gaullism [the mainstream French right] as well as contradicting the values of the republican and social Right.” I am not and never will be, he said, a man of the left. He said he was sure he would be upbraiding Hollande for his spendthrift ways. But on the issue of republican values, he had to back Hollande.
Only about a third of France’s roughly 4.5 million persons of Muslim descent (mainly North and West Africans) identify as Muslims. Only about 10 percent of Muslims are said to vote. So French Muslims are not flexing their electoral muscles yet in a meaningful way. Probably many more secular French voted against Sarkozy because of his odious language about immigrants than did Muslim-heritage French, in absolute numbers.
Sarkozy, by embracing the noxious language of hatred of immigrants and fear-mongering about secular Socialists spreading Muslim theocracy in the villages of France, failed to convince the hard right to vote for him but managed to alienate the center. Even MPs in his own party began speaking out against his having gone too far.
Of course, the kind of violent, anti-immigrant, and Muslim-hating language Sarkozy used is par for the course in the GOP in the US today. But aside from some Libertarians such as Ron Paul, where are the mainstream centrist Republicans who will openly denounce it? Who among Republicans recognizes that the sorts of things Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney say about a monolithic Muslim Caliphate menace are violent and contradictory to the values of the American Republic. Not to mention the things many of them say about Latino immigrants. Where is our Francois Bayrou?
Creating the Muslim Manchurian Candidate
The Right Wing’s Election-Year Islamophobia
By John Feffer
Those who fervently believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim generally practice their furtive religion in obscure recesses of the Internet. Once in a while, they’ll surface in public to remind the news media that no amount of evidence can undermine their convictions.
In October 2008, at a town hall meeting in Minnesota for Republican presidential candidate John McCain, a woman called Obama “an Arab.” McCain responded, incongruously enough, that Obama was, in fact, “a decent family man” and not an Arab at all. In an echo of this, a woman recently stood up at a town hall in Florida and began a question for Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum by asserting that the president “is an avowed Muslim.” The audience cheered, and Santorum didn’t bother to correct her.
Though they belong to a largely underground cult, the members of the Obama-is-Muslim congregation number as many as one third of all Republicans. A recent poll found that only 14% percent of Republicans in Alabama and Mississippi believe that the president is Christian.
These true believers treat their scraps of evidence like holy relics: the president’s middle name, his grandfather’s religion, a widely circulated photo of Obama in a turban. They occasionally traffic in outright fabrications: that he attended a radical madrasa in Indonesia as a child or that he put his hand on the Qur’an to be sworn in as president. An even more apocalyptic subset believes Obama to be nothing short of the anti-Christ.
By and large, however, this cult doesn’t attract mainstream support from the larger church of Obama haters. Indeed, these more orthodox faithful have carefully shifted the debate from Obama being Muslim to Obama acting Muslim. Evangelical pundits, presidential candidates, and the right-wing media have all ramped up their attacks on the president for, as Baptist preacher Franklin Graham put it recently on MSNBC, “giving Islam a pass.”
The conservative mainstream still calls the president’s religious beliefs into question, but they stop just short of accusing him of apostasy and concealment. What they consider safe is the assertion that Obama is acting as if he were Muslim. In this way, Republican mandarins are cleverly channeling a conspiracy theory into a policy position.
There is a whiff of desperation in all this. After all, it’s not an easy time for the GOP. The economy shows modest signs of improvement. The Republican presidential candidates are still engaged in a fratricidal primary. By expanding counterterrorism operations and killing Osama bin Laden, the president has effectively removed national security from the list of Republican talking points.
One story, however, still ties together so many narrative threads for conservatives. Charges that the president is a socialist or a Nazi or an elitist supporter of college education certainly push some buttons. But the single surefire way of grabbing the attention of the media and the public — as well as appealing to the instincts of the Republican base — is to assert, however indirectly, that Barack Obama is a Manchurian candidate sent from the Islamic world.
Obama and the Muslim World
A succession of Republican candidates have attempted to run to the right of party favorite Mitt Romney by asserting that only a true conservative can defeat Obama in November. Most of them boasted of the same powerful backer. Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum all declared that God asked them to run for higher office. Together with Newt Gingrich, they have deployed various methods of appealing to their constituencies, but none is more potent than religion.
Rick Santorum, a Catholic and the favorite of the evangelical community, has been particularly adept at using his soapbox as a pulpit. The president subscribes to a “phony theology,” Santorum has claimed, “not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology.” Although he occasionally asserts that “Obama’s personal faith is none of my concern,” he nonetheless speaks of the president’s attempt to “impose values on people of faith”– implying that the president is certainly no member of that community.
It turns out that from a hard-right American evangelical point of view, the US public may have a choice between two Muslims, or two ‘may as well be Muslims’ for president this fall.
He underlined that the fact that someone is not a professing Christian (sliding over from Mormons not being orthodox Christians to not being Christians at all) should not disqualify him from running for president. He quotes Martin Luther that “I would rather be governed by a competent Turk [i.e. Muslim] than an incompetent Christian.”
at 12:04:
[Everything Land says earlier about Ahmadinejad, Iran and Israel is factually incorrect by the way.]
Ironically, Land’s quotation of Luther, which is historically without any basis in fact, actually points to another analogy that Protestant leaders once made, between Islam and Roman Catholicism. Throughout history, evangelicals have used Islam to represent “the other.” Now it is Mormonism, but once it was the papacy.
The rumor that Luther felt this way about accepting Muslim rule was actually promulgated by Leo X. George W. Forell, “Luther and the War against the Turks,” Church History, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Dec., 1945), pp. 256-271, explained,
“It was at that time that Luther published his first major statement in regard to the Turkish danger. It appeared in 1529 under the title On War against the Turk, and was written to counteract the prevalent opinion that Luther considered the war against the Turks a war against God. This impression of Luther’s position had been fostered by the notorious papal bull, Exsurge Domine, in which Pope Leo X had condemned Luther’s theses as heretical. In his fifth thesis Luther had said that the pope cannot remit any other punishments than those which he or canon law had imposed. He had claimed that the pope cannot remit God’s punishments. And in his defense of the ninety-five theses of 1518 he had tried to make his point even more emphatic and had added that if the pope was as well able to remit divine punishment as he claimed, he should stop the advance of the Turk. Luther said that he must indeed be a poor Christian who does not know that the Turks are a punishment from God, and invited the pope to stop that punishment.
The pope had countered by condemning as heretical the following sentence of Luther: “To fight against the Turks is to fight against God’s visitation upon our iniquities.” In this misleading form, Luther’s attitude toward the war against the Turks had been widely publicised. This had given the general impression that Luther considered a war against the Turks sinful and preferred the rule of the Turks to the rule of the emperor.
Luther had to answer this accusation. He did that in a detailed reassertion of all the articles condemned by Leo X. In regard to the Turks he said that unless the pope were put in his place, all attempts to defeat the Turks would prove futile. The wrath of the Lord would continue to be upon all Christendom as long as Christian nations continued to honor those most Turkish of all Turks, even the Romanists.
But this answer merely showed that Luther’s pronouncements in regard to the Turks were not a defense of the Turks but an attack against the pope.”
Actually, Luther believed that Muslims were being allowed to advance into Central Europe in the 1500s as a punishment on European Christians for being Roman Catholics. He understood that Muslims often lived moral lives and had mystics among them, but considered them ‘saints of the devil.’ He saw both the pope and Islam as ‘anti-Christs’. Forell explained,
‘Luther’s identification of the Turk with the Antichrist sounds confusing in view of his frequent claims that it is the pope in Rome who is the real Antichrist. But for Luther two Antichrists presented no problem. He said, “The person of the Antichrist is at the same time the pope and the Turk. Every person consists of a body and a soul. So the spirit of the Antichrist is the pope, his flesh is the Turk. The one has infested the Church spiritually, the other bodily. However, both come from the same Lord, even the devil.” ‘
Luther rejected the idea of a crusade or a religious war as blasphemous. Human beings are too sinful to wage war in the name of a holy cause. But he did believe that Germans had a civil obligation to fight the Ottoman advance to defend their homes. The idea that he would have accepted an Ottoman ruler is absurd.
Yet another irony is that the Ottoman Empire was interested in Protestantism as a way of dividing and ruling Christian lands, and perhaps they knew enough of it to know its leaders often rejected holy war against the Ottomans or even that some had pacifist tendencies. They also viewed it as closer to an Islamic sensibility. Ultimately Protestantism in eastern Europe sometimes benefited from Ottoman protection. Luther himself was aware of this tendency, and rejected it. Forell:
‘a little episode reported in the Table Talk. At one time Luther was informed by a member of an imperial mission to the Turkish Sultan that Suleiman had been very much interested in Luther and his movement and had asked the ambassadors Luther’s age. When they had told him that Luther was forty-eight years old, he had said, “I wish he were even younger; he would find in me a gracious protector.” But hearing that report, Luther, not being a realistic politician, made the sign of the cross and said, “May God protect me from such a gracious protector.” ‘
Land’s position is therefore actually much more tolerant and admirable than that of Luther himself, insofar as he says, at least, that he would accept a non-Muslim president and he lacks Luther’s animus toward Roman Catholicism. But in likening Mormonism to Islam (to the detriment of both in his own mind), Land is deploying the same intellectual gesture, of amalgamating the internal Christian Other to the external Muslim Other, that Luther engaged in. And while Land believes that evangelicals will in the end prefer Romney to Obama, so far they are not voting that way, and they may well stay home on election day. What with having only Muslim or Muslim-like choices.
Jonathan Lyons writes in a guest column for Informed Comment
Islam, Women, and the West
This essay is adapted from my latest book, Islam Through Western Eyes: From the Crusades to the War on Terrorism, newly published by Columbia University Press. For more information, please see the CUP catalogue, at the CUP catalogue or my web page.
In the mid-1840s, French novelist Gustave Flaubert presented readers with a tantalizing view from the top of the Great Pyramid after an arduous climb under the blistering Egyptian sun: “But lift your head. Look! Look! And you will see cities with domes of gold and minarets of porcelain, palaces of lava built on plinths of alabaster, marble-rimmed pools where sultanas bathe their bodies at the hour when the moon makes bluer the shadows of the groves and more limpid the silvery water of the fountains.”
Flaubert’s excitable prose – “Open your eyes! Open your eyes!” – were penned four years before he ever set foot in the Middle East and so tells us far more about the writer’s idea of the Muslim world than they do about anything he could possibly have seen from distant France. Yet, Flaubert was by no means alone.
European artists routinely created their own representations of the Muslim Orient at home and only then set out on their travels in search of confirmation. Eugène Delacroix’s earliest representations of Ottoman women, intimate portrayals of Muslim female sexuality characterized by passive repose, overt submission, and sumptuous surroundings punctuated by symbolic reminders of restraint or outright captivity, were made some five years before his first trip to the Muslim world, which took him to Algeria and Morocco and not to Ottoman Turkey.
When they did arrive in the Orient, many Europeans were deeply disappointed by what they found. Gérard de Nerval, whose Voyage en Orient became a classic, groused to a friend that the Oriental cafés back home in Paris were more authentic than those of the Orient itself. Rather than mingle with real Egyptians, he conducted much of his research in a French-run library in Cairo. Nerval was so nonplussed that he even incorporated whole sections from a pioneering English work on the subject and passed it off as his own observations. Another writer used this same text, which described Egyptian customs, and applied it wholesale to daily life in Syria.
Flaubert’s disappointment was more primal. He found the women of Egypt, in particular those of the urban middle and upper classes, commonly veiled and often secluded and thus inaccessible to his European gaze. Unable to locate the idealized Oriental woman – or man –of his erotic fantasies, Flaubert had to literally create his own; he routinely hired prostitutes to act the parts he so ardently sought.
Not even the new tecnology of photography, with its implied promise of realism, could alter the equation. Soon, an entire commercial apparatus to manufacture the eroticized imagery of the Middle East was in place. Like the writer or the painter before him, the photographer was excluded from his intended subject, and could do little more than re-imagine existing images in the new medium. Entrepreneurs set up local studios where they could gather props, hire prostitutes as models, and then stage harem scenes to create the erotic Oriental postcards their audiences back home demanded. “What the postcard proposes as the truth,” writes the scholar Malek Alloula, “is but a substitute for something that does not exist.”
What is most interesting about this seeming confusion between the imagined and the real, between reading and seeing, is the extent to which the former so often takes precedence over the latter. This, in turn, reflects the primacy in Western thought of the expert “text” – philological, anthropological, theological, etc. – over any lived experience or personal observation of the Muslim world. In fact, whenever observation or experience on the part of the travel writer, the memoirist, or the diplomat conflicts with textual evidence, the prevailing narrative dictates that the text almost certainly wins. Today, we see this in the myopia that plagues most Western news reporting and analysis from the Muslim world.
In other words, Islam cannot be what the Muslims say or do or even what they say they mean, but only what a handful of “texts” – selected and then interpreted by the Western Islam expert – tells us it is and is not. This phenomenon reflects what I call the anti-Islam discourse, a totalizing western narrative that dates back to the run-up to the First Crusade at the close of the eleventh century. Yet, its core elements – that Islam is inherently violent, sexually perverse, and anti-modern – remain as influential today as they once were in the halls of the Roman curia.
These developments have, in turn, left the West unprepared to respond in any constructive way to some of the most daunting issues of the early twenty-first century – the rise of Islamist political power, the emergence of religious terrorism, clashes between established social values and multicultural rights on the part of growing Muslim immigrant populations, and so on.
Historical trends in Western scholarship have contributed greatly to such attitudes and ideas. Nineteenth-century representation of the Orient was closely tied to the earlier Enlightenment notion of Islamic civilization as timeless, dead, and without history. Thus, the Western imagination stepped forward to fill the void that was Islam. Only then could it be properly represented and in due course conquered, subdued, and colonized.
When it comes to the women of the Muslim world, the “hidden” quality represented by the institutions of the harem, of seclusion, and of the veil struck a nerve in the Western mind that went beyond attitudes toward other non-Western women. Initially, this focused particular attention on the imperial harem – with its legions of concubines, guarded by eunuchs – presenting what was in effect an institution restricted to the highest reaches of the Ottoman court as symptomatic of Muslim family life in general.
The general seclusion of middle- and upper-class Muslim women elicited two powerful strategies aimed at revealing the previously unseen: to draw on the storehouse of the Western imagination to fill in the blanks left by this inaccessibility, and later to literally unveil the women of Islam. Both responses drew on the anti-Islam discourse to produce an enormous number of Western statements about Islam and the Muslims, first in the form of Orientalist art and literature and then, beginning with outright colonial rule, in the shape of policies, reforms, and White Papers aimed at ending the degradation.
By the early twentieth century, the institution of veiling had for the most part supplanted the more exotic harem as the focal point of Western attention. Still, the underlying logic of the discourse of Islam and women remains firmly in place today. The end result has been a “sexualization” of the Western view of Islam, one in which the totality of Muslim beliefs and practices and even the entire Islamic civilization are too often reduced to Western perceptions and assessment of the male–female dynamic.
Exhibit A may be found in our obsession with the hijab, or veil, as a barometer of social progress and overall well-being within Islamic societies, to such a degree that it has become a commonplace of Western mass-media coverage, social activism, and political discussion alike. For years, the veil has been a staple of endless news articles, books, and documentaries, and it is captured in magazine and television images – all as shorthand for a society, a civilization, or a system that is backward, alien, immobile, and inherently antithetical to human rights and dignity.
Running throughout this public discourse is the persistent binary opposition of oppression and freedom, veiled and unveiled, bad and good. Islam itself and on its own terms is once again ignored in favor of an unquestioned Western construction. And this construction dictates that the West’s approaches and policy proscriptions toward Muslim societies be seen solely through the lens of our own flawed understanding of both women and gender relations in Islam.
Nothing else can adequately explain the Western fascination with the veil and the apprehension of this institution as the root of the oppressive conditions faced by many women in Muslim societies. The prevailing idea of veiling, and of the associated degradation of women, creates the notion of an inferior Muslim world in need of rescue from itself, by force if necessary. This recalls Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous critique of colonialist rhetoric as largely consisting of “white men saving brown women from brown men.”
To see the immediate dangers in such a course, one must only reflect on the ways in which the U.S. government was able to mobilize public support for two doomed wars against Muslim societies by tapping directly into the overarching discourse of Islam and its important subset, Islam and women. The expropriation of the rhetoric of women’s rights under Islam in order to unleash deadly violence on Muslim nations shows just how much the struggle for women’s equality has become a discursive one rather than a material one.
Closer to home, the discourse of Islam and women recently played out in America’s living rooms, after the obscure Florida Family Association (FFA) successfully pressured advertisers to drop support for a reality TV show, All American Muslim. According to the show’s producers, the program “takes a look at life in Dearborn, Michigan … through the lens of five Muslim American families. Each episode offers an intimate look at the customs and celebrations, misconceptions and conflicts these families face outside and within their own community.”
But the FFA labeled the program “propaganda.” At the heart of the group’s critique, one apparently endorsed by Lowe’s and other departed commercial sponsors, lies the notion that “the show profiled only Muslims that appeared to be ordinary folks.” Once again, when it comes to Muslims, appearances must be set aside in favor of the more powerful – and persuasive –discursive reality of Islam. Not surprisingly, an FFA statement on its Web site directs a central part of its argument on the established narrative of Islam and women: “Many woman were shown wearing hijabs and many who were not, but the program did not show what happens if one of the hijab-wearing women decides to take it off.” Tellingly, FFA sees no need to respond to its own question – what happens? – for the group can have no doubt but that we all know the answer.
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Jonathan Lyons, former Reuters Tehran bureau chief from 1998-2001, is the author of several books, most recently Islam through Western Eyes.
I sometimes talk to Muslim audiences. There is often an FBI agent in the audience and sometimes an ACLU representative. Maz Jobrani suggested at one such event that everyone else leave and let the two of them talk. Now it turns out that the agents often are there gathering information on participants and storing it, even though it is legal for American Muslims to have a public dinner together. The ACLU is blowing the whistle on these FBI practices. Obviously, Muslim groups may be increasingly reluctant to invite agents (done anyway on the unreasonable grounds that law enforcement needs to be reassured about a perfectly peaceful and loyal American community).
FBI Storing Information on Activities Protected by the First Amendment, Memos Obtained by ACLU Show
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org
NEW YORK – The FBI has been illegally using its community outreach programs to secretly collect and store information about activities protected by the First Amendment for intelligence purposes, according to FBI documents released today by the American Civil Liberties Union.
“The trust that community outreach efforts aim to create is undermined when the FBI exploits these programs to gather intelligence on the very members of the religious and community organizations agents are meeting with,” said Michael German, ACLU senior policy counsel and a former FBI agent. “The FBI should be honest with community organizations about what information is being collected during meetings and purge any improperly collected information.”
FOIA documents showing instances of inappropriate intelligence gathering include:
• San Francisco FBI memos, written in 2007 and 2008 by agents who attended Ramadan Iftar dinners under the guise of the FBI’s mosque outreach program, documenting participants’ names, conversations and presentations. The 2008 memo also recorded participants’ contact information and descriptions of their opinions and associations.
• A 2009 San Jose, Calif. FBI memo describing FBI participation in a career day sponsored by an Assyrian community organization. Agents detailed conversations with three community leaders and members about their opinions, backgrounds and charitable activities.
• A 2007 San Jose, Calif. FBI memo describing a mosque outreach meeting attended by 50 people representing 27 Muslim community and religious organizations, identifying each person by name and organization and analyzing their “demographics.”
“Except under certain special circumstances, the Privacy Act bars the FBI from maintaining records like these describing how Americans exercise their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and association,” said Nusrat Choudhury, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “Congress passed this law to prevent records obtained by the government for one purpose from being used for another reason without a person’s consent, but that is precisely what the FBI has done.”
There is no indication in the FOIA documents that community members were informed that the FBI’s outreach activities were used for intelligence gathering purposes or could be potentially used to target these people and their organizations for investigations.
One of the organizations whose members were noted attending the mosque outreach meeting was the Muslim Community Association (MCA). “Like all Americans, we want to help the FBI. Now we feel betrayed,” said MCA Board Secretary Isa Shaw. “We support the idea of building trust through FBI community outreach programs, but the government should not be taking advantage of it to violate our First Amendment rights like this.”
The ACLU is calling on the Department of Justice Inspector General to investigate Privacy Act violations in the FBI’s San Francisco and Sacramento Divisions and to initiate a broader audit of FBI practices nationwide. It is also urging the FBI to stop using community outreach for intelligence purposes, to be honest with community organizations regarding what information is collected and retained during community outreach meetings and to purge all improperly collected information.
The request for these documents was made by the ACLU of Northern California, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
A detailed description of examples (with links to FOIA documents) showing the FBI’s improper collection of information at community outreach meetings is available at: [this site]…
Norway’s mass murdered Anders Behring Breivik, a right wing white Christian supremacist who has confessed to killing 77 Labor Party youth activists and allegedly wounded 151 others, appeared in open court on Monday.
The BBC reports:
“One of those who witnessed his shooting spree on Utoeya was 20-year-old Bjoern Ihle from Oslo.
“He aimed at me on Utoeya island. That was the last time I saw him,” he told Reuters news agency after the hearing.
“It is good to see he was powerless, which he was not then… He looked nervous and weakened.”
Breivik says his killing spree was intended to save Norway from multi-culturalism and from Islam. Muslims are between 2 and 3 percent of the Norwegian population. He seems to mean by “multi-culturalism” a philosophy that does not approve of killing Muslims (thus he shot the European “multi-culturalists” rather than shooting Muslims, since the former were the true enablers of the latter in his twisted mind).
Breivik’s passions were whipped up, according to his diary, by reading anti-Muslim hatemongers such as Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller and Daniel Pipes (whose “Campus Watch” is an Israeli settler-oriented attempt to deny tenure to American academics critical of Israel’s oppression of the stateless Palestinians, and to harass more senior professors with character assassination).
Reasoned arguments that Muslims are incorrect in their beliefs, or that liberal premises about the good society are flawed, are a healthy part of the democratic process.
But authors who use propaganda techniques, of demonization, fear-mongering, guilt by association, gross exaggeration, and appeals to base emotions and latent racist sentiments, bear some moral responsibility when they whip persons with fragile personalities into a murderous frenzy.
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