There has been an extraordinary amount of violence perpetuated against Muslims in the Central African Republic. At one point all its Muslims had been ‘ethnically cleansed’ and all its mosques essentially destroyed. Ilisha series from a few years ago on CAR is a must read.

Now some of those who were driven out are returning “to nothing.”

Bangui, Central African Republic – M Babakir Ali cuts a lonely figure sitting on a plastic chair outside a rundown cafe in the PK5 district of Bangui.

Once the owner of five houses and 18,000 square metres of land in the Foulbe district of Pk13, on the outskirts of Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic, Ali is now reduced to a pair of jeans and a short white sleeved shirt. The thin vertical stripes are faintly visible beyond the creases. He is a refugee in his own city.

“I left for Chad in January 2014 because of what happened on the streets of Bangui,” Ali says.

Ali says he watched as bodies of young Muslim men were dragged through the streets of the capital and then piled at a local mosque in what was to signal the changing fortunes for Muslims in the country.

He was right.

In early January, Muslims in the PK5, PK12, PK13 districts of Bangui were hunted down, mutilated, burned alive and left on the streets. Muslims in the towns of Bossangoa, Bozoum, Bouca, Yaloke, Mbaiki, Bossembele and others also fled, as Anti-balaka embarked on a reign of terror across the northwest and southwestern regions.

Ali gathered his family, and fled to neighbouring Chad, too.

With the unrest in Bangui lifting in 2016 as the country neared elections, he decided to come home.

But he knew he would face a new struggle on his return.

“I knew my houses and my land, that everything had been taken,” 45-year-old Ali says. “I knew I would be coming back to nothing.”

Ali speaks in short and abrupt sentences. The already battered plastic chair bends and shifts with his every gesture. There is a calm dissonance in his moist, jaundiced eyes even as he explains that his property was sold to a third party by a local chief.

“I am not the only one. So many from my district have returned, and have nowhere to go,” Ali says, looking away.

Read the rest…

Bangkok, Thailand – February 20, 2014 : Apple Iphone5s held in one hand showing its screen with Facebook and WhatsApp application icons.

Reports over the years have established that individuals who join militant organizations such as ISIS are either completely ignorant or have very little knowledge of Islam. Muslims have been pointing this out for ages. Now there is a study, this time out of Germany that confirms this fact once again.

via. Huffington Post

A group of German scholars at the Universities of Bielefeld and Osnabrück analyzed 5,757 WhatsApp messages found on a phone seized by police following a terrorist attack in the spring of 2016. The messages were exchanged among 12 young men involved in the attack. The attack itself was not identified in the report.

Deutsche Welle noted that the timeframe suggested it may have been a bombing at a Sikh temple in Essen carried out in April of that year by a group of German teens with reported links to Islamic extremism.

Researchers conducting the study said the young men’s conversations demonstrated little understanding of their professed faith and that the group constructed a “Lego Islam” to suit their purposes.

People don’t join these groups out of a commitment to Islam but usually because of a perceived or actual grievance, and the influence of a close circle of peers.

Many are still uneducated and unaware of the fact that 8,000 Bosnian men and boys were systematically massacred by the Serb national army, and thousands of women and girls raped.

Thousands gathered across the world to remember the worst massacre in Europe since the end of World War II, letting the world know that this will never be forgotten or swept under the rug. In Srebrenica, over 20,000 gathered, while Serbian officials chose to miss the commemoration.

On the heels of the commemoration of the genocide at Srebrenica, an appeals court in Serbia halted the first ever war crimes trial.

via. Daily Sabah

Serbian appeals court has stopped a landmark trial of eight former Bosnian Serb police officers charged with taking part in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre Thursday.

The court in Belgrade said it has accepted defense complains that the indictment against the eight is invalid because it was filed when Serbia did not appoint the chief war crimes prosecutor.

The ruling meant that the whole proceeding will have to start over from scratch.

The eight former members of a Bosnian Serb special police unit went on trial in February this year, accused of organising and participating in the shooting of more than 1,300 Bosniak civilians in an agricultural warehouse in the village of Kravica near Srebrenica in July 1995.

It appears to have been halted over a technicality. Hopefully, the trial proceeds sincerely and factually, so that Serbia can live up to the genocidal crimes committed in the name of Serbian nationalism and Orthodox religion.

Hatred against Jews and hatred against Muslims have a lot in common. One thing in particular is that throughout history Jews and Muslims have been accused of being prone to criminality, rape and violence. The Nazis in the 30’s did so and many antisemites still today spread the lie. The exact same kind of lies are spread about Muslims.

You have all heard the Myth about the aggressive Muslim: the “terrorist”, the “criminal”, the “rapist”, the person that “inherently is prone to violence” just because he is Muslim.

This myth has its origin in classical antisemitism. I wrote about one part of the myth earlier this year: “are Muslims Rapists“. The slander about “aggressive” and “criminal” Muslims has the same origin.

Nicolai Sennells, a Danish psychologist, is often referred to as the main “expert” on this alleged  “Muslim aggressivity”. In Jihadwatch some years ago he claimed:

In Muslim culture, anger is seen as a sign of strength. To Muslims, being aggressive is in itself an argument and a way of gaining respect. But we should not be impressed when we see pictures of bearded men hopping up and down, shouting like animals and shooting in the air. We should take it for what it is: the local madhouse passing by…

In Western culture, self-confidence is connected with the ability to meet criticism calmly and to respond rationally. We are raised to see people who easily get angry when criticized, as insecure and immature. In Muslim culture it is the opposite; it is honorable to respond aggressively and to engage in a physical fight in order to scare or force critics to withdraw…

In general, Westerners are taught to be kind, self-assured, self-responsible and tolerant, while Muslims are taught to be aggressive, insecure, irresponsible and intolerant.

When the racists reports about “Muslim violence” they all do the same. They take reports about things that one Muslim or a small group of Muslims have done, or allegedly have done, and extrapolate it on all Muslims. Islam and “Muslim culture” were “responsible” for the individual crime, it is claimed. The Muslim is demonized and people are tricked to be afraid of him or her.

Thus: to be a Muslim is an accessory to murder, violence, rape and criminality.

Antisemitism

“To be a Jew is an accessory to murder, violence, rape and criminality”. That is what the Nazis in the 1930s claimed and what antisemites of all times have claimed. The nazis did the same as the islamophobes today: all Jews and Jewish culture were blamed for the things a few had done or was claimed to have done.

By now you might ask whether a Muslim or a Jew has ever raped a woman, or if there are no aggressive or criminal Muslims or Jews? Of course there are individual Muslim rapists, thiefs, thugs and murderers, as well as there are such among Trump supporters, among farmers, Americans, Christians, Russians, carpenters, farmers and stamp collectors.  But if you claim that Muslims, Jews, Trump supporters or Christians or farmers are rapists or aggressive thugs you are spreading a dangerous lie.

According to Breitbart there is a “Muslim Rape Culture” and that Muslims are “violent” The Nazis spread the same lies about Jews in the 30’s, as Breitbart and others does today in respect to Muslims, and claimed that there was such a thing as “Jewish Rape Culture” and that Jews were “violent”. The German magazine Der Sturmer was especially famous for spreading these kinds of slanders and its editors were put on trial after World War 2, at Nuremberg.

The Jew was  demonized and people were tricked to be afraid of him or her.

In the picture below, from Der Sturmer,  you can see the satanic Jewish “snake” that is seen raping a woman, and in the background you can see the Talmud. The headline deals with legacy-hunters, also implying that Jews try to “take over” Germany. The text on the bottom of the page says: “the Jews are our unluck”.

 

The myths about the violent Jews and Muslims has often been based on sex. Der Sturmer reported much about “Jewish sex crimes”. The example below is from Der Sturmer 1927. According to the article, an American Jew has raped and abused a German woman in Ohio. “Defamation of the Race in America” is the headline. The implied message is that “all Jews are like that.”
 

Here are two other examples from 1936 and once again Der Sturmer. About criminal cases that had to do with fraud. Der Sturmer combined violent articles about how Jews and Jewish holy books were inciting the Jews to violence with news that seemingly “comfirmed” the claims made in the longer articles.

First you read about Jews that was claimed to have committed fraud, thus being criminal, then you read articles about how Jewish culture and holy books (The Talmud) allegedly encouraged Jews to kill, lie and steal from non Jews. The text below is about the claim that Jews were allowed to kill nonjews (The same is said about Muslims today. It is claimed that Muslims are free to rape, and kill “kuffar”, i.e. non Muslims.)

The Jews were even using the blood of children in their food, The Nazis claimed. The ultimate “evidence” of Jewish aggressivity and criminality: human sacrifice.

The Nazi book “the Jew as a Criminal” is translated and can be read online.

“The frequent criminality of the Jew is as well known a fact as its peculiar inclination and aptitude for fraud, dirty enterprises, cheating in gambling, usury, sexual offenses of all kinds, pickpocketing, high treason, etc. These things shall find their confirmation here.  Beyond this, however, evidence is introduced that the role of Jewry incriminality does not limit itself to a more or less large participation, but rather is much more significant. In actually, the final threads of the criminal world come together in the hand of the Jew. The Jew is not only beneficiary of crime, he is also the leader and wire-puller of the criminal Underworld…”

The method of the book was simple: statistics. It was claimed that Jews were over-represented in criminal statistics.

“Up to the year 1929, of 348 international drug dealers, 98 were Jews, i.e., 28%… For the little Jew, the characteristic crime is pickpocketing. Here the Jewish element is decisive; it is his ‘profession’ before he has ‘arrived.’ [The English idiom for this would be ‘made it.’] The following numbers bear this out: In Berlin in 1931, 136 international pickpockets were arrested. Of these, not fewer than 106 were Jews — that is, 78%. In 1932, the number of arrested climbed to 163, of whom 134, or 82%, were Jews.”

That was not true as actual statistics from the 30s reveal. Jews were under-represented in criminal statistics. But that is not the main point. Even if there had been an over-representation if would still have been wring to blame all Jews and Jewishness becaise of that.

Chapter eight deals with sexual crimes:

“The Jew is sexually undisciplined and uses every opportunity to satisfy his sexual greed.”

Well, about the same as they say about Muslims today, right?!

Antisemitism is still a very big problem and the lie that Jews are criminals is still very widespread. But today the Muslims are blamed too, with the same racist logic the Nazis used against the Jews 80 to 90 years ago. 

 

Punishments such as stoning are imagined as only occurring among Muslims but as we’ve noted in past articles that just isn’t true. Stoning, cutting limbs, lashing etc. are carried out across the world by non-Muslims as well.

In many parts of the world, particularly parts of Africa hunting and killing witches is a recurrent issue. Danios noted in 2010 that some Christians take the Biblical command to kill witches literally.:

Yet, few Westerners realize that witch hunts are now an international problem…and it is not an area of concern limited to Muslim majority countries like Saudi Arabia.  Would it interest the Catholic apologist Robert Spencer to know that witch hunts are much more prevalent amongst Christians than Muslims?  Some Evangelicals continue to take the Bible quite literally, following its commandment: “Thou shalt not allow a sorceress to live” (Exodus, 22:18), and “sorcerers amongst you must be put to death” (Leviticus, 20:27).

Sadly, a 67 year-old woman in Ghana was recently stoned to death by a mob on the accusation that she was a witch. These stories receive little to no coverage in the West, as they don’t fit the neat bifurcation often propagated in media narratives. (h/t: Dawud Walid)

via. Modern Ghana

A 67-year-old woman has been stoned to death by the people of Tindongo in the Upper East region, after she was accused of being a witch, a claim the deceased denied vehemently.

A local reporter William Jalulah who spoke to host of Morning Starr on Starr 103.5FM Thursday stated that , was taken to the Pelungu Chief but the Chief allegedly told her accusers that she could not handle the matter since there wasn’t enough evidence to handle the matter.

The Pelungu was then handed over to the Tindongo Chief but before the Chief could sit on the matter a mob whisked the old lady and meted instant justice to her by stoning her to death.

According to William, people in the community allege that the old lady had been visiting them in their dreams at night and was the cause of several misfortunes in their life.

Superintendent Samuel Punobyin, the Bolgatanga Municipal Police Commander, with oversight responsibility for the Tongo confirmed the incident adding that the body had been taken to the morgue but has since been released to the relatives for burial.

The incident happened Monday, May 29, 2017, the same Captain Maxwell Mahama was murdered by the people of Denkyira West in the Central region.

Manchester. Another city added to the list of horrific attacks by individuals, usually men, who have been misguided into thinking their actions are somehow a salve for whatever torments them, or helpful to those suffering occupation and the terror of non-distinguishing “smart bombs” dropped in the tens of thousands on the homes of innocents. Also bewildering is the tenuous allegiance paid by attackers such as Salman Abedi to groups like ISIS and AlQaeda; whose bastardized modernist twisting of theology and law is no solution to grievances but only compounds and entrenches the multi-dimensional challenges and problems faced by Muslims. It takes God out of the center of din (way of life) and replaces it with jihad. When the hoped for victory is not achieved it often results in greater resentment, extremism and blind victimhood.

We have known that attacks of this kind do not end the vicious cycle of bloodletting but only feed it. The explosive growth industry of the field of “terror studies” and its ties to power, both governmental and non-governmental means that there is little incentive or effort to truly understand what causes “extremism” (aside from a handful of scholars and specialists) beyond the problematic radicalization models that lead to programs such as PREVENT and CVE.  Statistics highlighting that the nebulously defined category of so-called “Islamic terrorism” is less of a threat than dying in car accidents, or of an allergic reaction to peanuts is of no comfort, since Islamophobia is tied to existential and emotional concerns about the decline of Christianity, challenge to white supremacy and rise of minority groups, especially Muslim populations. Rational thinking doesn’t enter the equation.

This is not to say that imperialism cannot and should not be resisted but that the contemporary movements that are wreaking havoc are clearly not the way to respond to the challenge. Any resistance and liberation from the dominant paradigms however must be rooted not only in socio-economic terms but foremost in an authentic and spiritually grounded ethos.

Despite the hysteria and exploitation by the usual fear merchants: Katie Hopkins who tweeted for a “Final Solution,” the never-reconstructed EDL bigot Tommy Robinson claim that the mayor of Manchester is in cahoots with “Islamic radicals,” the laughable stupidity of  a UKIP politician whose brilliant response was to demand the return of the death penalty for suicide bombers, or Israeli PM Netanyahu’s shameless attempt to milk the tragedy by analogizing the Manchester attacker to Palestinian resistance, the overwhelming response of Britons and the City of Manchester has been to reject hate and the politics of division.

Take the message by Islamic scholar Abu Eesa from Manchester that has gone viral.

The comments are heartwarmingly refreshing in their solidarity and the expression of united grief for the victims. The message is clear we will not be divided, we will be stronger.

Also take Aarron Lambo’s viral video:

There’s many more such instances of togetherness and we hope that these attempts to divide us and subvert our democracy whether by terrorists and their Islamophobic dopplegangers will come to naught.

“They are for child marriages”. Who has not heard that myth about Islam and Muslims? But what about the USA? There are states in the USA that allow marriages of children aged 12,13 or 14, and has done so since the 1700s and 1800s. And guess what? It is mainly a “Christian” problem.

Most states in the USA prohibit child marriages, but not all, and there are “exceptions” in most states that allow minors to marry if a court okays it even if the minimum age is higher.

Source: Independent 

In Virginia 12 year-old’s were allowed to marry until last year when the minimum age was raised.

Between 2004 and 2013, 4,500 children under the age of 18 were married in the state, with more than 200 of them younger than 15. State authorities decided they had enough of this grossness and abolished laws that allowed parental and judicial consent for girls 12 to 13 to get married if they were pregnant.

In New Hamsphire the minimum age is 13:

It’s not often middle-schoolers get married in New Hampshire. But it’s still perfectly legal, after the Republican-led House killed a bill Thursday to raise the marriage age to 18. The rejection leaves intact a state law that lets girls get married as young as age 13 with parental consent and sign-off from a judge. Boys a year older can marry with the same approvals.

In North Carolina the minimum age is 14:

“If an unmarried female who is more than 14 years of age, but less than 16 years of age, is pregnant or has given birth to a child and the unmarried female and the putative father of the child, either born or unborn, agree to marry, or if an unmarried male who is more than 14 years of age, but less than 16 years of age, is the putative father of a child, either born or unborn, and the unmarried male and the mother of the child agree to marry, the register of deeds is authorized to issue to the parties a license to marry; and it shall be lawful for them to marry in accordance with the provisions of this Chapter,”

In New Jersey the minimum age is 18. But children can marry younger, with parental consent. Judges can even allow 13 year old’s to marry.

The minimum marriage age in New Jersey is 18. However, children ages 16 or 17 may wed with “parental consent” (with no process in place to ensure it’s not actually “parental coercion”), and children 15 or younger may wed with judicial approval (with no minimum age below which a judge may no longer approve a marriage, and with no instructions for judges not to approve marriages for couple at ages or with age differences that are considered statutory rape).

The situation

The last case, New Jersey, shows one important thing. There are exceptions to the laws in almost all states, meaning that if the law formally states that the minimum age is 18, the real minimum age might be below that age.

This is how it looks like if one disregards the exceptions.

Eleven other states — Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wisconsin—and the District of Columbia require parties to be at least age 16. Five states require parties to be at least age 15: Hawaii, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland and Utah. Three states require parties to be at least age 14: Alaska, New York and North Carolina. One state requires males to be at least age 14 and females to be at least age 13: New Hampshire. Case law in Massachusetts, but not statute, directs that males must be at least age 14 and females must be at least age 12.

The number of “child marriages” are not high. As PEW research showed the numbers are below 1%. Child marriages in the USA are mainly a problem in some Christian communities, as has been described in several articles in New York Times, Washington Post.

170,000 children were wed between 2000 and 2010 in the USA, in 38 of the 50 states where data was available.

Some people spread myths about the “Muslim threat” and claim that child marriages is an “imported” problem. The “Muslims” are as usual the ones to blame. IT IS NOT AN IMPORTED PROBLEM. The laws of the states are in some cases hundred years old or more and most cases has to do with non Muslims.

Read more: Is Child Marriages a Muslim problem?

Edit – 5/20

Well that was unexpected, to say the least.

In an historic announcement, President Trump asked his National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster to let the American people know that he is pledging allegiance to Islam and that he “hopes for a peaceful vision of Islam to dominate the world” ahead of a visit to Saudi Arabia.

It was so subtle you might have missed it.

It seems that Saudi King Salman, the Custodian of the Two Holy Places convinced Trump, after securing an over $300 billion dollars arms deal for the kingdom, that it was in the US’ best interests to embrace Islam.

Sources close to the White House say that Trump also thinks this will help to end violent attacks on the US by groups such as ISIS and AlQaeda, who could not be reached for comment as they are busy trying to figure out what to do with all the unemployed men they previously provided jobs for, and are once again jobless.

In celebration of the world historical event Trump will hold a male-only star-studded gala in Riyadh, the capital of Wahabbi Islam. Headlining the event will be country star Toby Keith who has forgone his trademark songs praising US bombs being dropped on innocent Muslim children and drinking cold beers for more passionate songs in praise of the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him).

Scenes of jubilation spread in front of the White House. Cheers of “USA!” were followed by “Allahu Akbars!”

*This piece is satire

It’s rare to see a not so cheesy, and or demeaning stand up routine from a Muslim comedian that is not defined simply by his Muslimness/Islamicness but crosses over without comprises to the dominant culture. I think he did good! What did you all think?

At least two German soldiers have been arrested for plotting to commit a false flag attack and blame it on Syrian refugees. The intense focus on so-called “Islamic terrorism” obscures the threats of white nationalists and neo-Nazis that pose a greater threat to Europe than fanatical Muslim political groups.

The Independent

A second soldier has been arrested for allegedly planning a “false flag” terror attack to be blamed on refugees in Germany amid fears of a wider neo-Nazi network within the army.

The plot was exposed with the arrest of a German lieutenant, Franco A, who was found to be posing as a Syrian refugee in order to carry out a shooting attack targeting left-wing politicians.

One of his friends at Illkirch-Graffenstaden barracks in France has now been detained for allegedly covering for the soldier’s absences as he periodically returned to Bavaria to continue the ruse.

Maximilian T, a 27-year-old German national, was also a member of Jägerbataillon 291 and was arrested on Tuesday after being questioned by military intelligence officers.

He had joined his friend on a trip to Vienna in January – supposedly for an officers’ ball – where Franco A stashed an unregistered gun to be used in the attack at the city’s main airport.

Maximilian T was also part of an online messaging group where he, Franco A and other members exchanged far-right posts, photos and audio files, Der Spiegel reported.

Continue Reading…

 

The Islamophobic strategy of targeting public school social studies and history textbooks that have sections on Islam by either having the books replaced with anti-Muslim histrionics or the courses removed all together was dealt a blow in Florida.

By Caroline Glenn, USA Today

MELBOURNE, Fla. — Ninth-graders in Brevard County will keep using a world history textbook, despite fierce debate over its chapter on Islam.

The Pearson textbook came under fire in 2013 and again last month, drawing the attention of the local chapters of ACT for America and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. However, the school board ultimately decided Tuesday night to keep the textbook as is.

Leading up to their decision, opponents argued that the chapter ignored the “true history” of Islam and painted Mohammed and the treatment of women in an overly favorable light.

…

“I think we all understand that the challenges to the specific faiths that are addressed in this book are not random challenges,” said Philip Stasik, president of the Space Coast Progressive Alliance. “This is an organized challenge against the Muslim community, and frankly it’s an insult to the Muslim community.”

Others said it scared them to see people who want to challenge “years of documented history” because of recent political discourse.

“I’m pretty offended by and really afraid of people who are going out of their way to make me feel unequal,” said Alyssa Ardhya, a freshman at Satellite High School. “They want to recreate the truth.”

It’s amazing how low Islamophobes will go in their Crusade against Islam and Muslims. Like all fanatic extremists they will cut off their nose to spite their face: i.e. purposefully remain ignorant to knowledge and truth. Indeed, they make-up their own “truth.”

Previous attacks on the Islam sections of history books have occurred in Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas. ACT! For America is behind a lot of the lobbying efforts and mobilization against the history textbooks. As RightWingWatch has documented, the basis of the strategy was detailed in a 200-page “national textbook study” called “Education or Indoctrination?”

New York Daily News

A heavily intoxicated Donald Trump supporter, who verbally attacked an innocent Muslim family, turned a fun beach day into a nightmare.

Alexander Jennes Downing, 35, was arrested May 3 and taken into custody by the South Padre Island Police for the reported public intoxication incident, which involved Downing shouting slurs and threats to a family nearby.

Downing, a Connecticut native, also made inappropriate gestures toward the group, who had children in their presence at the Texas beach.

A member of the victimized family, Noria Alward, recently uploaded the fiery footage to Youtube, which has since gone viral.

Downing can be hearing in the clip shouting out, “You’re a f—ing Muslim, motherf—er … You will never ever, ever, stop me, my Christianity, from rising above your Sharia law. Your Sharia law don’t mean s–t to me.”

“When he called it his country … It is my country too,” Ahmed told the news site.

“America is my country whether he likes it or not.”

Noria concluded in the YouTube post that the group would not be making future plans to visit the same resort.

“Overall we enjoyed the lovely island and we will definitely go back to South Padre again, we surely will never go back to Pearl South Padre hotel, Texas again,” she said.

There is an all white militia in Georgia calling itself the Georgia Security Forces (GSF) which is likely another iteration of the KKK.  We might need someone like General Sherman to take care of group’s like this if their racism and hatred gets out of hand.

Aljazeera has the scoop.:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

There are several “ex muslims”, that hate Islam.  They were radical Islamists and filled with hate as Muslims, today as “ex Muslims” they claim that all Muslims are just as filled with hate and radical as they once where.
Today she claims that “all Muslims” are as filled with hate as she once was. But only 7 percent of the Muslims worldwide believed that the attacks against USA 2001 was justified, and only a fragment of those cheered when the twin towers collapsed.

• The overwhelming majority of Muslims – 93 percent – condemned the Sep 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, and most said the biggest obstacle to better relations with the West was the latter’s lack of respect for Islam.

Mona Walter claims that all Muslims are like she was. But she was so extreme that most Muslims would have rebuked or condemned her. She belonged to the 7%, more probably the 1-2% or the most extreme radical islamists.

Hirsi Ali

Another such famous exmuslim, that has retained her extremist view of Islam, is Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

In 2014 she gave a speech at Yale, Great Britain.  She explained that she had a teacher in Kenya had radical ideas about Islam that affected her very much. She became indoctrinated with his ideas about Jihad, hate against Christianity, clothes, and that it was a good “to destroy the Jews” and “hang gays”.

He preached like all the others, incessantly about hell. … Jihad – we were to wage Jihad for the sake of Islam. Martyrdom, the best thing to ever happen to us was to die while fighting for Allah. We were to strive for the establishment of Sharia law in our society and beyond … be suspicious of Christians if they refused to convert to Islam … and aspire to destroy the Jews, all Jews, not only the ones in Israel. The preacher teacher would rant against gays, they were to be hanged, and women were to know their place … their place was at home (and they were to) sacrifice everything, even life and the lives of their children for the sake of Allah. … We were supposed to cover ourselves from head to toe when running errands outside the home.

This process of indoctrination that I describe, that affected me, I considered myself once a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, it’s this the process of indoctrination that I have seen from up close and personal that makes my experience relevant. It’s this process of indoctrination that is overlooked. We focus on the Jihad, the violence, but we ignore the Dahoa, we ignore the years and years and years of preaching.

She no doubt had a weird childhood and youth.

In Kenya, she was beaten so severely by her Qur’an teacher that he fractured her skull. At Qur’an school, Hirsi Ali remembers a classmate who was bullied mercilessly for being a girl with an intact clitoris. … Hirsi Ali learned from her mother that Jews were her darkest enemy. In songs, children’s textbooks, and newspaper articles, Jews were routinely called pigs, donkeys, rats, and cockroaches. “Our religious tutors and the preachers in our mosques set aside extra time to pray for the destruction of Jews,” Hirsi Ali writes.

It is understandable that Hirsi Ali fled from that environment of hate. Unfortunately she still believes that all Muslims are as insane as those few that “affected” her in her youth.

There is no doubt a lot of mutual hatred between Jews and Muslims in the Middle East and the surrounding parts of the world. PEW polls and reports that was published some years ago tell us that only 9% of Israeli Jews were positive to Muslims. In the nations bordering to Israel only 1 to 6% of the Muslims were positive to Jews. In Palestine 1%, The negativity ratings are high. Above 90% view Jews in a very unfavourable way in large parts of the Middle East.

But prejudices and hatred is not the same as wanting to murder lots of innocent Jews. I have seen no polls about Muslim attitudes to killing Jews  because they are Jews but would imagine that very few share that idea, in Europe amd the USA hardly none. Homophobia is not uncommon and in some parts of the world homosexuality is punishable by death, in some Muslim nations too. But Muslims in the western world do not share that view.

The choice

This phenomena is one that is not limited to “exmuslims”. There are a number of “ex Jews” too that are gaining fame in parts of the world and that believes that all Jews are evil. One such is Israel Shamir, that is one of the most famous antisemites in Russia today. His worldview is exactly the same as Hirsi Alis, and because of that he claims that all Jews are like he once was.

As a Muslim you face the same choice as a Jew or a Christian: to “love your neighbour” or hate him or her. To let the things that happen in the Middle East affect your heart and mind so you hate, or to love, despite of power politics and wrongdoings of a corrupt elite.

As an “ex Muslim”, or “Ex Jew” or “ex Christian” you face the same choice. Either you describe the religion you once belonged to in the worst possible way, or you admit that not all are insane and radical. As an ex Muslim that once were filled with hate, you face the choice to describe all Muslims as just as radical as you once where, or to be more honest and show that not all would have agreed with the hate you once bore in your heart.

Unfortunately, too many “ex Muslims” claim that the view of Islam they once bore is the one all Muslims share: thus claiming that all of Islam and all Muslims are evil.

 

 

The meme that Muslims, especially Western Muslims, whether they be in New York or London, celebrate terror attacks is a persistent trope used over and over again by Islamophobes. Christian missionary David Wood uses it, President Donald Trump uses it and now the leader of a small anti-Muslim party named Paul Golding has tweeted a video he claims shows “‘moderate’ Muslims celebrating the Paris terror attack in London.”:

Sadly for Golding, as MEND Community has shown, the video is actually Pakistani cricket fans celebrating their team’s victory in the 2009 World Cup.

It’s actually Pakistani cricket fans celebrating World Cup win… in 2009.

Highly irresponsible #FakeNews from a VERIFIED account. pic.twitter.com/IzA5D2I3in

— MEND Community (@mendcommunity) April 21, 2017

The tweet has been deleted though no correction/apology has been posted by Golding or Britain First.

For centuries Jews have been persecuted and murdered because that Jews ritually murder children and eat them directly or use their blood in the baking of Passover matzah (unleavened bread). Today such myths spread about Muslims too: the myth that Islam allows cannibalism.

When doing comparative studies of antisemitism and islamophobia one can easily see the similarities between the two. The myths, slanders, rumours, and racist methods are almost identical but is directed against two different groups, Muslims or Jews.

One such myth that is almos identical is the “blood libel myth”. Thisantisemitic version of the myth looks like this:

“The “blood libel” refers to a centuries-old false allegation that Jews murder Christians – especially Christian children – to use their blood for ritual purposes, such as an ingredient in the baking of Passover matzah (unleavened bread). It is also sometimes called the “ritual murder charge”… The blood libel spread throughout the Christian world in the Middle Ages. When a Christian child went missing, it was not uncommon for local Jews to be blamed. Even when there was no evidence that any Jew had anything to do with the missing child, Jews were tortured until they confessed to heinous crimes.”

Today these myths are still heard all over the world about Jews. But there is an islamophobic version of the myth too.

Muslim blood libel myth

“Muslims eat Christians”. That kind of myth was spread during the crusades  in the Middle Ages.  Today it is sometimes still claimed that “Islam allows cannibalism”.

I will spare the readers the details of the Myth. If you want to  study what racists claim about Islam and cannibalism you can easily find articles from Jihadwatch and Pamela Geller on the subject by using Google.

The most common version of this myth claims that the Al-Azhar University in Egypt has published lots of books on this subject. This information popped up on the internet in 2009-2010, after President Obama had visited the university. In 2012-2013 an arabic TV-show of some kind claimed that Al-Azhar teaches that cannibalism is “ok”. Walid Shoebat, a Christian islamophobe, picked up this alleged TV-show and wrote a series of articles about it. Like this one:

“In the future, the Egyptian Islamists will not only be conducting systematic violence, but cannibalism against Christians and moderates.

In a recent video interview, one Egyptian scholar exposed the high school curriculum coming from Al-Azhar university, the most reputable of all Islamic schools, showing that it condoned cannibalizing non-Muslims:

‘We allowed the eating of the flesh of dead humans… under necessary conditions. It [dead human flesh] must not be cooked or grilled to avoid Haram (wrongdoing) …and he can kill a murtadd (apostate) and eat him.’

The interviewer commented:

‘The book that is being taught to general high-school students mentions that those who don’t pray can be grilled & then eaten’.”

From this TV-interview, that Shoebat popularized, stems most versions of the modern Muslim blood-libel myth. But currently the myth is mixed with similar allegations about ISIS. That “Muslims allow cannibalism” and the proof for that is that ISIS allow cannibalism (and sometimes it is claimed that the Al Azhar university authorized ISIS to eat its enemies).

Perhaps such a book exist, I dont know. The myth is nevertheless a typical racist myth. One or two alleged books allegedly published by one egyptian university somehow gives the “proof” that all Muslims, and all of Islam, allows cannibalism.

As for Shoebat himself he does not seem to be a cannibal, he prefers to nuke people.

 

By Nathaniel Mathews Originally published on Sapelo Square

A number of years ago I gave a lecture on Swahili coast history to a group of educators and students on Chicago’s South Side. During the Q&A period one older gentleman asked me why I didn’t say more about Muslim-led slavery of Africans in the Indian Ocean. I responded somewhat inadequately that slavery in the Indian Ocean wasn’t a religious issue but an economic one. The gentleman wasn’t satisfied, explaining that he was disappointed in Louis Farrakhan’s silence on the issue and testifying to the continuing presence of slavery in African Muslim countries like Mauritania to this day, explaining that slavery was justified by sharia.

The man in question was not a conservative Christian, nor part of Islamophobia Inc. but rather part of a generation of Afrocentric black nationalists in the intellectual tradition of John Henrik Clarke. He was condemning the practice of slavery globally from his commitment to Afrocentrism and part of the broader tradition of black nationalist liberation politics in in the United States. He wondered why Muslims were seemingly behind in that fight or ambivalent to the practice of enslavement. In spite of my historical understanding of slavery and the slave trade as practices that many non-Muslim African as well as Muslim African societies often willingly engaged in, his words forced me to reckon more seriously with how Islamic law treats the abolition of slavery. I am especially interested in this issue as someone trained as a historian of East Africa, where the abolitionist movement predated and then became part of the first wave of European colonization of Africa, post 1885. My position is that the Islamic tradition has already developed an abolitionist ethos and a strong commitment to liberation, out of a set of social and political struggles, including resistance to European colonialism, that took place in the historical encounters between Islam, Africa and the West in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Afrocentrists often point to the Quran and Hadith’s sanction of slavery. It is true that Islam accepted slavery as a part of Arabian society, but there is no evidence the tradition actively encouraged the taking of slaves. If one wishes to speak of a particular ‘trajectory’ of Islamic interpretation based on the Qur’an and Sunnah, it is a trajectory of manumission, not abolition.1 The Prophet Muhammad assumed that if manumission continued to regularly occur, then slavery could continue to exist without being a trans-generational status, and would eventually die out.

The Prophet Muhammad challenged the practice of slavery in Arabian society by compelling the powerful to care for and protect the less powerful.2 If masters and slaves could share some basic moral assumptions, powerful masters would feel a social obligation to protect and show kindness to their slaves. In Islam this is exemplified by a hadith enjoining the believer to treat their slaves as they would treat their own children.3 Slaves in Islam would (ideally) function more like kin and less like a separate caste of sub-humans.4 Their offspring, again ideally, would be free to assume their place alongside the freeborn. None of these reforms radically challenged the ‘natural’ reality of slavery itself.5

Why didn’t Muslims abolish slavery earlier? This is a valid question and it is worth it for Muslims to reflect very hard and critically about, especially if one is seriously committed to practicing the tradition. But when Afrocentrists ask Muslims why Islam did not abolish slavery, there is a hidden assumption that non-Muslim African societies had already abolished the practice. But in fact many powerful non-Muslim African societies depended on slavery for their wealth and resented European imposed abolition for that reason, for instance, the Asante empire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Enslaved Swahili men in Stone Town, Zanzibar, c. 1890 (via BBC News)

Abolition as an ethical dilemma only occurs because we inhabit a very different time from the early Muslims, as well as most pre-colonial African societies. We often forget that for Jesus, Muhammad and other moral teachers of the past, the master-slave relationship was both a fact of life and a metaphor of our relationship with the Divine.6 The more relevant question then, is not ‘why didn’t Muslims abolish slavery?’, but ‘what makes our time different from the time of the early Muslims?’

One possible answer to that question is that we now live in a global society where we take the freedom of an individual as an irrevocable human right. Although this ideal is often traced to Western origins, it is important to note that it has other global, non-Western genealogies that are both Muslim and African. Haitian revolutionaries, among whom were African Muslims, were first among those insisting on this freedom in their struggle to end slavery in the late 1700s. At around the same time, the West African Muslim ruler Abdul Kader Kane sought to abolish the slave trade in his realm, in order to protect his subjects from the French-controlled slave trade at Saint Louis.7

Formerly enslaved Muslims also helped to reshape community perceptions of slavery.  In East Africa especially, the abolition of slavery coincided with the new popularity of Sufi brotherhoods as tools for the mass propagation of Islam. Sufism became the language by which formerly servile people appropriated the message of Islam to undermine the ijma around the social status of slaves and ex-slaves. In Lamu, Kenya, the ‘Alawi shaykh Habib Saleh angered the town’s former slaveholding elite by teaching ex-slaves. In Bagamoyo, Tanzania, an ex-slave from the Congo rose to become a Sufi shaykh and one of the most knowledgeable scholars of the region; he faced strong opposition from former slave owners.8  The first five decades of the twentieth century in Africa revealed Muslims reshaping the consensus on slavery. This process of reshaping ijma was not only an elite scholarly one; it included formerly enslaved Muslims, who contested their rights within the idioms of Islam, molding Islamic cultural repertoires to critique the exclusionary social practices of Muslim elites.

Traditions, Islam included, are not closed caskets but open conversations and debates often characterized by shifting notions of what is permissible. Slavery is one such shifting notion. There is nothing in the Islamic tradition mandating slavery. Thus, the overwhelming majority of Muslims today find slavery distasteful and have no desire to practice it. They have internalized a desire not to own people that is very modern. This is a direct result of the most oppressed and vulnerable elements of human global society forcing the world to accept a more robust and inclusive concept of individual freedom.  Concepts of abolition and freedom are the product of centuries of struggle by enslaved Africans and others to radicalize and decolonize the values of the societies they found themselves forcibly dragged into. They constitute a valuable tool that a range of activists today, from the Rabaa Square protests in Egypt to the garment worker strikes in Bangladesh to Black Lives Matter activists in the US, use to launch more radical critiques of global inequality, exploitation, and other conditions analogous to slavery.

Captured Africans in German East Africa (modern-day Tanzania), c. 1890 (via BBC News)

The Prophet Muhammad’s attempt to protect the enslaved and to grant them protections and rights, without abolishing slavery, was not a moral failing, but the advancement to the limits of what it was possible to envision within his era. If we do not acknowledge this, we will continue to reproduce two stale arguments of past Muslim apologists: that abolition is a Western concept that fetishizes consent and freedom, or that the Prophet Muhammad was an abolitionist. Neither of these are tenable positions, and there are severe moral costs to holding them, that compromise the moral compass of Muslims and leave serious and inquisitive outsiders with a suspicion that Muslims are more interested in theological apologetics than an honest reckoning with history. For instance, it is but a short step from the saying abolition is a Western concept to making the argument, like the late Islamist philosopher Abu Ala Mawdudi,  that we need to retain slavery as a mark of Muslim moral independence from the West.9 And there is simply no evidence from our tradition that the Prophet Muhammad ever contemplated abolishing slavery.

My argument is distinct from both of these extremes. I have argued that Western notions of abolitionist freedom have already fused with Islamic values, and that it is dangerous to try to extract one from the other. There are a number of positive benefits from embracing this position. For one thing, it provides Muslims with a powerful language not only to challenge slavery, but many other forms of similar domination and exploitation that go by different names. It seems to me that Muslims who are using this fusion of moral horizons to critique both Muslim and Western complacency with regards to forms of oppression analogous to slavery are engaged in an urgently necessary and positive reinvigoration of the Islamic tradition.

NOTES:

1  Trajectory hermeneutics originated with Christian theologian William Webb. For more on their use, see his 2001 book, Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis.

2 Jonathan Glassman. “The Bondsman’s New Clothes: The Contradictory Consciousness of Slave Resistance on the Swahili Coast” Journal of African History 32(2): 1991, 277-312.

3 Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī º30; Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim º1661

4 The walāʾ system then, whatever its faults, was a social compact between master and slave, and thus often a tool of integration of the latter. See Ulrike Mitter. “Unconditional Manumission of Slaves in Early Islamic Law: A Hadith Analysis.” In The Formation of Islamic Law (ed. Wael Hallaq). New York: Routledge, 2008.

5 Unlike the status of ex-slaves even many postbellum Western societies, the formerly enslaved in the Islamic world could raise their status considerably. But that did not erase an existing hierarchy placing the enslaved at or near the bottom of society.

6 Luke 12:43-48; Qur’ān (Sūra az-Zumar) 39:36. The Apostle Paul’s advice to the runaway slave Onesimus in the Book of Philemon is filled with admonishments about a new community of belief between slaves and masters that does not upend the social hierarchy but nevertheless creates a sense of moral obligation between the two.

7 For the Haitian revolutionaries and their creation (not merely co-optation of) Enlightenment values, see Laurent Dubois, “Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic” Social History 31(1): Feb 2006, 1-14. For the abolitionists, see Adam Hochschild. Bury The Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free An Empire’s Slaves. London: Mariner Books, 2006. For Abdul Kader Kane and the abolition of slavery in Futa Toro, see Rudolph Ware, The Walking Quran, Chapter 3.

8 For Habib Saleh, see Patricia Romero. “‘Where Have All the Slaves Gone?’ Emancipation and Post – Emancipation in Lamu, Kenya.” The Journal of African History 27 (3): 1986, 497-512. For Shaykh Ramiya, see August Nimtz Jr. Islam and Politics in East Africa. The Sufi Order in Tanzania. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980, 45.

9 Abu Ala Mawdudi was unabashed about this stance. See W.G. Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery, 188.

Also read: Responding to “Hoteps”: Three Points On “Islamic” Slavery

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The Australian imam Shaikh M. Tawhidi is becoming more and more an international celebrity. Some weeks ago he claimed that he was persecuted by “the Australian Muslims” and went into hiding. That made him famous outside Australia. The self proclaimed “Muslim reformist” Ayaan Hirsi Ali has voiced his support of the “imam“.  He is the latest darling of Jihadwatch and Pamela Geller. One Nation, the political party that wants to kick out all “disobedient Muslims” from Australia, loves him. He is a strange imam. Just look at this:

A strange imam indeed. He publicly states that islam is a dangerous religion. He wants to close all islamic schools and believe that no more mosques should be built in Australia. He claims that Muslims in Australia are not protesting against ISIS. He believes that all of Palestine belongs to Israel. And he claims that his father would not have moved to Australia if he had known that so many Muslims would live there in the future.

‘My father wouldn’t have moved from Iran to Australia if he’d known there’d be so many Muslims here’.

He makes an interesting slip of the tongue while speaking on the video above. He says that he does not understand “why Muslims believe” that they come to heaven by blowing themselves up, but corrects himself and say “well radical Muslims”. Interesting slip of the tongue. By “accident” he claims that all Muslims are terrorists.

The slip of the tongue is understandable if you know that Shaikh M. Tawhidi supports a racist political party that hate Muslims.  Here below is one picture he posted on social media recently, when he made offerings of roses to  One Nation posters. One Nation is a radical rightwing party in Australia that hates Muslims.

He supports One Nation and apparently they like him, or what should we say about the frequent posts the party representative in South Australia praising the imam?

Besides this, he apparently is a supporter of a Korean cult:

With his gold-trimmed white robes and pointed turban, the man who calls himself both an Imam and Sheikh cuts an elegant figure as a minder guides him out of the car, past more jubilant Koreans and television cameras, and into the surreal surrounds of an Olympic stadium filled to capacity, where tens of thousands of seated spectators holding coloured cards form a gargantuan human LCD screen.

Here he is ushered to pose for photographs with other similarly well turned-out men of faith, all of whom have been flown in from religious communities across the globe to take part in the World Alliance of Religions Peace (WARP) summit.

But the cheer squads are not really here for Tawhidi, and this is not really a peace conference. These ecstatic young Koreans are members of an allegedly dangerous religious cult taking part in a highly regimented North Korean-style stadium extravaganza to pay tribute to their controversial leader, Lee Man Hee.

Well I can agree with one thing the imam says: we certainly need to scrutinize some of the imams in Australia. Lets begin with the imam Shaikh M. Tawhidi! Who funds him? And why? 

This is the largest bomb ever dropped in the world after the two nuclear bombs that were dropped on Japan. In the US there have been celebrations and joy over the attack, with many describing it as “what freedom looks like” and praising the “red, white and blue.”

Fox host: Dropping MOAB is “what freedom looks like, that’s the red, white, and blue.”
Geraldo: It’s one of my favorite things to watch. pic.twitter.com/E5X2lmTnSE

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) April 14, 2017

Fox News has assigned host Tucker Carlson to subtly promote the right-wing meme that “cultural Marxists” in public schools are indoctrinating American kids into Islam. Guest contributor, Jonas Stubbings recently wrote about the origins of the myth:

Mawyer’s ludicrous claims of a Department of Education sponsored “indoctrination program” being met with nods from a gormless Tucker Carlson was an insult to journalism. A plastic spoon could scrape the surface of Mawyer’s alarmist claims which disingenuously conflate teaching ABOUT Islam with a government sponsored ‘creeping Sharia’  project to convert non-Muslim children.

Following up on his interview of the Christian Action Network’s (CAN) Michael Mawyer’s, Carlson interviewed two gullible New Jersey mothers who have swallowed the propaganda myth.

This is the challenge facing U.S. educators. And as if that weren’t bad enough, among this happily ignorant population are some tin foil hats who actually believe their children are being indoctrinated into Islam, by our public schools. And Fox News is happy to put them on air, completely uncontested.

Two mothers from the New Jersey suburb of Chatham, Libby Hilsenrath and Nancy Gayer, recently went on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show to complain that a simple cartoon that teaches about Islam is indoctrinating their 7th graders, in a story feverishly embraced by conservative media. …

Other conservative outlets also ran wild with it, falsely claiming that Christianity is banned from being taught in Chatham schools. Nonsense. State law requires all major world religions to be taught by the eighth grade, from Christianity to Sikhism, as teaching staff later explained exhaustively at a packed school board meeting.

The war on educating American kids on the basics of world religions is not new. Islamophobes have been at war against books for some time now. There is a Conservative network including Brigitte Gabriel‘s (who recently met with the Trump administration), ACT For America, that seeks to Christianize the US, part of that is demonizing Islam and Muslims. The strategy with schools is to undue social studies requirements and challenge history, in the hopes of producing a hate-mongering Islamophobic populace among a youth demographic that is trending to heavily favor diversity and multi-culturalism.