By Nasser Karimi

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran on Tuesday hanged an Iranian convicted of spying for the country’s archenemy Israel, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Ali Akbar Siadati had been accused of providing Israel with classified information on Iran’s military capabilities, including details about military maneuvers, bases, operational jet fighters, military flights, air crashes and missiles, IRNA reported.

Separately, another Iranian was hanged Tuesday for membership in an exile opposition movement, IRNA reported.

Over the past decade, Iran has stepped up its domestic military production, including missiles capable of reaching Israel and beyond — aiming, Tehran says, to defend the country from Israel and the U.S. amid Iranian concern they might strike its nuclear facilities.

According to IRNA, Siadati confessed to spying for Israel starting in 2004 in return for $60,000, as well as an additional $7,000 each time he met with Israeli handlers. IRNA said he met up with Israeli intelligence agents during “foreign trade” trips to Turkey, Thailand and the Netherlands and that he transferred data through a digital camera, transmitters and laptop.
IRNA reported that Siadati was arrested in 2008 while planning to flee Iran. There were no details on whether Siadati was a government employee or how he obtained the classified information.
There was no immediate comment on the execution from officials in Israel.

IRNA said Siadati was hanged in Tehran’s Evin prison. Earlier in the week, Iran’s judiciary announced that a spy for Israel would be executed soon after an appeals court confirmed the man’s death sentence. It said the trial was held in the presence of his lawyer.

Espionage is punishable by death under Iranian law. Iran and Israel have been enemies since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, with Tehran periodically announcing arrests of people suspected of spying for Israel.

In 2008, Iran executed Ali Ashtari, an electronics salesman who was convicted of relaying information on Iran’s nuclear program and other sensitive data to Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
And in 2000, a court convicted 10 Iranian Jews of spying for Israel in a closed-door trial and sentenced them to prison terms ranging from four to 13 years. All were released before serving out their full sentences after international pressure.

Iran faces increased pressure from the West over its controversial nuclear program that Israel, the United States and others contend is intended for nuclear weapons making. Tehran denies the charge, insisting the program is for peaceful purposes only, such as generating power.

IRNA also reported that another Iranian, identified as Ali Sarami, was hanged on Tuesday in Evin after being convicted of membership in an exiled opposition group, the Mujahedeen-e Khalq Organization. It said he had been arrested several times since 1982 for membership in the group but had continued his activities each time. He was detained in 2007 for the last time and was sentenced to death, IRNA reported.

MEK in a statement Tuesday claimed Sarami’s wife and daughter as well as two other supporters were arrested while protesting outside Evin prison after his execution. It said Sarami, 63, has spent a total 24 years in prison from various incarcerations under the shah and clerical rule. Though arrested in 2007, his death sentence came after mass opposition protests that were held in December 2009, the group said.

The MEK said that before his arrest, Sarami visited a son who is staying at Camp Ashraf, an MEK base in neighboring Iraq. Iranian authorities have arrested other people in the past in part for visiting relatives in the camp. The London-based rights group Amnesty International reported in August that in addition to Sarami, six others in Iranian prisons are facing execution after being sentenced to death for MEK links.

The MEK is a bitter opponent of Iran’s ruling clerics. It was founded in the 1960s and opposed the rule of the U.S.-backed shah, but then after his fall in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, it carried out attacks against the cleric-led government that came to power. MEK and its affiliates were deemed foreign terrorist organizations by the U.S. State Department in 1997.

Associated Press correspondent Lee Keath in Cairo contributed to this report.

Guardian UK

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PressTV

Turkish parliamentarians are discussing a report revealing that the United States has deployed 90 nuclear bombs at Turkey’s Incirlik Air Force base, a report says.

The report, called the “US nuclear weapons in Europe,” indicates that Washington currently has 90 nuclear bombs of the “B 61” variety in Turkey, all on the Incirlik Air Force base, Turkey’s Hurriyet newspaper reported on its website on Friday.

The account has been prepared by the US National Resources Defense Council and is based on figures provided last February by the US Air Force.

It says 50 of the B-61 bombs are ready to be loaded onto American bomber planes while the remaining 40 will be loaded onto Turkish planes.

According to the daily, Turkish MP Shukru Elekdag has questioned reasons behind keeping the bombs on Turkish soil even decades after the end of the Cold War.

Elekdag has also noted that Turkey’s consent to the deployment of the US nuclear bombs at Incirlik is an act which ‘could not be easily explained to its Muslim and Arab neighbors.’

Press reports have established that US currently has more than 100 nuclear bombs positioned in bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.

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By Geofrey Cook, MMNS

An Indian policeman walks under snow-covered trees during the winter season’s first snowfall in Srinagar December 30, 2010. REUTERS/Danish Ismail

Santa Rosa–Today, your writer is composing the third part of this article on the South Asian Muslim zone in this good-size city about fifty miles north of San Francisco and Oakland.  The development between San Raphael (just above the Golden Gate) and this metropolis is tremendous.  The farmland through Marin (County) and the Sonoma Valley will one day be as urbanized as Silicon Valley with the same high-tech industries.

My subject, of course, is not about the Northern San Francisco Bay Area, but the human rights situation in the disputed occupied terrain of Kashmir. 

Your essayist takes most of his information from the comments of Vikram Batra, a lawyer based in New Delhi and a human rights investigator from Amnesty International for India, who led a two-man team to the Vale to determine the human rights conditions there.  Although he is of Hindu heritage, the Delegation’s report became quite controversial in Hindustan itself because it was quite damning to the State’s legal system and the brutality of its border militia and the Federal military treatment of dissenters and or / non-combatants.

Kashmiri citizens have more in common with Pakistan, whose official position is that Kashmir’s future political composition should be determined by the Kashmiris themselves and the Islamic world in general than the (majority) Hindu Bharat.

Most dramatically have been the mysterious disappearances of citizens.  (From your researcher’s studies, only small percentages of those incidents have been instituted by violent jihadists, but the majority has been proven to be by perpetrators from New Delhi’s military and paramilitary forces.)

AI (Amnesty Internal) became critical of the persecution against Muslims within this geographical sector in 2000.  The persons behind this violence committed the crimes with impunity. 

The removal of the military is the fundamental demand of the Islamic majority of “Indian-” occupied Kashmir’s civil society.  Batra stated that it is beyond a doubt that gross human rights have occurred within Srinagar’s realm.  Most NGOs are regional, (and are doing a tolerable job) although the Red Cross established an international presence there during the last decade. 

It was difficult to enter the territory, but the delegation was able to do so without a visa.  They received resistance by Islamic inhabitants to relay the stories of atrocities from the Kashmiris themselves because the two-person mission was Indian.   Another minus was that they could only spend a week there in the districts in and around the Vale. They concluded that most of the Muslims there would accept a reduction of Indian troops and the Islamic militant irregulars as the foundation for any future negotiations between the Islamic natives and the Indians. 

The process of detention within the district subverted the principles of Indian law.  An individual can be held without trial for two years under a legal principle that is referred to as the “Security of the State,” but under this dictum the prisoner has the right to appeal to the High Court.   This process takes about a month to prepare; then, Mr. Batra, Esq. estimates it will almost assuredly be procured under Constitutional bases within five months after the initial filing.  Therefore, the local State authorities are assured six months of imprisonment.  As the detainee walks out of incarceration, he is arrested again on another trumped up charge.  The process can proceed for decades.  Thus, the indigenous Muslims leaders are perpetually imprisoned by the regional prefecture of the Center.  There are at least 725 persons who are confined at any one time.   This amounts to one-sixth of J & K’s penal population who, in turn, will never have the right to trial as long as the current regime remains in ascendancy.   

Decisions on the Indian peripheries (which includes J & K – Jammu and Kashmir) fundamentally are made by the military and /or the infamous factious Indian bureaucracy on the local level.

The methods of repressing the rebellion through what may be described as “Extraordinary Law” have not succeeded.  To quite the contrary, it has produced sympathy for those who practice public disobedience, and even for the extremists themselves.

If your columnist may have the privilege of the last word, a solution on the Kashmir quandary, and, further, on the Indo-Pakistani nuclear stand-off can only be achieved if New Delhi will lighten its stand on the the Simla Agreement.   This “Accord” forced upon Pakistan after the 1971 War states that all bi-lateral issues between Islamabad and New Delhi must be resolved bi-laterally.  Firstly, shuttle diplomacy — by neutral trusted external governmental participant(s) — that are acceptable to the regional State and sub-national actors  be instituted as soon as possible to avoid a nuclear conflagration, furthermore, in consideration of Srinagar’s populace and situation, the Kashmiris themselves must be a key participant in any discussions. 

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By Parvez Hoodboy

My green passport requires standing in a separate immigration line once my plane lands at Boston’s Logan airport. The ‘special attention’ from Homeland Security, although polite, adds an extra two to three hours. I belong to the fortunate few who can get a visa, but I am still annoyed. Having travelled to the US frequently for forty years, I now find a country that once warmly welcomed Pakistanis to be strangely cold. The reason is clear.

Foreigners carrying strong negative feelings — or perhaps harmful intentions — are unlikely to find enthusiastic hosts. I know that the man who tried to bomb Times Square, Faisal Shahzad, a graduate of the University of Bridgeport, is my compatriot. So is Aafia Siddiqui, our new-found dukhtur-e-millat (daughter of the nation). Another Pakistani, Farooque Ahmed, with a degree from the College of Staten Island, made headline news in November 2010 after his abortive attempt to blow up DC Metro trains.

If such violent individuals were rarities, their nationality would matter little. But their actions receive little or no criticism in a country consumed by bitter anti-Americanism, which now exceeds its anti-Indianism.

Example: after the Faisal Shahzad news broke in early May 2010, TV channels in Pakistan switched to denial mode. Popular anchors freely alleged conspiracies against Islam and Pakistan. None revisited their claims after Shahzad proudly pleaded guilty in June. Calling himself a “Muslim soldier”, he read a prepared statement: “It’s a war … I’m going to plead guilty a hundred times over”.
Psychologists say that even hard facts can be denied when people subscribe to a radically different vision of the world. A glimpse of the current Pakistani weltanschauung — the mental makeup which selects and filters facts before they reach the conscious brain — can be had through the lives of the three young US-educated Pakistanis mentioned above.

Idealistic in their own way, they fought for a cause they believed was just. Influenced by an ambiance that puts America as the source of the world’s grief, they bravely sacrificed their jobs and careers. Having inhabited some part of their universe, I can understand something of what they went through.

Like Aafia Siddiqui — now al Qaeda’s poster girl — I, too, was a student at MIT. And, like her, I was furious at America. In the late 1960s, American B-52s were flattening Hanoi and Haiphong, while napalm and Agent Orange were destroying Vietnam’s people and jungles. When Nixon ordered the Christmas bombings of 1972, I wept. How could one live in America and not fight it? But instead of wanting to bomb Harvard Square, I chose to return to Pakistan — for good.

Reason and observation slowly changed me. Cruelty to the weak is not an American monopoly; wars and brutal conquests are as old as history. The US cannot be forgiven for the Vietnam and Iraq wars, among others. But should India be forgiven for killing Kashmiris, West Pakistan for the East Pakistan massacres, Turkey for the Armenian genocide, or Japan for the Rape of Nanking? Countless states have blood on their hands. But retribution would surely make the world an inferno.

If Pakistani-Americans wish to feel welcome in the country they have chosen to live in, then, they must judge the West and Pakistan using exactly the same criteria, and expose three popular falsehoods.

First, it is a lie that American Muslims are victims of extreme religious prejudice. Certainly, no country is free of religious discrimination. But, the secular West is infinitely less discriminatory than any Muslim country. How many churches are there in Saudi Arabia? Yet Muslims have built hundreds of new mosques in America — with Saudi money — and many after 9/11. New churches or temples are impossible in Pakistan; even old ones are burned down by rampaging mobs.

In America, Muslims successfully use the legal system to seek damages if there is discrimination in matters of employment, housing, or access to public facilities. But in Pakistan, if you are a Christian, Hindu, or Ahmadi, you simply accept your fate.

Second, it is a lie that US Muslims are physically endangered. In fact, Muslims are far safer in the US than in Pakistan. Does one see Kalashnikov-toting guards during Friday prayers outside a mosque in the West? Yet if you are a Barelvi or a Shia in Pakistan, your life may end at your place of worship. Scattered body limbs and pools of blood at Data Darbar, Abdullah Shah Ghazi, and the Pakpattan shrines testify that the cruellest of Islam’s enemies come from within.

While Pakistan’s terrified religious minorities live in fear of an intolerant majority, American Muslims get protection both from its people and the state. A personal example: the day after 9/11, I was appalled by the wild joy among my students. Worried about my former students, now studying in various US universities, I emailed them. Their return emails were reassuring. White American students had formed defence committees; no Muslim student was ever harmed on any campus. So even though George W Bush — a religious zealot — was preparing to invade Iraq, ordinary Americans were largely decent.

Third, the nauseating hypocrisy of Pakistan’s radicalising West-hating, West-baiting leaders needs to be exposed. For example, Imran Khan — who speaks of the West as the fountainhead of evil — prefers to keep his family in London and New York, owes his fame to a game invented by British colonialists, and employs real doctors rather than hakeems for his cancer hospital.

To conclude: if Pakistani-Americans want to feel welcome in the land they have chosen to settle in, they must actively combat the cancer of radicalism. They must want to be part of the modern world, not the one they came from. To mosque imams and radical Islamists, they must say clearly and loudly: we want to live peacefully with other Americans in a modern, pluralistic and secular society that values freedom of belief, freedom for art and music and freedom for thought and expression.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 4th, 2011.

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By Thomas Saffold, Michigan Islamic Academy

tsaffold@provide.net; 734-649-7241

This is potentially a new TMO column by a Muslim convert living in Michigan. Opinions expressed are his own.

Challenges Muslims face in America was the topic of a recent talk in Ann Arbor by Imam Hassan Al-Qazwini of the Islamic Center of America.  In this talk, Imam Al-Qazwini said that assimilation—losing our Muslim distinctiveness and deen—was one main challenge to the American Ummah. 

This kind of assimilation is a process in which we accept not only America’s non-Muslim cultural trappings (tastes in dress, entertainment, holidays, sports, etc.), but the moral values and mores of its society and government.  Assimilation is final when Muslims become indistinguishable from the non-Muslim majority in our interpersonal relationships, families, and business practices, and uncritically accept America’s political conduct and foreign policy.  We end up losing not only our identity, but our deen.

A second challenge is being exclusionary as Muslims and not participating in the public sphere of American society.  When we segregate ourselves, Al-Qazwini observed, when we avoid doing “American things” like voting and engaging in community affairs, our deen becomes marginalized, powerless, and irrelevant, and this does not serve the interests of Islam either. 
So, if we interact with American culture, we risk assimilation and the loss of our deen, but if we segregate ourselves and avoid as much interaction as possible, we risk having a deen that is not able to effect change around us in the cause of Allah (SWT).

It seems that American Muslims are on the horns of a dilemma, faced with two equally unpleasant options and having to choose one. 

This seeming dilemma affects no group more than our youth.  They are most vulnerable to the incessant onslaught of bewitching, misleading, and tempting advertisements to abandon morality and devotion to Allah (SWT) and become unthinking consumerists and uncaring capitalists.

The answer to this dilemma is to develop an approach to Islam that avoids either horn.  The Ummah must help young Muslims in particular to become so strong in the deen that they are confident enough to engage the dominant society on existing common ground so that our Islamic values supplant haram values.

A great American, with whom we share much good common ground, and who offers us profound insights in our struggle as Muslims, is Martin Luther King, Jr.  In his book, Where Do We Go from Here, he thoroughly analyzes our haram culture as based upon the evils of racism, poverty, and militarism, and then warns:

“Let us…not [seek] to integrate the Negro into all the existing values of American society.  Let us be those creative dissenters who will call our beloved nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humaneness.”

That is our calling, too, as American Muslims, and our Islamic schools are crucial as we carry it out.  Otherwise, our Ummah will continue to be gored by the horn of assimilation or the horn of powerless irrelevance. 

13-2

Houston Mayor: Lawsuits Costing Taxpayers More Than $37-Million

Two lawsuits regarding water and drainage fees are costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, Mayor Annise Parker said. The lawsuits have been backed by Republican activist and former Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector Paul Bettencourt, who’s appealing a water rate hike, passed by Houston City Council earlier this year.

Until that legal hurdle is cleared, Parker said, the city wouldn’t be able to sell bonds to help finance water and sewer improvements. According to a memo between Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysts and the city’s finance department, the legal delay has allowed interest rates to creep back up and “has cost the City of Houston ratepayers an estimated $37.72 million over the life of the issue.”

When broken down, the numbers represent an average cost of $1.26 million per year over the next 30 years. Bettencourt also filed a lawsuit earlier this month over the city’s recently-passed drainage fee, which council members must implement by July 1. The suit claims the ballot language “intentionally misled” voters and asks a judge to overturn the fee.

“This is just one more example of irresponsible behavior on the part of people who have no care for the needs of the city of Houston itself,” Parker said, adding that the previous lawsuit has already cost the city hundreds of thousands of dollars in outright legal fees.

On Monday, Bettencourt blasted Parker, saying the bond issue was irrelevant since the city shouldn’t be borrowing money to pay for improvements.

“Somebody has to stand up for the taxpayers here,” Bettencourt said. “This is a classic example of the mayor trying to double-dip on public policy.”

Bettencourt said Parker’s support of a pay-as-you-go system seemed contradicted by her desire to sell the bonds.

“When a politician takes it personal instead of talking about public policy, then you know you have a real policy issue,” Bettencourt said.

Additional Funds Added to Texas Appliance Mail-In Rebate Program

The Texas Comptroller’s office has added $8.5 million to a mail-in rebate program that returns up to $1,000 to Texans, who purchase energy-efficient Energy Star appliances.

Rebates now totaling about $18.5 million are available in eight categories, which range from $40 on room air conditioners to $1,000 on air-source heat pumps. The program, which begins Dec. 20 and will stay open until all funds are distributed, is funded through federal stimulus funds.

The eight categories are: Air-Source Heat Pumps, Central Air Conditioners, Clothes Washers, Dishwashers, Freezers, Refrigerators, Room Air Conditioners, and Water Heaters.

After installation of the appliance, consumers can mail in completed application forms and a copy of the receipt to receive a rebate. Rebate forms are available online and more information about the program can be found at www.TexasPowerfulSmart.org

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By Parvez Fatteh, Founder of http://sportingummah.com, sports@muslimobserver.com

Formula One racing is wildly popular in Europe and Asia, but it is dominated by men. But a young Australian has her sights set on a Formula One career, and she brings the uncommon racing combination of being female and Muslim. Yassmin Abdel-Magied of Brisbane is the young lady with these uncommon dreams. “Everyone thought it was a phase,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald. “I just became enamoured with these beautiful machines, the capacity they have. It’s just fantastic.”

The daughter of Sudanese immigrants, Yassmin’s love of sports extends even further than racing, as she coaches a Muslim youth soccer team called “Shinpads and Hijabs.” Even more impressive, she was voted Young Queenslander of the Year in 2010 for the entire province of Queensland. She is also a member of the Queensland Design Council. And at the age of 16 she set up a network for community-minded teens called Youth Without Borders. In addition, she was the first girl at her Christian college to wear a hijab. You would not think that there are enough hours in the day for her to do all of that. “I never get eight hours of sleep at night,” she says. “But I’m all right with it, I enjoy being busy, I enjoy helping people … when you want to do things, you find time for it.”

The 19-year-old still has a year left at University of Queensland in pursuit of her mechanical engineering degree. But after that, inshAllah, this daughter of an architect and an electrical engineer will be pursuing other cars around a track, at very high speeds. Talk about the fast life.

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The Great Islamophobic Crusade

By Max Blumenthal

Nine years after 9/11, hysteria about Muslims in American life has gripped the country.

With it has gone an outburst of arson attacks on mosques, campaigns to stop their construction, and the branding of the Muslim-American community, overwhelmingly moderate, as a hotbed of potential terrorist recruits. The frenzy has raged from rural Tennessee to New York City, while in Oklahoma, voters even overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure banning the implementation of Sharia law in American courts (not that such a prospect existed). This campaign of Islamophobia wounded President Obama politically, as one out of five Americans have bought into a sustained chorus of false rumors about his secret Muslim faith. And it may have tainted views of Muslims in general; an August 2010 Pew Research Center poll revealed that, among Americans, the favorability rating of Muslims had dropped by 11 points since 2005.

Erupting so many years after the September 11th trauma, this spasm of anti-Muslim bigotry might seem oddly timed and unexpectedly spontaneous. But think again: it’s the fruit of an organized, long-term campaign by a tight confederation of right-wing activists and operatives who first focused on Islamophobia soon after the September 11th attacks, but only attained critical mass during the Obama era. It was then that embittered conservative forces, voted out of power in 2008, sought with remarkable success to leverage cultural resentment into political and partisan gain.
This network is obsessively fixated on the supposed spread of Muslim influence in America. Its apparatus spans continents, extending from Tea Party activists here to the European far right. It brings together in common cause right-wing ultra-Zionists, Christian evangelicals, and racist British soccer hooligans. It reflects an aggressively pro-Israel sensibility, with its key figures venerating the Jewish state as a Middle Eastern Fort Apache on the front lines of the Global War on Terror and urging the U.S. and various European powers to emulate its heavy-handed methods.
Little of recent American Islamophobia (with a strong emphasis on the “phobia”) is sheer happenstance. Years before Tea Party shock troops massed for angry protests outside the proposed site of an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, representatives of the Israel lobby and the Jewish-American establishment launched a campaign against pro-Palestinian campus activism that would prove a seedbed for everything to come. That campaign quickly — and perhaps predictably — morphed into a series of crusades against mosques and Islamic schools which, in turn, attracted an assortment of shady but exceptionally energetic militants into the network’s ranks.

Besides providing the initial energy for the Islamophobic crusade, conservative elements from within the pro-Israel lobby bankrolled the network’s apparatus, enabling it to influence the national debate. One philanthropist in particular has provided the beneficence to propel the campaign ahead. He is a little-known Los Angeles-area software security entrepreneur named Aubrey Chernick, who operates out of a security consulting firm blandly named the National Center for Crisis and Continuity Coordination. A former trustee of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which has served as a think tank for the American Israel Policy Action Committee (AIPAC), a frontline lobbying group for Israel, Chernick is said to be worth $750 million.

Chernick’s fortune is puny compared to that of the billionaire Koch Brothers, extraction industry titans who fund Tea Party-related groups like Americans for Prosperity, and it is dwarfed by the financial empire of Haim Saban, the Israeli-American media baron who is one of the largest private donors to the Democratic party and recently matched $9 million raised for the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces in a single night. However, by injecting his money into a small but influential constellation of groups and individuals with a narrow agenda, Chernick has had a considerable impact.

Through the Fairbrook Foundation, a private entity he and his wife Joyce control, Chernick has provided funding to groups ranging from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and CAMERA, a right-wing, pro-Israel, media-watchdog outfit, to violent Israeli settlers living on Palestinian lands and figures like the pseudo-academic author Robert Spencer, who is largely responsible for popularizing conspiracy theories about the coming conquest of the West by Muslim fanatics seeking to establish a worldwide caliphate. Together, these groups spread hysteria about Muslims into Middle American communities where immigrants from the Middle East have recently settled, and they watched with glee as likely Republican presidential frontrunners from Mike Huckabee to Sarah Palin promoted their cause and parroted their tropes. Perhaps the only thing more surprising than the increasingly widespread appeal of Islamophobia is that, just a few years ago, the phenomenon was confined to a few college campuses and an inner city neighborhood, and that it seemed like a fleeting fad that would soon pass from the American political landscape.

Birth of a Network

The Islamophobic crusade was launched in earnest at the peak of George W. Bush’s prestige when the neoconservatives and their allies were riding high. In 2003, three years after the collapse of President Bill Clinton’s attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian issue and in the immediate wake of the invasion of Iraq, a network of Jewish groups, ranging from ADL and the American Jewish Committee to AIPAC, gathered to address what they saw as a sudden rise in pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses nationwide. That meeting gave birth to the David Project, a campus advocacy group led by Charles Peters, who had co-founded CAMERA, one of the many outfits bankrolled by Chernick. With the help of public relations professionals, Peters conceived a plan to “take back the campus by influencing public opinion through lectures, the Internet, and coalitions,” as a memo produced at the time by the consulting firm McKinsey and Company stated.

In 2004, after conferring with Martin Kramer, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the pro-Israel think tank where Chernoff had served as a trustee, Peters produced a documentary film that he called Columbia Unbecoming. It was filled with claims from Jewish students at Columbia University claiming they had endured intimidation and insults from Arab professors. The film portrayed that New York City school’s Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures as a hothouse of anti-Semitism.

In their complaints, the students focused on one figure in particular: Joseph Massad, a Palestinian professor of Middle East studies. He was known for his passionate advocacy of the formation of a binational state between Israel and Palestine, as well as for his strident criticism of what he termed “the racist character of Israel.” The film identified him as “one of the most dangerous intellectuals on campus,” while he was featured as a crucial villain in The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, a book by the (Chernick-funded) neoconservative activist David Horowitz. As Massad was seeking tenure at the time, he was especially vulnerable to this sort of wholesale assault.

When the controversy over Massad’s views intensified, Congressman Anthony Weiner, a liberal New York Democrat who once described himself as a representative of “the ZOA [Zionist Organization of America] wing of the Democratic Party,” demanded that Columbia President Lee Bollinger, a renowned First Amendment scholar, fire the professor. Bollinger responded by issuing uncharacteristically defensive statements about the “limited” nature of academic freedom.

In the end, however, none of the charges stuck. Indeed, the testimonies in the David Project film were eventually either discredited or never corroborated. In 2009, Massad earned tenure after winning Columbia’s prestigious Lionel Trilling Award for excellence in scholarship.

Having demonstrated its ability to intimidate faculty members and even powerful university administrators, however, Kramer claimed a moral victory in the name of his project, boasting to the press that “this is a turning point.” While the David Project subsequently fostered chapters on campuses nationwide, its director set out on a different path — initially, into the streets of Boston in 2004 to oppose the construction of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center.

For nearly 15 years, the Islamic Society of Boston had sought to build the center in the heart of Roxbury, the city’s largest black neighborhood, to serve its sizable Muslim population. With endorsements from Mayor Thomas Menino and leading Massachusetts lawmakers, the mosque’s construction seemed like a fait accompli — until, that is, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Boston Herald and his local Fox News affiliate snapped into action. Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby also chimed in with a series of reports claiming the center’s plans were evidence of a Saudi Arabian plot to bolster the influence of radical Islam in the United States, and possibly even to train underground terror cells.

It was at this point that the David Project entered the fray, convening elements of the local pro-Israel community in the Boston area to seek strategies to torpedo the project. According to emails obtained by the Islamic Society’s lawyers in a lawsuit against the David Project, the organizers settled on a campaign of years of nuisance lawsuits, along with accusations that the center had received foreign funding from “the Wahhabi movement in Saudi Arabia or… the Moslem Brotherhood.”

In response, a grassroots coalition of liberal Jews initiated inter-faith efforts aimed at ending a controversy that had essentially been manufactured out of thin air and was corroding relations between the Jewish and Muslim communities in the city. Peters would not, however, relent. “We are more concerned now than we have ever been about a Saudi influence of local mosques,” he announced at a suburban Boston synagogue in 2007.

After paying out millions of dollars in legal bills and enduring countless smears, the Islamic Society of Boston completed the construction of its community center in 2008. Meanwhile, not surprisingly, nothing came of the David Project’s dark warnings. As Boston-area National Public Radio reporter Philip Martin reflected in September 2010, “The horror stories that preceded [the center’s] development seem shrill and histrionic in retrospect.”

The Network Expands

This second failed campaign was, in the end, more about movement building than success, no less national security. The local crusade established an effective blueprint for generating hysteria against the establishment of Islamic centers and mosques across the country, while galvanizing a cast of characters who would form an anti-Muslim network which would gain attention and success in the years to come.

In 2007, these figures coalesced into a proto-movement that launched a new crusade, this time targeting the Khalil Gibran International Academy, a secular Arabic-English elementary school in Brooklyn, New York. Calling their ad hoc pressure group, Stop the Madrassah — madrassah being simply the Arab word for “school” — the coalition’s activists included an array of previously unknown zealots who made no attempt to disguise their extreme views when it came to Islam as a religion, as well as Muslims in America. Their stated goal was to challenge the school’s establishment on the basis of its violation of the church-state separation in the U.S. Constitution. The true aim of the coalition, however, was transparent: to pressure the city’s leadership to adopt an antagonistic posture towards the local Muslim community.

The activists zeroed in on the school’s principal, Debbie Almontaser, a veteran educator of Yemeni descent, and baselessly branded her “a jihadist” as well as a 9/11 denier. They also accused her of — as Pamela Geller, a far-right blogger just then gaining prominence put it, “whitewash[ing] the genocide against the Jews.” Daniel Pipes, a neoconservative academic previously active in the campaigns against Joseph Massad and the Boston Islamic center (and whose pro-Likud think tank, Middle East Forum, has received $150,000 from Chernick) claimed the school should not go ahead because “Arabic-language instruction is inevitably laden with Pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage.” As the campaign reached a fever pitch, Almontaser reported that members of the coalition were actually stalking her wherever she went.

Given what Columbia Journalism School professor and former New York Times reporter Samuel Freedman called “her clear, public record of interfaith activism and outreach,” including work with the New York Police Department and the Anti-Defamation League after the September 11th attacks, the assault on Almontaser seemed little short of bizarre — until her assailants discovered a photograph of her wearing a T-shirt produced by AWAAM, a local Arab feminist organization, that read “Intifada NYC.” (“As AWAAM provides young women with opportunities to become active as community organizers and media producers, `intifada NYC’ is a call for empowerment, service, civic participation and critical thinking in our communities,” the organization explained once the controversy erupted.)

Having found a way to wedge the emotional issue of the Israel-Palestine conflict into a previously New York-centered campaign, the school’s opponents next gained a platform at the Murdoch-owned New York Post, where reporters Chuck Bennett and Jana Winter claimed her T-shirt was “apparently a call for a Gaza-style uprising in the Big Apple.” While Almontaser attempted to explain to the Post’s reporters that she rejected terrorism, the Anti-Defamation League chimed in on cue. ADL spokesman Oren Segal told the Post: “The T-shirt is a reflection of a movement that increasingly lauds violence against Israelis instead of rejecting it. That is disturbing.”

Before any Qassam rockets could be launched from Almonstaser’s school, her former ally New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg caved to the growing pressure and demanded her resignation, prompting the state’s Department of Education to fire her. A Jewish principal who spoke no Arabic replaced Almontaser, who later filed a lawsuit against the city for breaching her free speech rights. In 2010, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that New York’s Department of Education had “succumbed to the very bias that the creation of the school was intended to dispel” by firing Almontaser and urged it pay her $300,000 in damages. The commission also concluded that the Post had quoted her misleadingly.

Though it failed to stop the establishment of the Khalil Gibran Academy, the burgeoning anti-Muslim movement succeeded in forcing city leaders to bend to its will, and having learned just how to do that, then moved on in search of more high-profile targets. As the New York Times reported at the time, “The fight against the school… was only an early skirmish in a broader, national struggle.”
“It’s a battle that has really just begun,” Pipes told the Times.

From Scam to Publicity Coup

Pipes couldn’t have been more on the mark. In late 2009, the Islamophobes sprang into action again when the Cordoba Initiative, a non-profit Muslim group headed by Feisal Abdul Rauf, an exceedingly moderate Sufi Muslim imam who regularly traveled abroad representing the United States at the behest of the State Department, announced that it was going to build a community center in downtown New York City. With the help of investors, Rauf’s Cordoba Initiative purchased space two blocks from Ground Zero in Manhattan. The space was to contain a prayer area as part of a large community center that would be open to everyone in the neighborhood.

None of these facts mattered to Pamela Geller. Thanks to constant prodding at her blog, Atlas Shrugged, Geller made Cordoba’s construction plans a national issue, provoking fervent calls from conservatives to protect the “hallowed ground” of 9/11 from creeping Sharia. (That the “mosque” would have been out of sight of Ground Zero and that the neighborhood was, in fact, filled with everything from strip clubs to fast-food joints didn’t matter.) Geller’s activism against Cordoba House earned the 52-year-old full-time blogger the attention she apparently craved, including a long profile in the New York Times and frequent cable news spots, especially, of course, on Fox News.

Mainstream reporters tended to focus on Geller’s bizarre stunts. She posted a video of herself splashing around in a string bikini on a Fort Lauderdale beach, for instance, while ranting about “left-tards” and “Nazi Hezbollah.” Her call for boycotting Campbell’s Soup because the company offered halal — approved under Islamic law (as kosher food is under Jewish law) — versions of its products got her much attention, as did her promotion of a screed claiming that President Barack Obama was the illegitimate lovechild of Malcolm X.

Geller had never earned a living as a journalist. She supported herself with millions of dollars in a divorce settlement and life insurance money from her ex-husband. He died in 2008, a year after being indicted for an alleged $1.3 million scam he was accused of running out of a car dealership he co-owned with Geller. Independently wealthy and with time on her hands, Geller proved able indeed when it came to exploiting her strange media stardom to incite the already organized political network of Islamophobes to intensify their crusade.

She also benefited from close alliances with leading Islamophobes from Europe. Among Geller’s allies was Andrew Gravers, a Danish activist who formed the group Stop the Islamicization of Europe, and gave it the unusually blunt motto: “Racism is the lowest form of human stupidity, but Islamophobia is the height of common sense.” Gravers’ group inspired Geller’s own U.S.-based outfit, Stop the Islamicization of America, which she formed with her friend Robert Spencer, a pseudo-scholar from Great Britain whose bestselling books, including The Truth About Muhammad, Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion, prompted former advisor to President Richard Nixon and Muslim activist Robert Crane to call him, “the principal leader… in the new academic field of Muslim bashing.” (According to the website Politico, almost $1 million in donations from Chernick has been steered to Spencer’s Jihad Watch group through David Horowitz’s Freedom Center.)

Perfect sources for Republican political figures in search of the next hot-button cause, their rhetoric found its way into the talking points of Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin as they propelled the crusade against Cordoba House into the national spotlight. Gingrich soon compared the community center to a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, while Palin called it “a stab in the heart” of “the Heartland.” Meanwhile, Tea Party candidates like Republican Ilario Pantano, an Iraq war veteran who killed two unarmed Iraqi civilians, shooting them 60 times — he even stopped to reload — made their opposition to Cordoba House the centerpiece of midterm congressional campaigns conducted hundreds of miles from Ground Zero.

Geller’s campaign against “the mosque at Ground Zero” gained an unexpected assist and a veneer of legitimacy from established Jewish leaders like Anti-Defamation League National Director Abraham Foxman. “Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational,” he remarked to the New York Times. Comparing the bereaved family members of 9-11 victims to Holocaust survivors, Foxman insisted, “Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.”

Soon enough, David Harris, director of the (Chernick-funded) American Jewish Committee, was demanding that Cordoba’s leaders be compelled to reveal their “true attitudes” about Palestinian militant groups before construction on the center was initiated. Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles, another major Jewish group, insisted it would be “insensitive” for Cordoba to build near “a cemetery,” though his organization had recently been granted permission from the municipality of Jerusalem to build a “museum of tolerance” to be called The Center for Human Dignity directly on top of the Mamilla Cemetery, a Muslim graveyard that contained thousands of gravesites dating back 1,200 years.

Inspiration from Israel

It was evident from the involvement of figures like Gravers and Spencer that the Islamophobic network in the United States represented a trans-Atlantic expansion of simmering resentment in Europe. There, the far-right was storming to victories in parliamentary elections across the continent in part by appealing to the simmering anti-Muslim sentiments of voters in rural and working-class communities. The extent of the collaboration between European and American Islamophobes has only continued to grow with Geller, Spencer, and even Gingrich standing beside Europe’s most prominent anti-Muslim figure, Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, at a rally against Cordoba House. In the meantime, Geller was issuing statements of support for the English Defense League, a band of unreconstructed neo-Nazis and former members of the whites-only British National Party who intimidate Muslims in the streets of cities like Birmingham and London.

In addition, the trans-Atlantic Islamophobic crusade has stretched into Israel, a country that has come to symbolize the network’s fight against the Muslim menace. As Geller told the New York Times’ Alan Feuer, Israel is “a very good guide because, like I said, in the war between the civilized man and the savage, you side with the civilized man.”

EDL members regularly wave Israeli flags at their rallies, while Wilders claims to have formed his views about Muslims during the time he worked on an Israeli cooperative farm in the 1980s. He has, he says, visited the country more than 40 times since to meet with rightist political allies like Aryeh Eldad, a member of the Israeli Knesset and leader of the far right Hatikvah faction of the National Union Party. He has called for forcibly “transferring” the Palestinians living in Israel and the occupied West Bank to Jordan and Egypt. On December 5th, for example, Wilders traveled to Israel for a “friendly” meeting with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, then declared at a press conference that Israel should annex the West Bank and set up a Palestinian state in Jordan.

In the apocalyptic clash of civilizations the global anti-Muslim network has sought to incite, tiny armed Jewish settlements like Yitzar, located on the hills above the occupied Palestinian city of Nablus, represent front-line fortresses. Inside Yitzar’s state-funded yeshiva, a rabbi named Yitzhak Shapira has instructed students in what rules must be applied when considering killing non-Jews. Shapira summarized his opinions in a widely publicized book, Torat HaMelech, or The King’s Torah. Claiming that non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature,” Shapira cited rabbinical texts to declare that gentiles could be killed in order to “curb their evil inclinations.” “There is justification,” the rabbi proclaimed, “for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.”

In 2006, the rabbi was briefly held by Israeli police for urging his supporters to murder all Palestinians over the age of 13. Two years later, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, he signed a rabbinical letter in support of Israeli Jews who had brutally assaulted two Arab youths on the country’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. That same year, Shapira was arrested as a suspect in helping orchestrate a rocket attack against a Palestinian village near Nablus.

Though he was not charged, his name came up again in connection with another act of terror when, in January 2010, the Israeli police raided his settlement seeking vandals who had set fire to a nearby mosque. One of Shapira’s followers, an American immigrant, Jack Teitel, has confessed to murdering two innocent Palestinians and attempting to the kill the liberal Israeli historian Ze’ev Sternhell with a mail bomb.

What does all this have to do with Islamophobic campaigns in the United States? A great deal, actually. Through New York-based tax-exempt non-profits like the Central Fund of Israel and Ateret Cohenim, for instance, the omnipresent Aubrey Chernick has sent tens of thousands of dollars to support the Yitzar settlement, as well as to the messianic settlers dedicated to “Judaizing” East Jerusalem. The settlement movement’s leading online news magazine, Arutz Sheva, has featured Geller as a columnist. A friend of Geller’s, Beth Gilinsky, a right-wing activist with a group called the Coalition to Honor Ground Zero and the founder of the Jewish Action Alliance (apparently run out of a Manhattan real estate office), organized a large rally in New York City in April 2010 to protest the Obama administration’s call for a settlement freeze.

Among Chernick’s major funding recipients is a supposedly “apolitical” group called Aish Hatorah that claims to educate Jews about their heritage. Based in New York and active in the fever swamps of northern West Bank settlements near Yitzar, Aish Hatorah shares an address and staff with a shadowy foreign non-profit called the Clarion Fund. During the 2008 U.S. election campaign, the Clarion Fund distributed 28 million DVDs of a propaganda film called Obsession as newspaper inserts to residents of swing states around the country. The film featured a who’s who of anti-Muslim activists, including Walid Shoebat, a self-proclaimed “former PLO terrorist.” Among Shoebat’s more striking statements: “A secular dogma like Nazism is less dangerous than is Islamofascism today.” At a Christian gathering in 2007, this “former Islamic terrorist” told the crowd that Islam was a “satanic cult” and that he had been born again as an evangelical Christian. In 2008, however, the Jerusalem Post, a right-leaning newspaper, exposed him as a fraud, whose claims to terrorism were fictional.

Islamophobic groups registered only a minimal impact during the 2008 election campaign. Two years later, however, after the Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives in midterm elections, the network appears to have reached critical mass. Of course, the deciding factor in the election was the economy, and in two years, Americans will likely vote their pocketbooks again. But that the construction of a single Islamic community center or the imaginary threat of Sharia law were issues at all reflected the influence of a small band of locally oriented activists, and suggested that when a certain presidential candidate who has already been demonized as a crypto-Muslim runs for reelection, the country’s most vocal Islamophobes could once again find a national platform amid the frenzied atmosphere of the campaign.

By now, the Islamophobic crusade has gone beyond the right-wing pro-Israel activists, cyber-bigots, and ambitious hucksters who conceived it. It now belongs to leading Republican presidential candidates, top-rated cable news hosts, and crowds of Tea Party activists. As the fervor spreads, the crusaders are basking in the glory of what they accomplished. “I didn’t choose this moment,” Geller mused to the New York Times, “this moment chose me.”

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CBS) Max Blumenthal is a writing fellow for the Nation Institute and author of the bestselling book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party (Nation Books). This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.

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By Patrik Jonsson, The Christian Science Monitor

One of thousands of blackbirds that fell out of the sky on New Year’s Eve lies on the ground in Beebe, Arkansas January 1, 2011 in this handout photograph. Stress from New Year’s Eve fireworks may have caused the deaths of up to 5,000 birds in Beebe, Ark., which mysteriously began falling from the sky late Friday night, state officials said on January 3, 2011. Picture taken January 1, 2011.    REUTERS/Arkansas Game and Fish Commission/Handout

Motorists stopped and gawked at hundreds of dead red-winged blackbirds on a highway in Pointe Coupee Parish, La., Monday, just days after residents of Beebe, Ark., saw more than 1,000 birds fall from the sky on New Year’s Eve.

On Monday, state biologists were gathering up some of the approximately 500 blackbirds and starlings that lay dead along Louisiana Route 1 near Pointe Coupee Central High School for testing.
The United States Geological Survey has noted 16 incidents in the past 30 years where more than 1,000 black birds have died at the same time, usually the result of tightly-packed flocks flying into bad weather. What’s more, more than 5 billion birds die of natural causes in the United States each year, so it is, in a way, unusual that Americans don’t witness more major bird kills.
Yet the use of improved testing and a state of heightened concern on the parts of state ornithologists is a proper response, even if the two bird kills had not come so close together, experts say.
“Birds can be really good indicators of environmental problems, so I’d hate to think that 5,000 would die and nobody would care,” says Greg Butcher, director of bird conservation at the National Audobon Society, in Washington. “It’s worth investigation to find out what happened because there is potentially something we should worry about and it’s potentially something that has an odd, but benign cause.”

Americans have theorized that everything from fallout from secret government weapons testing to UFO collisions downed the birds in Arkansas. But the newly-discovered bird rain in Louisiana is likely to focus more serious attention to the plight of blackbirds now bundled in winter flocks that can number over 100,000 birds.

Postmortem tests of birds in the Arkansas incident showed evidence of blunt force trauma to many of the victims, which Mr. Butcher says means that it’s likely the birds were spooked by New Year’s Eve fireworks and may, in mass confusion, have run into cars and houses.

Since blackbirds are considered a nuisance by farmers, the mass death in Louisiana could be attributable to a legal pest control effort. Pest control experts kill blackbird roosts in several ways, including spraying water on birds to induce hypothermia or by using legal poisons. Most such poisons work quickly, but a botched control attempt could mean that birds may have flown away from the roost and died nearby.

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