Jewish left continues to take on the Simon Wiesenthal Center

This article originally appeared in Mondoweiss:

Protesters outside the Simon Wiesenthal Center in New York City. (Photo: Bud Korotzer)

A coalition of progressive Jewish organizations on both coasts yesterday slammed the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s honoring of the civil rights-era Freedom Riders while “engaging in anti-Muslim bigotry that is no less destructive than that against which the Freedom Riders protested,” as Alan Levine, a New York activist and civil rights lawyer who worked in Mississippi in 1964 and 1965, put it in a press statement.

Simultaneously, Jewish peace groups, Palestine solidarity groups and the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California held a protest against the Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. The central demand of the protests was for the center, which runs the Museum of Tolerance, to be “a voice for justice on behalf of the Muslim community,” instead of a voice disrespecting Muslims.

It was the latest action to try and turn the heat up on the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which came out against the Park 51 Muslim community center and is building a Jerusalem branch of its Museum of Tolerance on top of a historic Muslim cemetery.

Jews Against Islamophobia, a coalition consisting of Jews Say No!, Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and American Jews for a Just Peace, has targeted the Simon Wiesenthal Center since mid-September. The coalition has conducted frequent demonstrations outside the Museum of Tolerance, holding up signs calling out the center’s “hypocrisy” and passing out flyers to passer-bys and those going into the museum.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, appeared on Fox News last August to say that the location of the proposed center, known as Park 51, was “insensitive.” The executive director of the center, which describes itself as a Jewish organization that “promotes human rights and dignity,” expressed similar sentiments to Crain’s New York Business.

The protests highlight the split within the American Jewish community over Park 51 and Islamophobia. For instance, Marc Tracy of Tablet pointed out last August that “out of the [Marist] pool of registered New York City voters, only 20 percent of Jews approve of the center, while 71 percent oppose it.”

In interviews, members of the coalition say their aim is to highlight alternative Jewish voices against Islamophobia and in support of the Park 51 project as well as attempt to pressure the center to reverse what they say is a hypocritical position. “As much as [mainstream Jewish organizations] want to marginalize others in the Jewish community, I think there are lots and lots of Jews who stand for the principles of justice together with other communities,” said Donna Nevel, a member of Jews Say No!

The coalition’s actions are meant to “let institutions such as the Wiesenthal Center know that they can’t get away with Islamophobic and anti-Arab racist comments and just assume that there’s not going to be any pushback,” said Jon Moscow, a leading member of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a New York City-based social justice organization. Jewish groups’ opposition to Park 51 shows a “real misunderstanding of Jewish history in America, and to use the old phrase, ‘what’s good for the Jews,’” Moscow said.

In an emailed statement, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said that “the issue is not the right to build the Islamic Center, but one of sensitivity by religious leaders to the suffering of innocents. The Simon Wiesenthal Center believes that the feelings of the families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks are paramount.” The statement went on, saying, “if the families agree to the Islamic Center’s proposed location, fine; if they ask that it be moved, we would hope that the organizers would be sensitive to those feelings and move the location elsewhere in Manhattan.”

Those involved with Jews Against Islamophobia are also highlighting the connection between Islamophobia here and abroad by denouncing the Simon Wiesenthal Center for the building of a Museum of Tolerance on top of the Islamic Mamilla cemetery in Jerusalem. The Center for Constitutional Rights, which has filed a petition with several international bodies to halt construction of the museum, says the project has resulted in the “disinterment of hundreds of graves.”

A three-part investigation by the Israeli daily Haaretz documented the building of the museum, reporting that “hundreds of skeletons that were buried in Jerusalem’s central Muslim cemetery over a period of some 1,000 years” were “cleared away from the site swiftly and clandestinely during five grueling months of nonstop work.”

Rebecca Vilkomerson, the executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, says that the Wiesenthal Center is using the word “tolerance as a fig leave, to engage in behavior that is anything but tolerant. There is a sort of fetishization of Jewish victim hood, but it doesn’t translate into identifying other forms of oppression, such as Islamophobia. In fact, by opposing Park 51, they are engaging in Islamophobia themselves.”

Vilkomerson says that given the history of discrimination against Jews in the U.S. and Jewish struggles in solidarity with other marginalized groups, the Jewish community should be standing firm against Islamophobia.

“It’s ‘never again’ for everyone, not just ‘never again’ for us. Therefore, its our responsibility to speak out when other groups are being targeted.”

No Surprise Here: Palin’s PAC Tied to Islamophobic Dutch Writer

Mother Jones magazine reports on an “incendiary Dutch journalist” named Joshua Livestro who is apparently working on Sarah Palin’s political action committee (emphasis mine):

Not surprisingly, Livestro’s views skew to the right. He helped to found the Edmund Burke Foundation, a right-wing Dutch think tank created to push back against progressive politics in the Netherlands. In one manifesto, citing the number of Muslims in the Netherlands, the foundation warned of ethnic conflict and said the country’s borders should be closed. In the Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland, Livestro once wrote that the gruesome photos depicting detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib resembled little more than an out-of-control frat party; he complained that Abu Ghraib critics were “cry-babies” exaggerating the episode’s signficiance. On his blog, Livestro similarly quipped that the CIA’s torture techniques—with the exception of waterboarding—were milder than the hazing methods of fraternities.

Livestro founded the Edmund Burke Foundation along with a fellow Dutch journalist named Bart Jan Spruyt, who went on to advise the virulently Islamophobic Dutch politician Geert Wilders.  Spruyt accompanied Wilders on a trip to the United States in 2005, the purpose being for Wilders to publicize here “what is happening to his country because of the rise of radical Islam and why he is promoting a moratorium on non-western immigration.”  (Spruyt has now distanced himself from Wilders.)

It’s no surprise that Palin would be tied to an anti-Muslim Dutch writer.  Palin has stoked bigotry against Muslims herself, from referring to the president as Barack Hussein Obama to calling on “peaceful Muslims” to “refudiate” the “Ground Zero mosque” to defending Franklin Graham, who once called Islam a “very evil and wicked religion.”  She’s also the hero of the Tea Party, a right-wing movement that’s no stranger to anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment.

Race and religion-baiting of President Obama and Muslims will be par for the course if/when Palin runs for president in 2012.

 

 

New York’s Muslims, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Israel

Protesters throw shoes at a portrait of Mayor Michael Bloomberg after the mayor's trip to Israel while Operation Cast Lead raged on. PHOTO: Zahra Hankir

Ever since Lawrence Swaim of the California-based Interfaith Freedom Foundation articulated his valuable insight to me that the question of Israel courses through Jewish-Muslim relations, I’ve been coming across stories that fit into that theme.  In general, strong support for Israel correlates with an aversion to understanding legitimate Palestinian, Arab and Muslim grievances about the United States and Israel, and given the dehumanization of Palestinians (the majority of them Muslims) that pervades Israeli and U.S. society, it’s no surprise that Israel is a big roadblock in Jewish-Muslim relations.  You have to place the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s opposition to Park 51 in lower Manhattan in that context.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been busy reporting on how Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City is perceived by the Muslim community here–which is at about 800,000 strong–in the wake of Bloomberg’s admirable defense of the mosque and community center near Ground Zero.  (The fruits of my labor are here at the Gotham Gazette.)  A lot of different issues came up in my discussions with Muslim community leaders in New York City, but Bloomberg’s staunch support for Israel came up in a number of interviews.  Bloomberg’s role in not standing up for Debbie Almontaser, the founding and former principal of the city’s first dual-language Arabic school who was felled by a right-wing smear campaign, also had something to do with Israel, as Kiera Feldman points out in this excellent article. Bloomberg’s relationship with the Muslim community is one prominent symbol of the role Israel plays in the challenge of forging strong Jewish-Muslim solidarity, all the more important in a time of rising Islamophobia that bears many of the same hallmarks that characterized anti-Semitism.

In early 2009, around the same time that the massacre of the al-Samouni family occurred in Gaza, Mayor Bloomberg flew in to Israel on his private jet along with NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelley and Representative Gary Ackerman.  Bloomberg went to Sderot, the Israeli town that saw many rockets from Gaza rain down, and laid the blame for the Israeli assault on Hamas: “That they are putting people at risk is an outrage. If Hamas would focus on building a country instead of trying to destroy another one, then those people would not be getting injured or killed.”

This trip enraged the Arab and Muslim community in New York City.  Shortly after Bloomberg’s trip, Palestine solidarity activists organized a rally outside of City Hall, throwing shoes at a portrait of Bloomberg.

“His relationship with Israel, supporting Israel with no limits, hurts us,” Zein Rimawi, a member of the New York City-based Arab Muslim American Federation, recently told me. “Don’t forget: We are Arabs, we are Muslims, and the people in Gaza are Arabs and Muslims and we support them.”

Bloomberg made many New York Muslims happy with his defense of Park 51.  But Israel looms large, and it’s obvious that his disregard for the suffering of the people in Gaza dealt substantial damage to his relationship with the New York City Muslim community.  Take the relationship between Bloomberg and Muslims as a lesson that those interested in forming stronger Jewish-Muslim coalitions must deal with the question of Israel.  Fighting Islamophobia and the right-wing Zionist project of expelling Palestinians from their historic homeland depends on strong Jewish-Muslim solidarity.

Beyond the Mosque: Bloomberg and New York’s Muslims

The following article originally appeared in the Gotham Gazette, an online-only publication focusing on New York City government and politics:

When Mayor Michael Bloomberg strongly defended the proposed Islamic community center and mosque near Ground Zero last August even as polls showed most New Yorkers opposed the project, he garnered some favorable media coverage and praise for his stance.

A New York Times editorial called Bloomberg “the leader with the courage to make the case” for the center. Tom Robbins, a Village Voice columnist and frequent critic of the mayor, wrote, “Mike Bloomberg did a brave and good deed for this city” when he spoke out in favor of the project, known as Park 51. Errol Louis called Bloomberg’s speech on Governors Island defending the proposed center “the finest speech of his career.” And the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights organization, praised Bloomberg for “defending the rights of Muslims and other Americans to build houses of worship.”

The mosque, while significant, is just one issue. Beyond that, many Muslim groups, faith leaders and activists who have applauded Bloomberg’s forceful defense of Park 51 say his administration has had a mixed and at times disappointing track record on policies affecting the Muslim community. Among other issues, they cite his failure to speak out on proposals for other mosques around the city, his refusal to provide a school holiday for Muslim holy days and the attitude of the police department toward Muslims in the city.

“We appreciate that Bloomberg came out and took a stand in a very difficult political moment, particularly a backlash against Muslim communities,” said Monami Maulik, the executive director of Desis Rising Up and Moving, a grassroots activist group serving the South Asian community. “On the other hand, we also saw it as window dressing in many ways because the bottom line is that it’s the policies and practices that the administration puts in place that affects the members of our community day to day.”

A Range of Concerns

An estimated 800,000 Muslims live in the city, and their numbers are growing. Not surprisingly, they have an array of concerns — extending far beyond a mosque in lower Manhattan. Interviews with a wide array of Muslim community leaders indicate that the Bloomberg administration and the city’s Muslim community have a complicated and nuanced relationship.

“It is a work in progress,” said Adem Carroll, the former executive director of the Muslim Consultative Network and the former coordinator for the Islamic Circle of North America’s 9/11 relief program. “He has hired some Muslims as commissioners who work very hard at being liaisons. He himself does not visit our community members very much, at least that’s the perception.”

Robina Niaz, the founder and executive director of Turning Point for Women and Families, a non-profit organization that seeks to address domestic violence within the Muslim community, said she has seen a “marked change in the last several months” toward the positive in how Bloomberg is perceived in the Muslim community.

Imam Al-Hajj Talib ‘Abdur-Rashid, an African-American leader at the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood in Harlem, describes the relationship between the Bloomberg administration and the Muslim community as “strained.” But he said, “There has been a demonstration of some political sensitivity on the part of that administration toward some issues of importance to the Muslim community.” For example, ‘Abdur-Rashid said, after a September 2009 fire badly damaged a mosque in the Bronx that served a large West African Muslim community, “the Bloomberg administration was a great help and assistance to them, helping them to find a temporary place to worship.”

However, a consensus exists that the Bloomberg administration needs to reach out more to the Muslim community, especially in a difficult political climate for Muslims.

“Just because he supported Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and Park 51, that doesn’t mean every other issue should be taken off the burner,” said Niaz.

In an interview, Fatima Shama, a Palestinian-American Muslim who is the commissioner for immigrant affairs under the Bloomberg administration, forcefully defended the administration’s efforts.

Bloomberg “has engaged with the Muslim community more than any other mayor in this city,” said Shama, noting that she was the first Muslim hired to be commissioner of immigrant affairs. Shama also pointed out that Bloomberg holds an annual Iftar dinner, to mark the fast breaking during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

The Voice of Reason

With anti-Muslim prejudice seemingly on the rise across the country, many Muslims in New York would like the mayor to go beyond his speech on the mosque and community center near Ground Zero. In particular, they wish he would speak out on the battles over proposed mosques elsewhere in the city. In the Midland Beach neighborhood of Staten Island, the board of a Catholic Church blocked plans for a proposed mosque when, in the face of harsh condemnation, they refused to sell a vacant convent to a Muslim organization. In Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, a proposed mosque and community center has also sparked controversy.

“Bloomberg this time around chose to stand on the right side of history on the Park 51 controversy by making that eloquent speech, but I don’t think that he should stop there. I think he’s positioned uniquely as a mayor, as a national leader, to lead the charge against Islamophobia if he really wants to redeem himself in the eyes of Muslim New Yorkers considering that he’s failed them a few times,” said Debbie Almontaser, the founder and former principal of the Khalil Gibran International Academy, the city’s first dual-language Arabic public school.

In 2007, many Muslims and other New Yorkers believe, Almotaser fell victim of that prejudice when a right-wing campaign targeted the school and Almontaser. Following an article in the New York Post that claimed she “downplayed the significance” of T-shirts bearing the word “intifada,” she was “forced to resign following a directive from Bloomberg, according to Almontaser. Earlier this year, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission determined that the Department of Education discriminated against Almontaser and “succumbed to the very bias that the creation of the school intended to dispel.”

Almontaser’s resignation remains on the mind of many community leaders.

Perceptions of the mayor’s actions don’t stop at New York’s borders. While Bloomberg does not have a role in formulating foreign policy, many Muslim activists disapprovingly cited his staunch support for Israel, and specifically his January 2009 visit to Israel while the country waged an assault on the Gaza Strip in Palestine.

“His relationship with Israel, supporting Israel with no limits, hurts us,” said Zein Rimawi, a member of the New York City-based Arab Muslim American Federation. “Don’t forget: We are Arabs, we are Muslims, and the people in Gaza are Arabs and Muslims and we support them.”

Under Suspicion

In addition, Muslim leaders have concern about New York Police Department counter-terrorism practices in the Bloomberg era. Civil rights organizations like CAIR-NY and DRUM have of police harassment of Muslims in New York.

Arguably the biggest irritant came when the police department released a 2007 report, titled Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat. The report detailed the process by which it saw some American Muslims as being “radicalized” into terrorists and said that, while Americans Muslims are “more resistant to radicalization than their European counterparts, they are not immune.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations promptly criticized the report, saying, “Its sweeping generalizations and mixing of unrelated elements may serve to cast a pall of suspicion over the entire American Muslim community.” In the wake of the report, the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition formed and critiqued the report for presenting “a distorted and misleading depiction of Islam and its adherents.”

Following meetings with Muslim organizations, the police department quietly issued a two-page clarification that stressed that the “NYPD’s focus on al Qaeda inspired terrorism should not be mistaken for any implicit or explicit justification for racial, religious or ethnic profiling.”

While Muslim organizations welcomed the clarification, criticism of the report remains.

“It’s not clear what the NYPD really thinks, because it’s leaving the bulk of its assertions and its conclusions in place,” said Faiza Patel, who works with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Project. The clarification “didn’t address all of [the Muslim community's] concerns. The way it was done — really kind of hidden there — makes it seem as if the police department is talking out of two sides of its mouth.”

The police did not respond to requests for comment. But Shama defended the department, saying it has many Muslims in the police force and also has a Muslim Officers Society whose mission includes promoting “a mutual understanding between the NYPD and the Muslim community.”

“I don’t think there are any broad brushes or generalizations in the report,” said Shama, when asked about Muslim community leaders’ criticism of the document. “But we do have a policy that if you see something, say something. … It’s a new day in a new country,” she said, referring to the post-9/11 world.

No Days Off

Bloomberg’s opposition to closing public schools on two Muslim holidays — Eid Ul-Fitr and Eid Ul-Adha — disappointed many in the Muslim community — particularly after the City Council approved the change in the school calendar. In July 2009, the New York City Council passed a nonbinding resolution calling for the inclusion of Eid Ul-Fitr and Eid Ul-Adha, two Muslim holidays, into the school calendar. Underscoring the issue, parent-teacher conferences this year are being held today, which is also Eid Ul-Adha.

The administration opposed the measure, saying that the school system can’t celebrate every holiday. “One of the problems you have with a diverse city is that if you close the schools for every single holiday, there won’t be any school,” Bloomberg has said.

Shama said the Bloomberg administration “absolutely listened to all the requests and concerns of the school holidays coalition” before taking its position. Despite that, ‘Abdur-Rashid said, the administration stand “left a very bad taste in the mouths of many Muslims.”

Faiza Ali, the director of community affairs for CAIR-NY, said her organization is still pursuing the issue. “We’re looking to the leadership of the mayor and chancellor…[to] re-tool the school calendar to fit the needs of the community,” she said.

Upper West Side Synagogue and Brooklyn Jewish Center to Host Memorial Events for Far-right Extremist Meir Kahane

Three memorial events for the racist, far-right ultra-nationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane are to be held throughout New York City this Sunday in ceremonies marking twenty years since the killing of Kahane.

The events are to be held at the Ocean Avenue Jewish Center in Brooklyn, at the site of Ground Zero in lower Manhattan and at the West Side Institutional Synagogue, which describes itself as a “warm and vibrant modern orthodox synagogue located in the heart of Manhattan’s Upper West Side.”

The Kahane memorial at Ground Zero is taking aim at “political Islam” and at the proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero.  A blog post promoting the event on the Jewish Defense League’s “Canada blog” states, “It has been 20 years since *Rabbi Meir Kahane* (HY”D) was murdered. He was the first Al Quida [sic] terror victim. And his vision is more important today than ever.  The forces of Political Islam built a Mosque on the holiest site of the Jewish People-The Temple Mount. And today, the forces of Political Islam are determined to build a Mosque at Ground Zero.”

At the Upper West Side event, Rabbi Shlomo Einhorn of the West Side synangogue will be speaking–despite telling someone organizing a protest against the event that the Kahane memorial is “not a west side institutional event” and that “somebody is renting our ballroom.”  Also speaking will be Helen Freedman of Americans for a Safe Israel, a right-wing group that supports “Israel’s right…to the territories won in the 1967 war”; the talk-show host Barry Farber; and Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind, a right-wing Orthodox Jewish follower of Kahane who has advocated for the racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims in New York City.  Hikind is an advocate for illegal Jewish settlement in occupied Palestine, and his wife runs “Ateret Cohanim, one of the chief Jewish groups forcibly Judaizing East Jerusalem,” as blogger Richard Silverstein put it.

The honoring of Meir Kahane has sparked controversy among the Jewish community in New York City, and there are plans, led by Yeshiva students in the city, to protest the memorial events.

“We were pretty outraged to see that a synagogue in the Upper West Side–from what I understand, a relatively mainstream, Orthodox Upper West Side synagogue–would be holding a memorial to Meir Kahane, who is one of the most extreme, radical, right-wing Israeli leaders in the last few decades,” said Itamar Landau, a full-time fellow at Yeshivat Hadar, in an interview.  Landau is a key organizer behind the planned protests this Sunday.  “That’s not the Jewish community that I believe in, and that’s not the Jewish community I think we have.”

Kahane is a notorious figure.  He founded the Jewish Defense League, a U.S. organization designated a “terrorist” group by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the State Department and U.S. courts. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Jewish Defense League “has a long history of bombing, assaulting and threatening its perceived enemies. Its targets have included the Soviet Union, neo-Nazi activists, Palestinian leaders, prominent black Americans, and even Jewish moderates.”

Perhaps the most infamous act of violence by a follower of Kahane was the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre, when Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli-settler born in Brooklyn, murdered 29 Muslims praying at the Cave of the Patriarchs/Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.  The Israeli government outlawed the Kach political party, which was founded by Kahane, and an offshoot party, in the 1990′s.

Kahane advocated for the expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, an idea that still retains currency among Israeli political parties, as Avigdor Lieberman’s recent speech at the United Nations showed.

(Thanks to Jesse Bacon of Jewish Voice for Peace for tipping me off to this).

American Islamophobia, Inextricably Linked with Support for Israel

One of the themes that has arisen from my blogging lately on Israel/Palestine and anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States is the close connection American Zionism has with the existence of Islamophobia and anti-Arab attitudes here.

You can see it in the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s opposition to the Park51 Islamic community center in lower Manhattan; in how intertwined the opposition to the Park51 project is with big-wig Zionists’ funding; and in the alliance between far-right groups, who see the Israel/Palestine conflict as a key battle in the fight to end “Islamism,”and right-wing Zionists like Pamela Geller.

Continuing with that theme, Alia Malek, the author of A Country Called Amreeka: U.S. History Retold Through Arab-American Lives, has a new piece in the Nation magazine titled “Invisible Arab-Americans” that sums what I have been writing about up nicely:

The Arabs and Muslims who do exist in the American perception are overseas and foreign. We glimpse them as subjects of geopolitics and of American engagement in the Arab and Muslim worlds, which has often been adversarial and based on a reductionism that conflates many diverse countries, peoples and situations. This is not a dynamic that began with the “war on terror”; it has been in place since 1948, when the United States began to identify with the new state of Israel, which necessitated delegitimizing Palestinian national aspirations and any dissent from American-backed Israeli policies.

House Republicans Pal Around with anti-Muslim, anti-Black racist David Yerushalmi

It should come as no surprise that elected officials are aiding and
abetting anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S., especially with mid-term elections nearby.  But it was still a little shocking to read Think Progress national security blogger Matt Duss’ post on a newly released report titled “Sharia: The Threat to America.”

Duss writes that the report, authored by the neoconservative Center for Security Policy, was presented to Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) and Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI).  Here’s the slightly shocking part:  also attending the event Duss reported on was David Yerushalmi, the general counsel for the Center for Security Policy.

So just who is this Yerushalmi fellow that Republican politicians were palling around with?

Yerushalmi has been aptly described as a “Jewish fascist” by blogger Richard Silverstein.  As Silverstein highlighted in August 2007, Yerushalmi has said:

One must admit readily that the radical liberal Jew is a fact of the West and a destructive one…Indeed, Jews in the main have turned their backs on the belief in G-d and His commandments as a book of laws for a particular and chosen people…What interest does America have in a strong Israel? If your answer is democracy in a liberal or western sense, know you have sided with the Palestinians of Hamas.

Yerushalmi was a member of the Stop the Madrassa Coalition, which was instrumental in the anti-Arab, anti-Muslim smear campaign that brought down Debbie Almontaser, the founding principal of Khalil Gibran International Academy, a dual-language Arabic school in Brooklyn.  He has followed his Islamophobic buddies Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer in joining in their war against the Muslim community center near Ground Zero, and is an attorney with the so-called American Freedom Defense Initiative, which is run by Geller and Spencer.

That’s not even the worst part.  Charles Johnson, the blogger at the formerly right-wing, hawkish website Little Green Footballs who “parted ways with the right” for, in part, its “Anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide (see: Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, etc.),” has the rundown on Yerushalmi:

This is a good time for some background information on Pamela Geller’s associate David Yerushalmi, who is an advocate for criminalizing Islam itself and imposing 20-year sentences on practicing Muslims. Yes, really.

He’s not simply anti-Muslim, though; Yerushalmi also wrote a now-infamous article titled “On Race: A Tentative Discussion, Part II,” in which he advocated a return to a pre-Bill of Rights Constitution, and the restriction of voting rights to white male land-owners. Again … yes, really.

Here’s a lengthy article at Talk To Action on the bizarre views and causes of David Yerushalmi: Anti-Semitic White-Supremacist Orthodox Jew Tries To Ban Islam In US.

Yerushalmi has deleted as much evidence of the “On Race” article as he could; he removed it from the Internet Archive and the Google cache, and put his entire website behind a registration wall. But here’s a PDF that contains the full article, and it’s as ugly and twisted a piece of racism as anything I’ve ever seen. Yerushalmi opens by calling Islam “an evil religion,” and “blacks … the most murderous of peoples.”

A quote:

“There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote. You might not agree or like the idea but this country’s founders, otherwise held in the highest esteem for their understanding of human nature and its affect on political society, certainly took it seriously. Why is that? Were they so flawed in their political reckonings that they manhandled the most important aspect of a free society – the vote? If the vote counts for so much in a free and liberal democracy as we ‘know’ it today, why did they limit the vote so dramatically?”

So there you have it: House Republicans are openly associating themselves with a “Jewish fascist” who has called “blacks…the most murderous of peoples” and advocates for the criminalization of Islam.

9/11 anniversary weekend brings out spirited demonstrations

The following two pieces, one from last Friday night and the next from Saturday, originally appeared in the Indypendent:

On Night Before 9/11, New Yorkers Voice Strong Support for Muslim Community Center:

As the anniversary of 9/11 and the Islamophobic rally led by far-right blogger Pamela Geller converge today, over 1,000 New Yorkers gathered Sept. 10 at Park Place in lower Manhattan for a candlelight vigil in support of the proposed Muslim community center two blocks from Ground Zero that has ignited a national firestorm over Islam in America.

Organized by New York Neighbors for American Values, a new coalition of over 100 groups formed in response to the opposition to the Cordoba House project, faith leaders, elected officials, musicians and activists voiced strong support for the proposed Islamic community center, which will also include a September 11 memorial, a restaurant and culinary school and more.

“This is not just an issue I should support silently,” said Frank Fredericks, the co-director of Religious Freedom USA.  “This is a core, essential issue that Americans should stand up for.”

The supporters of the center, holding candles, filled more than two blocks, and some had to stand on a sidewalk across the street from the vigil.  The music of Bob Marley, John Lennon and a live rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” filled the air.

“There’s enough for all of us.  Nobody has to be thrown away.  We can do this thing if we hang together.  There’s enough room in this neighborhood for an Islamic center,” the keynote speaker of the event, Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN), the first Muslim elected to Congress, said.  “We don’t have to say they gotta go…They are our fellow Americans.”

The action came the night before the 9th anniversary of the September 11 attacks and a planned rally in lower Manhattan organized by the right-wing Stop Islamization of America group.  A counter-protest against Islamophobia and in support of Muslims backed by a broad left-wing coalition is also being held on September 11.

“No neighborhood should be off-limits for any particular group,” said Aliya Latif, the civil rights director for the New York chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations.

Stop Islamization of America, led by Geller and Robert Spencer of the anti-Muslim blog Jihad Watch, is protesting the planned Muslim community center two blocks away from Ground Zero, claiming that it is “an effort to insult the victims of 9/11 and to establish a beachhead for political Islam and Islamic supremacism in New York.”  Geller is a leading Islamophobic voice who has called for the removal of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, one of the most holy sites for Muslims, and has posted on her website a picture that replaced the Prophet Muhammad’s face with that of a pig. Spencer has compared the Islamic holy book, the Quran, to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and thinks that Islam is “innately extremist and violent.”

“I think we all know that nobody would object to a community center on Park Place unless it was sponsored by Muslims.  And no one can say with a straight face that that’s not based on religious discrimination,” said Richard Gottfried, a New York State Assemblyman.  “People who share American values do not do that.”

The vigil came in the midst of an increase of anti-Muslim sentiment across the country, stoked by the right-wing press.  There has been a spate of anti-Muslim actions over the past couple of weeks as the debate over the Muslim community center in New York has heated up.  While two-thirds of New York City residents want the proposed center to be moved farther away from the site of Ground Zero, a majority of Manhattan residents support the project, according to a recent New York Times poll.

“We have every right to worship wherever we want.  This country was founded on the basis of religious freedom,” said Rabyaah Althaibani, a Muslim Arab-American.

***

On 9/11 Anniversary, Park 51 Islamic Center Sparks Rallies, For and Against

(with Ellen Davidson)

Thousands rallied in Manhattan’s City Hall Park, near the site of Ground Zero, on the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks to denounce anti-Muslim bigotry, while blocks away an equal number demonstrated against the proposed Cordoba House Islamic community center at 51 Park Place in lower Manhattan.

At the Unity and Solidarity Rally, speakers denounced racism, urging protesters to fight growing anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Israel/Palestine conflict.  The multiracial crowd heard antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan, former U.S. Rep. and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, former U.S. Attorney Ramsey Clark, the Raging Grannies and representatives of peace, religious, labor, and community organizations including the Albany Central Labor Federation, the Bail Out the People Movement, Riverside Church, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, the Islamic Society of North America, United for Peace and Justice, the Center for Constitutional Rights and Veterans for Peace. The anti-Islamophobia protest was organized by the International Action Center and backed by a broad coalition of leftist, Muslim, Arab and Palestine solidarity groups.  Demonstrators marched to Foley Square, chanting and holding signs against anti-Muslim bigotry.

At the anti-Cordoba House rally, the mostly white participants waved U.S. flags and chanted “No mosque here.”  Speakers at the anti-community center rally included Pamela Geller, a leading voice on the Islamophobic right, and the notorious Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who has stated that he “hates Islam.”

View a slide show that features pictures from both actions here.


Islamophobia in New York, Redux: We Should Have Seen the Ground Zero Furor Coming

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf

When the Islamophobic furor against the proposed Muslim community center two-and-a-half blocks away from Ground Zero began to peak in mid-late July, some people wondered why it was occurring now, nine years after the 9/11 attacks.  As the New York Times recently noted, an article published in the paper “last December about the project drew little negative comment.”  Daisy Khan, the wife of the imam who is spearheading the Cordoba House, told the Times that the possibility of their project being controversial “never occurred” to them.

But there is no reason to be surprised at the anger over the community center.  While others have pointed to the economy, or to the recent surge in thwarted homegrown “terror” plots, to explain the anger over the community center, one can read what’s being played out as simply a continuation–albeit a much more intense strain–of the virulent anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment that began after the September 11 attacks.  Specifically, the concocted controversy over the Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA) in 2007 should have set off alarm bells about the power of Islamophobic activists whose aim is to shut Muslims and Arabs out of American public life.  The Brooklyn academy, the nation’s first dual-language Arabic public school, barely survived an onslaught of racist right-wing attacks against the school.  Unfortunately, the founding principal, Debbie Almontaser, was not spared, and fell victim to an orchestrated smear campaign not unlike the one now targeting Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf.

There are many parallels between the controversies around the Cordoba House and KGIA: both of the project’s leaders–Rauf and Almontaser–are well-known and respected interfaith leaders in New York City; both campaigns were begun by right-wing, Islamophobic blogs and leaders and were only later picked up by mainstream media; and both campaigns smeared Islam and demonstrated a profound ignorance about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Debbie Almontaser

Imam Rauf is currently being tarred as a “radical Muslim” who supports al-Qaeda and wants to build the Muslim community center to celebrate “Islamic triumphalism.” Almontaser, too, was painted as a Muslim radical and a “9/11 denier” whose school would secretly indoctrinate students to hate America and Israel and support sharia law.  The hysteria about Rauf and Almontaser misses basic, sobering facts about the two leaders: both of them have demonstrated a profound commitment to interfaith understanding between Muslims and other groups in the U.S. after 9/11 and have sought to fight anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stereotypes.  Rauf is a Sufi Muslim leader in New York who, as Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek put it, “speaks of the need for Muslims to live peacefully with all other religions…emphasizes the commonalities among all faiths…advocates equal rights for women, and argues against laws that in any way punish non-Muslims…His vision of Islam is bin Laden’s nightmare.”  Almontaser was described as “the city’s most visible Arab-American woman” in an excellent profile of her written by the New York Times’ Andrea Elliott:

After 9/11, Education Department officials had enlisted Ms. Almontaser to hold workshops on cultural sensitivity for schoolchildren. She spread the message that Islam was a peaceful religion. She told of how her own son had served as a National Guardsman in the clearing effort at ground zero. She was soon attending interfaith seminars, befriending rabbis and priests. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg honored her publicly.

But none of these facts seem to matter to the bigots who are trying to take down Rauf and the proposed community center, or who successfully forced Almontaser to resign as head of KGIA.

The current drive against the Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan was started by, as Salon‘s Justin Elliott has shown, “third-tier right-wing blogs, including Pamela Geller’s Atlas Shrugs site,” and quickly moved to the New York Post, as well as other mainstream media outlets.  Republican politicians have now taken up the cause, and it’s impossible to turn on cable news and not see a racist rant directed against Muslims in the U.S.  The anti-Cordoba House movement has now reached a fever pitch, but it has not yet invented the “smoking gun” that would mean the downfall of the initiative, as they did in the case of Almontaser.

There was a similar trajectory in the case of Almontaser and KGIA.   As soon as plans for the school were announced in February 2007, Pamela Geller and friends begun a campaign to shut what they called a “madrassa in New York’s public school system” down.  Daniel Pipes, a neoconservative author who has made a career out of stoking fears of Muslims and Arabs in the Western world, and the so-called “Stop the Madrassa” coalition, were instrumental in the targeting of KGIA.  Soon after the school was announced, assisted by columns by Pipes that mis-characterized and lied about the school, the story migrated to the New York Sun and eventually the New York Post. Almontaser’s downfall came after the Post labeled her the “‘intifada’” principal, as I reported for the Indypendent in September 2008:

The intense media focus on KGIA peaked when the New York Post picked up the story. The DOE pressured Almontaser to agree to an interview with the Post. In an Aug. 6, 2007, article, the Post declared that Almontaser “defended” the use of the word “intifada” on a t-shirt made by Arab Women Active in the Arts and Media (AWAAM), a group whose only connection to Almontaser was that she was on the board of a Yemeni-American organization that at times shared office space with AWAAM.

On Aug. 9, Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott, following what Almontaser says was a directive from Mayor Bloomberg, forced Almontaser to resign as KGIA principal, saying that either she or the academy had to go.

“That was the most horrendous and devastating 24 hours of my life,” Almontaser says. “To experience working with people who admired me and respected me and who believed in me, and then just to see a complete shift, basically saying that ‘you’re the problem’ … was absolutely devastating.”

The quote used by the Post to claim that Almontaser “defended” the use of the word “intifada” on a shirt was found later to have been “inaccurately reported by The Post and then misconstrued by the press,” according to a federal appeals court.  In March 2010 of this year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that New York City’s Department of Education “succumbed to the very bias that the creation of the school was intended to dispel, and asmall segment of the public succeeded in imposing its prejudices on the DOE as an employer.”

The conflating of Islam with terrorism and a demonstrated ignorance about the religion is another common feature of the furor over KGIA and the Cordoba House.  The opposition to the Islamic community center can only be justified by asserting collective Muslim guilt for the attacks of September 11, despite the fact that many Muslims died during the attack and the fact that al-Qaeda has killed more Muslims that any other religious group in the world.  Furthermore–and this is not to say that other sects of Islam aren’t also peaceful– Sufi Islam, which Imam Rauf is an adherent to, “couldn’t be farther from the violent Wahhabism of the jihadists. [Rauf's] videos and sermons preach love, the remembrance of God (or “zikr”) and reconciliation,” as William Dalrymple writes today in the Times.

In the case of KGIA, Pipes claimed that “Arabic instruction is heavy with Islamist and Arabist overtones and demands.”  According to Pipes, any teaching of Arabic is bound to promote Islamism–which, in Pipes’ world, is all one and the same, an ideology that promotes terrorism and al-Qaeda.

Lastly, let’s turn to the Israel-Palestine angle.  Imam Rauf has been pilloried for not condemning the Palestinian Hamas movement as a “terrorist organization,” as they are labeled by the U.S. State Department.  Rauf said, “Look, I’m not a politician.  The issue of terrorism is a very complex question.”  And he’s exactly right.  The State Dept. list of “terrorist groups” is a highly politicized grouping.  “Terrorism,” in mainstream parlance, has no real meaning besides armed struggle against the West and Israel.  If you support the U.S. or Israel, you’re not a terrorist.

To simply call Hamas a “terrorist” group is a disservice to understanding what Hamas, an Islamist movement, is.  Hamas has committed terrorist acts; but by the same token, so has the U.S. and Israel, but on a far larger scale.  Hamas is resisting a brutal occupation, whereas Israel is focused on continuing their colonization of Palestinian lands.

Almontaser attempted to explain the origin of the word “intifada,” which appeared on t-shirts made by Arab Women Active in the Arts and Media.  The Post, in the article that led to Almontaser’s forced resignation, spun her explanation as “downplaying” the significance of the t-shirts and the word intifada.  The Post reported that the  “inflammatory tees boldly declare ‘Intifada NYC’ – apparently a call for a Gaza-style uprising in the Big Apple.”  Further down in the story, they quote Pamela Hall, who fought against KGIA, as saying, “Intifada is a war. Isn’t that what Arafat had?”  Intifada, as Almontaser tried to explain in that Post article, “basically means ‘shaking off.’ That is the root word if you look it up in Arabic.”  The first Palestinian intifada was largely nonviolent.  And the second intifada, as Neve Gordon pointed out in his book Israel’s Occupation, began as a nonviolent popular uprising, but only turned violent after Israel brutally suppressed the uprising, firing 1.3 million bullets into the West Bank and Gaza Strip after Israeli security forces were directed to “fan the flames”, as Haaretz’s Akiva Eldar reported in 2004.

These misunderstandings and distortions about the situation in occupied Palestine have added fuel to the Islamophobic fire.

The lesson of the KGIA controversy should have been that Islamophobes hold a disturbing amount of power in the United States and that anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment needs to be combated.  So it’s no surprise that Islamophobia continues to be a potent political weapon.  Perhaps we should take this opportunity to double-down on our efforts to combat Islamophobia, so when the next furor over Islam in the U.S. comes–and it will–education and activism can successfully tamp down these dangerous games being played.  If we didn’t learn that lesson after KGIA, we better learn it now.

A depressing statistic: 71 percent of NYC Jews oppose Islamic community center

Tablet Magazine‘s Marc Tracy picks up a depressing statistic out of a new Marist poll:  71 percent of New York City Jews who are registered voters oppose the building of the Islamic community center two blocks away from Ground Zero.

Given that Jewish-Americans are a reliably liberal group on most issues, that statistic says a lot about the nature of the mainstream discourse about Islam and how Islamophobia is accepted in this country.  It’s a big problem, and one that needs to be combated.

Also–and I don’t think this is just me connecting Israel to every single issue–there’s a Zionist angle to analyzing that statistic.  Many Jewish-Americans, especially older ones, still have a deep, emotional connection to the State of Israel.  They see Israel has being besieged by those terrible, genocidal Arabs and Muslims.  Just look at Jeffrey Goldberg’s latest piece in the Atlantic, where he points out that Israel sees the Islamic Republic of Iran as “a threat to Israel’s very existence.”  That notion glosses over the complexity of Iranian society and the fact that, as Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett point out in Foreign Policy, “roughly 25,000-30,000 Jews continue living in Iran, with civil status equal to other Iranians and a constitutionally guaranteed parliamentary seat.”  And in the United States, Arabs and Muslims are often lumped in to one big, giant mass of people who are anti-Semites.  That misses the diversity of the Arab and Muslim worlds, the distinction between the likes of al-Qaeda (who only represent a tiny sliver of Muslims) and Hamas and Hezbollah, and contributes to a complete misreading of the Israel/Palestine conflict.