Wanted at #OccupyWallStreet: Coalition building across NYC communities

This article originally appeared in Waging Nonviolence.  It’s also worth checking out the response of journalist Nathan Schneider, who has been providing the best coverage of the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests.

The burgeoning #OccupyWallStreet protest made headlines again on Saturday night when hundreds of demonstrators were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge.  And once again, the tried-and-true media narrative of protesters vs. police is played up.

It could be argued that the story here is not about police arrests and should instead be about the growing movement occupying public space across the United States as a symbol of disgust with the U.S. economic system.  That’s true, but you can’t expect corporate media to focus on the real story.  What’s also true is that the media’s focus on that narrative, and #OccupyWallStreet’s revulsion with the New York Police Department’s tactics, is an opportunity for coalition building with marginalized communities in the city.

Kai Wright, editor of the excellent ColorLines website, notes that the demonstrators are “largely young and white.” He also writes critically that the #OccupyWallStreet demonstrators have not included those “millions of people who have been kicked out of their homes, laid off or forced to work multiple part-time jobs, caught in predatory debt traps and, yes, so harassed by cops that they have petty criminal records that make them unemployable.”

Wright continues:

These millions are neither lobbying Congress nor marching across the Brooklyn Bridge; they’re trying to make it through the week without another crisis. They are also overwhelmingly and not in the least bit coincidentally black people. And I suspect that until we build our politics around their participation, we will continue to miss the point.

Wright’s point is salient, although there are certainly black people and those who have lost their homes now down at Liberty Plaza.  And there are probably few protesters at Liberty Plaza right now who would disagree with Wright’s call.  The question is how to garner the participation of those in marginalized communities and build strong links with the protesters who do come from those communities.

Labor’s willingness to get on board the occupation is one way.  The Transit Workers Union, which has come out strong for the protesters, has a largely Black, Latino and immigrant workforce.  But that’s not enough.

#OccupyWallStreet, which will continue to battle the police in the coming days, should be building bridges with communities who suffer the most from NYPD policing tactics.  Anger at the department’s “stop and frisk” policy, which is overwhelmingly directed at poor Black and Latino men in New York City, is high.  So is anger at the NYPD’s recently exposed spying program on NYC Muslim communities.  What’s a better way to connect the struggles of communities of color and the #OccupyWallStreet demonstrators than marching specifically against those policies and the heavy-handed NYPD tactics used on #OccupyWallStreet?

Last Friday’s protest against police brutality was certainly a start.  The upcoming October 22 protest against police brutality, an annual event, could be the next step.  #OccupyWallStreet should use existing anger at police brutality and connect the struggle against inequality to the struggle against police brutality.  After all, both the policing and economic systems in this country target poor people in communities of color.  Making those explicit connections could be a powerful boost to the growing movement to occupy Wall Street, and the United States.

Far-right Jewish white supremacist authors Tennessee anti-Islam bill

The wave of Islamophobia continues to spread across the United States, as a Tennessee bill now on the table would make “following the Islamic code known as Shariah law a felony, punishable by 15 years in jail.”  The author behind this bill, one of 15 similar pieces of legislation being considered in states around the U.S., is a notorious, far-right figure:  David Yerushalmi.

Mother Jones‘ Tim Murphy has the story:

Yerushalmi, a lawyer, is the founder of the Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), which has been called a “hate group” by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). His draft legislation served as the foundation for the Tennessee bill, and at least half a dozen other anti-Islam measures—including two bills that were signed into law last year in Louisiana and Tennessee.

With the exception of SB 1028, much of Yerushalmi’s legislation sounds pretty innocuous: State courts are prohibited from considering any foreign law that doesn’t fully honor the rights enshrined in the US and state constitutions. Because a Taliban-style interpretation of Islamic law is unheard of in the United States, the law’s impact is non-existent at best. But critics of some of the proposed bills have argued they could have far-reaching and unintended consequences, like undoing anti-kidnapping statutes, and hindering the ability of local companies to enter into contracts overseas.

But Tennessee’s SB 1028 goes much further, defining traditional Islamic law as counter to constitutional principles, and authorizing the state’s attorney general to freeze the assets of organizations that have been determined to be promoting or supporting Sharia. On Monday, CAIR and the ACLU called for lawmakers to defeat the bill.

Yerushalmi has quite the checkered past.  Here’s what I wrote on him following an event in which two Congressional Republicans were presented a report, co-authored by Yerushalmi, on the “threat” sharia law apparently poses to the U.S.:

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?”

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.

American Neocons and Zionists Embrace Far-right Dutch Pol Geert Wilders

Match made in heaven: Far-right blogger Pam Geller and Dutch politician Geert Wilders. Photo: atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com

Geert Wilders, the far-right Dutch politician, wants to bring his noxious brand of Islamophobia into mainstream American politics.  It looks like he’s succeeding, and prominent figures on the American right are actively courting him.

He has already had his voice heard and amplified by anti-Muslim blogs like Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch.  And on September 11, Wilders told a crowd gathered to protest the Muslim community center near Ground Zero that “New York, rooted in Dutch tolerance, will never become New Mecca…In the name of freedom: No mosque here!”

Ferry Biedermann, a correspondent for Dutch and international media in the Middle East, provides details (emphasis mine) on some of the American allies Wilders has in a piece in Foreign Policy titled “Mainstreaming Hate”:

Not that long ago, both American Democrats and Republicans were considered rightwing by Dutch, and indeed European, standards. No longer. Wilders sometimes makes the likes of Fox News host Glenn Beck, anti-Muslim blogger Pamela Geller, and even the most extreme fringes of the Tea Party crowd look like moderates — and the comparison is not a random one. Several Dutch media outlets have delved into ideological and financial ties between Wilders and American archconservatives such as David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, and Jim DeMint. In an article this May, the respected Dutch NRC newspaper reported that Horowitz had brought Wilders over for a “conservative conference in California” at the end of 2009, attended by DeMint and Liz Cheney, among others. It also quotes Pipes as saying that he had gathered a “six-figure sum” to support Wilders…

Some Dutch analysts warn that it is a mistake to “blacken” Wilders’s name too much or lump him with fascism or Nazism. “For one, he’s not anti-Semitic,” says Alfred Pijpers of the Clingendael Institute of International Relations in The Hague. Israeli officials have indeed privately commended him as “a friend of Israel.” Pijpers says that Wilders has more in common with the Tea Party activists in the United States than with any old-style European right-wing party

Here are some of Wilders’ political positions concerning Muslims and Islam:

He has called for a “head rag tax” on women wearing headscarves. He favors banning the Quran, wants to close Muslim schools but not equivalent Christian or Jewish ones, wants to force immigrants to sign “assimilation contracts,” and wants to include the “Judeo-Christian character” of the state in the constitution.

This should be a scandal in American politics, especially because people who have political power, such as Jim DeMint, a senator from South Carolina, are tied to Wilders.  This Foreign Policy piece further underscores the troubling ties that bind together Zionism, American neoconservatism and Islamophobia.

UPDATE:  I should have added in links to these excellent pieces by Ali Gharib, a blogger at the Inter Press Service’s LobeLog: Dutch MP Geert Wilders and U.S. Allies Tied to European Far Right and Frum Whitewashes Dutch Islamophobe.

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.

Anti-Defamation League Condemns ‘Anti-Muslim Sentiment’ to which it Contributes

A month after the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the “nation’s premier civil rights” agency (in their words), came out against building an Islamic community center blocks away from Ground Zero because “building [it] in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain,” the ADL is now condemning the anti-Muslim stabbing that occurred in New York City Aug. 25.

The ADL statement condemned the attack “in the strongest terms,” saying that the incident was “especially disturbing” because it occurred “amid an atmosphere of elevated anti-Muslim sentiment surrounding the Ground Zero controversy.”

When the ADL came out against the proposed Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan, it took pains to say that the group “categorically reject[s] appeals to bigotry on the basis of religion.”  But no matter the ADL’s intent, their statement against the Muslim center contributed to the very same “elevated anti-Muslim sentiment” that is no doubt connected to the stabbing of Ahmed Sharif, a New York City taxi driver.  The ADL should look in the mirror before it begins to lecture others on anti-Muslim sentiment.

It’s true that the ADL statement against the Park51 project was mild compared to the hateful rhetoric coming from the likes of Pamela Geller, Newt Gingrich and Rick Lazio.  However, the ADL’s statement can only be read as holding the whole of Islam and Muslims as somehow responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001.  The only reason why the proposed center would “offend” the sensitivities of the victims of 9/11 is if the ADL concludes that Islam attacked the United States on that day.

It is the height of hypocrisy for the ADL to condemn the stabbing of Sharif and the general hate of Muslims engulfing the United States without looking at their statement against Park51 again and realizing that they have played a central role in legitimizing that anti-Muslim sentiment.  Their gentile opposition to the project has emboldened the hate-mongers on the right that are aiming to shut this project, and proposals to build mosques around the country, down.