RIP Mohammad Saleem

Death by brown skin

Sunando Sen, a 46-year-old Indian immigrant, recently opened a small copying and printing business in New York City’s Upper West Side with his hard-earned savings. Described by friends as “very educated” and “so quiet, so gentle, so nice,” Sen’s American dream ended in tragedy last Thursday when Erika Menendez fatally pushed him in front of an oncoming subway train.

Menendez admitted the hate crime, explaining she “pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up.”

Never mind that Sen was raised Hindu and the 9-11 terrorist attacks were coordinated by 19 foreign hijackers primarily from Saudi Arabia.

An unbalanced, paranoid mind marinated in our oversaturated Islamophobic environment is numb to such cultural specifics and susceptible to conflate anyone appearing “Muslimy” as the “enemy.”

Although Islamophobes did not cause the NYC murder, they contaminate civil society with their toxic ideological fuel and remain a beacon for bigots, hate-mongers, and the mentally unhinged, all of whom emerge from the same diseased infrastructure.

Citizens of this dangerous, fringe minority include Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, who killed 77 individuals last summer to punish Europe’s alleged leniency towards Muslims and multiculturalism. Upon reviewing Breivik’s 1,500 page anti-Muslim manifesto, which frequently cites notable American Islamophobes, counter-terrorism expert Marc Sagemen concluded thisIslamophobic  rhetoric is “not cost free.”

The cost of such hate is mostly borne by members of the AMEMSA (Arab Middle Eastern Muslim South Asian) communities, however the tainted profit is collected by bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, co-founders of the “hate group” Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), part of the lucrative  “Islamophobia network” subsidized by inciting fear-mongering and misinformation against Muslims.

SIOA claims that it is a “human rights organization dedicated to freedom of speech, religious liberty, and individual rights; no special rights for special classes.” However, the Anti Defamation League reviewed SIOA’s activities and concluded SIOA “promotes a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda under the guise of fighting radical Islam. The group seeks to rouse public fears by consistently vilifying the Islamic faith and asserting the existence of an Islamic conspiracy to destroy ‘American’ values.”

In the fall, SIOA purchased inflammatory anti-Muslim ads that continue to appear in New York City and Washington D.C. metro stations and buses.  One ad reads: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel, Defeat jihad,” suggesting all Muslims are savages. Another ad features a picture of the World Trade Center towers burning next to two Quran quotes.

In light of SIOA’s recent propaganda in NYC subway stations, it is not far-fetched to wonder if Menendez’s hate toward Sen was in some way influenced by these ads.

After news broke of Sen’s murder, Robert Spencer tweeted what sounded like a justification for senseless, anti-Muslim hate crimes: “If Muslims would stop doing evil in name of Islam and jihad, no one would respond with evil to them.”

This is typical rhetoric from Spencer, a hack whose writings are so toxic they reverberate globally and damage both national security and our relationship with Muslim communities abroad. Before her death, Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Benazhir Bhutto name-checkedSpencer in her biography as an individual who “uses the Internet to spread misinformation and hatred of Islam…he presents a skewed, one-sided, and inflammatory story that only helps sow the seeds of civilizational conflict.”

Spencer’s blog “Jihad Watch” was cited more than 162 times in mass murderer Breivik’s manifesto.  Spencer has published the writings of Serge Trifovic, one of the leaders of the Bosnian Serbs during the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims. Spencer believes the neo-Nazi group English Defense League “deserves the support of all free people.”

Spencer’s colleague in hate, Pam Geller, who never met an anti-Muslim conspiracy theory she didn’t immediately publish as fact, believes “devout Muslims should be prohibited from military service. Would Patton have recruited Nazis into his army?” She also thinks President Obama is a Muslim, illegitimate son of Malcolm X who once went to Pakistan for drugs and jihad, and that the Arabic language is a spearhead for anti-Americanism. She believes stealth jihadists have infiltrated Disneyland because employees wear headscarves to work. Like Spencer, Pamela Geller once strongly endorsed the English Defense League writing, “I share the EDL’s goals… We need to encourage rational, reasonable groups that oppose the Islamisation of the West.”

In a perfect world, these rantings would be amusing fodder for an amateur comic.  However, when over 60% of Americans say they do not know a Muslim and Islam has its lowest favorability rating ever, extremists like Geller and Spencer disproportionately inform and influence the nation’s conversation and perceptions about Islam and Muslims.

According to a new quantitive analysis published by the American Sociological Review, sociologist Christopher Bail mentions Stop Islamization of America as one of the “angry and fearful fringe organizations” that “not only exerted powerful influence on media discourse about Muslims in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, but ultimately became some of the most influential mainstream groups in the field. By 2008, these fringe organizations not only permeated the mainstream but also forged vast social networks that consolidated their capacity to create cultural change.”

These Islamophobic memes do not exist in a victimless vacuum. There is a cost to such dissemination of hate.

In 2012, The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reported a 300 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate groups. In 2010, the FBI reported unprecedented 50 percent rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes, with 160 reported cases. In 2011, the number dipped slightly to 157.

SPLC mentions the 2010 Ground Zero Mosque debate as the key driver for the recent surge in anti-Muslim sentiment. The controversy and subsequent protests against the Park 51 community center, which is neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero, was directly manufactured and orchestrated by Pamela Geller and SIOA. Now, there are over 50 ongoing nationwide movements against allowing Muslims to build their constitutionally protected houses of worship.

Recently, a man convicted of setting fire to an Ohio mosque said Fox News convinced him all Muslims are “terrorists.”

Last August, recently defeated Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) told a town hall in Chicago that Muslims in America are “trying to kill Americans every week.” A few days later, air rifle shots were fired at a mosque in north suburban Morton Grove, Illinois. Soon after, someone hurled a 7-Up bottle filled with acid and other unspecified materials at an Islamic school in Chicago during nighttime Ramadan prayers.

Nearly 31 states have introduced an anti-sharia bill, which is about as necessary as a bill banning big-foot or unicorns.  Yet, 6 states have passed it (Louisiana, Arizona, Tennessee, Kansas, South Dakota, Oklahoma.)  The author of the bill is attorney David Yerushalmi, who serves as counsel to none other than Pamela Geller.

Islamophobia is not just a “Muslim” issue. It never was. Sadly, it is a cancer affecting all our communities.

Sen’s horrific death was yet another episode in which an innocent individual’s brown skin tragically caused him to be mistaken as an anti-American threat. Last August, White supremacist Wade Michael Page murdered six Sikh Americans at their Wisconsin temple. The first post 9-11 hate crime murder was of Arizona gas station owner Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh American specifically chosen by the murderer because he was “dark-skinned, bearded and wore a turban.”

A senseless tragedy like this affords an opportunity, requires necessity and demands urgency for diverse American communities, especially Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus, to unite in solidarity against hate and intolerance. In America, there exists space for legitimate criticism, debate, and discussion about  religion, race, and ethnicity. But we must finally confront ourselves and ask how do we, as a society, benefit from hysteria, fear and scapegoating? What do these Islamophobes inspire except division and lucrative, personal paychecks?

Yes, we give the KKK a freedom to speak their nonsense, but we as citizens and as a nation have disempowered them, denied them a mainstream platform and silenced their megaphone.

The question now at hand is how many Sens and Sodhis will it take to expose these fringe Islamophobic voices, marginalize them, and move onward, together, as they slither in shame and eventually drown in their own irrelevance. 

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Pamela Geller: ‘I Endorse Herman Cain. What He Doesn’t Know, We’ll Teach Him’

Is this the kind of help Herman Cain is looking for this week?

Cain has now picked up a top endorsement from the right-wing blogosphere: Pamela Geller, the anti-Islam campaigner and Birther.

Geller posted an entry on her blog Wednesday evening, declaring her support for Cain. In the past, Geller has criticized Cain, when he backed down from his statement that local communities should be able to ban mosques. She had also hoped that Sarah Palin would run, a dream that came to naught when Palin declared a month ago that she would not run.

But now, recent developments have put her on board. Specifically, the allegations of past sexual harassment against Cain — and the counter-accusation from Team Cain that the Rick Perry campaign was behind it — have changed her mind. Geller has long detested Perry, calling him soft on “stealth jihad” by Muslims in America.

Key quote from Geller’s new blog post, with emphasis in the original:

Perry is a snake. Watch him. He is creepy. And his drunken, freak show speech this past weekend belonged in a Roger Corman film.

I questioned his very bad judgment when I exposed his entire Islamic curriculum, dawah and proselytizing, to Texas school children. But this? Perry is a really bad guy. Only a lowlife (or a Democrat — Perry was Al Gore’s campaign manager) would eliminate a better man with innuendo and gossip. Men like Perry do not win on merit.

I endorse Herman Cain. What he doesn’t know, we’ll teach him.

Geller, author of a recent book Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance, is perhaps best known for her campaigning against the Park51 project, a Muslim community center in downtown New York City that Geller and others have dubbed the “Ground Zero Mosque,” declaring that it is part of an international Muslim effort to subjugate America.

In addition, Geller called for a boycott of Campbell’s soup, when the company introduced a line of halal-certified products. In her denunciation of halal food, she has also made accusations that it is secretly being sold to non-Muslims: “we are being forced into consuming meat slaughtered by means of a barbaric, torturous, and inhuman method: Islamic slaughter, the cutting of the animal’s throat without stunning or any other form of mitigation for the animal’s pain.” It should be noted that this aspect of halal meat slaughter is the same as the Jewish kosher dietary rules.

She has also been waging a legal battle against the city’s transit authority, over their refusal of her submitted subway ad calling for support of Israel: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.”

Also, some of her more creative claims have come from her contributions to the Birther conspiracy theory, alleging that President Obama is ineligible for the Oval Office. In addition to the standard claim insisting that the president’s birth certificate is “an obvious forgery,” Geller has also alleged that the marriage of the president’s parents was not legally valid — and that people like Obama had different rights in 1789: “Illegitimate children had different rights — at least they certainly did in 1789. There is no way that the founders of this great nation intended for an illegitimate child of a foreign bigamist to attain the highest, most powerful position in the new land.”
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Department of Homeland Security officer disciplined over anti-Muslim hate comments on Facebook

A veteran officer with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in Chicago is being disciplined after posting hundreds of racist and derogatory comments on Facebook.

His name is Roy Egan. Not only were Officer Egan's racial and religious rants open for anyone to see, for years he openly identified himself by name on Facebook and listed his employer as U.S. Homeland Security-TSA, the Transportation Security Administration.

For the past nine years, Egan has worked as a TSA baggage screener at O'Hare Airport. The 46-year-old has noted on his Facebook page, "I look for bad stuff going on airplanes."

But it wasn't Egan's personal data that caught the eye of the I-Team. It was his public postings calling "Islam a cult that glorifies death...and a filthy religion." It is a theme Egan repeated in postings just about every day: that Muslims should be exterminated.

In the garage at Egan's southwest suburban home, the I-Team questioned the nine-year TSA officer about his anti-Muslim statements.

Goudie: You posted those, didn't you?
Egan: It was common stuff I picked off the web and made comments on.
Goudie: What does it say that a TSA officer is saying these kinds of things about Muslims?
Egan: I don't refer to it in my job.

Egan's job is to screen baggage at O'Hare. Since 9/11, the treatment of Muslim travelers and allegations of Middle Eastern profiling, have dogged Homeland Security agencies.

Officer Egan recently posted, "does anything at all make you smile more than a Muslim burning by his own hateful hand." He maintains such beliefs don't interfere with his work.

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