“Who Defines Islam In America?”: Muslims Must Learn To Define Themselves
You may have heard by now about the event over the weekend where more than 1,000 Muslims joined hands and formed a “peace ring” around a synagogue in Oslo, Norway in sub-zero temperatures. Why? Because the Muslims in that city wanted to make it clear they oppose anti-Semitism. As one of the Muslim organizers, Zeeshan Abdullah, explained: “There’s still hope for humanity, for peace and love, across religious differences and backgrounds.”
So with the Muslims standing side by side with Jews, Norway’s chief Rabbi Michael Melchior sang the traditional song marking the end of the Sabbath. The head of Norway’s Jewish community organization, Ervin Kohn, added, “It is unique that Muslims stand to this degree against anti-Semitism and that fills us with hope… particularly as it’s a grassroots movement of young Muslims.”
This was truly an inspirational event. One that helps define Islam accurately, as opposed to the way ISIS and al Qaeda are striving to define the faith.
This story, happily, did end up going viral. But another story about Muslims this weekend made bigger headlines and top-lined media websites across the country. That was the threat made by the Somali terrorist group Al Shabaab that it was targeting shopping malls in North America, including the Mall of America in Minneapolis. The Norway event got loads of play in social media, and to some extent the traditional media. But the mall threat was top-of-the-hour news everywhere.
And that is a perfect example to explain who defines Islam in America: The media. The adage, “If it bleeds, it leads,” can be updated to “If threatens to cause bleeding, it leads.” So a story about Muslims doing what Islam calls for doesn’t hold a candle to one where Muslims act in violation of the faith is glorified.
We constantly see wall-to-wall coverage of the tiny percent of bad Muslims. Keep in mind that if ISIS is truly 30,000 fighters that means it represents .02 percent of the 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide. We are talking less than a third of 1 percent of Muslims.
Yet our media barely covers the stories about the other 99.98 percent of Muslims. How often have you seen segments in the news about the interfaith work in the United States, such as the efforts of Rabbi Marc Schneier and Imam Shamsi Ali? Or Muslim groups denouncing terrorism, or even stories about the millions of other Muslims simply living their lives?
Here’s another example of the media defining Islam more than the faith does. Last week, The Atlantic ran a front-page story telling readers: “The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic.” The article’s conclusion was based on interviews with a handful of extremist Muslims, including Anjem Choudary, a person with no following of note and who has been continually denounced by mainstream Muslim leaders.
This would be the equivalent of relying on the Christian pastor in Arizona who in December called for the mass killing of all gays, which he claimed is mandated by the Bible, as revealing what Christianity is truly about.
Still the Atlantic story was extensively covered in media in the framework of being accurate. However, when over 120 Islamic scholars and clerics released a letter in September detailing in specificity how the actions of ISIS—such as beheading aid workers and forcing conversion to Islam—violated the principles of Islam, that received far less media attention.
Same goes for when Muslims are killed by terrorists. In the Charlie Hebdo attack, the police officer we saw shot and killed while lying wounded on the sidewalk was Ahmed Merabet, a Muslim who gave his life defending freedom of expression. While some media outlets covered that angle, it was a minor part of the story. The result is that the two terrorists defined Islam far more than Merabet.
And while our media rightly covered the recent despicable murder of 21 Egyptian Christians by ISIS, why don’t we see similar coverage of the literally daily slaughtering of Muslims by ISIS? The media’s failure to cover the Muslim men, women, and children killed by ISIS furthers the narrative that this is a war by Islam against the West, as opposed to what it truly is: ISIS versus everyone, Muslims included (and indeed on the front lines), who won’t submit to them.
While we hear other minority groups in the United States also bemoan the media’s obsession with covering their worst examples, the Muslim American community is unique. We are far more dependent upon the media in defining who we are since we are tiny, clocking in at about 1 to 2 percent of our nation’s population. And only 38 percent of Americans, per a Pew poll released last summer, actually know a Muslim.
So what can be done to change the media’s coverage? Well, complaining might have a slight impact, but I doubt it will change much.
But I did learn a valuable lesson this weekend. I tweeted out the article about the Muslims in Oslo, which ultimately made its way to Rush Limbaugh’s younger brother, David. (He’s also conservative.) He then tweeted out the link to the story with the words: “Bravo. Credit where credit is due” and included the link to the story. In turn, others shared the story.
The lesson is that to change media coverage, we, Muslims, need to strategically plan how to attract media coverage in a way that enables us to tell people what we are truly about. To date, we have focused on denouncing terrorism perpetrated by Muslims. But that isn’t working. First, not many people hear it because the media barely covers press events of Muslims condemning terrorism.
But more importantly, simply focusing on telling people what we are not does little to define who we are. Consequently, many of our fellow Americans don’t know what Islam is truly about and have no way of knowing that the terrorists are the exception, not the norm. We must change that.
True, it’s unlikely we can eclipse the coverage of the terrorists given the business model of the media. But perhaps we can at least create a counter narrative that chips away little by little at the inaccurate image created by the terrorists. I know that is a tall order, but it’s better than simply complaining and hoping things will change for the better.
By: Dean Obeidallah, The Daily Beast, February 24, 2015
“The Strategy Of Confederate Republicans”: I’m Glad That The GOP Has Decided To Come Out Of The Closet As Openly Racist
Steve Scalise, the House Republican Whip-elect, appears to be surviving the flap over his appearance at a David Duke-organized event. It’s good to be able to welcome the New Year with a word of praise for the party I oppose. I’m glad that the GOP has decided to come out of the closet as openly racist.
The event itself has been misdescribed in the press as “white supremacist;” in fact, David Duke’s keynote speech didn’t even mention black-white issues, instead focusing on anti-Jewish themes. “Neo-Nazi” would give a much clearer picture of what EURO was really about.
Still – as even Erick Erickson has pointed out – there was never any doubt of what David Duke, the Klan Wizard, was about. He’s the kind of batsh*t-crazy racist who isn’t sure Jews are actually “white” (and, a generation or two ago, would have had the same doubts about the Irish and the Italians).
So what did Steve Scalise, aspiring Louisiana politician, have to say about David Duke?
The voters in this district are smart enough to realize that they need to get behind someone who not only believes in the issues they care about, but also can get elected. Duke has proven that he can’t get elected, and that’s the first and most important thing.
Well, that couldn’t be clearer, could it? “The first and most important thing” is to get elected. Politicians who frankly campaign on their hatred of blacks and Jews can’t get elected. So voters who “care about” hating blacks and Jews need to find politicians like Steve Scalise, who “believes in” Duke’s message but won’t say so explicitly, because such politicians can get elected.
That sums up the current strategy of the Confederate Republicans about as clearly as I’ve ever heard it summed up: seek the votes of bigots by winking at them, and by pursuing policies that are hostile to African-American interests without being explicitly racist. So it’s entirely appropriate that Scalise should have been chosen for, and remain in, the House Republican leadership.
It’s also entirely appropriate, of course, for those who don’t approve of bigotry not to be taken in. Somebody needs to explain that slowly to the ADL.
By: Mark Kleiman, Professor of Public Policy at The University of California Los Angeles; Ten Miles Square, The Washington Monthly, January 2, 2014
“Questioning Our Questions”: In Faith As In Science, Finding The Right Answers Inevitably Involves Questioning Our Own Questions
It is a mark of our pluralistic moment that I learned of an old joke among rabbis from the writings of a great Christian scholar, Jaroslav Pelikan.
In his book “Jesus Through the Centuries,” Pelikan tells the story of a rabbi who is challenged by one of his pupils: “Why is it that you rabbis so often put your teaching in the form of a question?” To which the rabbi replies: “So what’s wrong with a question?”
Trying to imagine what will matter in a new year is daunting, but it takes no clairvoyance to see that in 2015, one of the struggles around the globe will be between those who acknowledge that religion is as much about questions as answers and those who have such a profound certainty about their answers that they will kill in the name of the divine.
To cast the matter this way, I know, invites dissent from both believers and nonbelievers. The believer can plausibly argue that you can be utterly certain about the truth without killing anyone. Nonbelievers might note that both halves of my formulation undercut religion. If religion is primarily about questions, what truth can it contain? And if it preaches certainty, where is the space for dissent and dialogue?
Holding on to faith’s middle ground — what my friend Arnie Eisen calls “moderate religion” — is one of the most important tasks in the world now. Eisen, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, is not referring to a faith that is weak or tepid. Rather, he thinks that all traditions need to recognize the radically new situation in which they find themselves.
“The job market is global, and so is the thought-and-values market,” Eisen said in a lecture in November in Jerusalem. “It is more difficult for ‘The People of the Book’ to sustain the belief that it is in any meaningful sense ‘The Chosen People’ — or is ‘the’ anything — because an unlimited diversity of claims is literally in our face every time we look at a screen on a laptop or smartphone.”
Admitting this does not produce all the answers, but, as the rabbi in the story might say, it does lead to the right questions.
My hunch is that Pope Francis’s understanding of Eisen’s point has much to do with his worldwide popularity. A recent Pew survey across 43 nations found Francis with a median favorable rating of 60 percent and an unfavorable rating of just 11 percent.
Political consultants would love to have access to the pope’s secret sauce. Some of the ingredients are clearly personal: Francis conveys the reflectiveness of a holy man and the compassion that most hope religious engagement encourages. But he also manages to juggle the imperative of making tough judgments, especially about injustice and poverty, with an awareness that justice without mercy and understanding (“Who am I to judge?”) lacks both humanity and the sense of a God whose most important characteristic is mercy.
By simultaneously conveying a certainty about what his faith teaches him and a confident openness to those who are seeking answers along other paths, Francis gives an intimation of what holiness needs to look like in the 21st century.
One of my favorite political acts at the end of 2014 was the Senate’s confirmation of Rabbi David Saperstein as the State Department’s ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom. I admire Saperstein for many reasons, but why I think he is perfect for his new job was illustrated during his 2004 visit to my Religion and Politics class at Georgetown University.
It was around the time that Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” was released. Saperstein had been a sharp critic of what he (and many others) saw as anti-Semitic tropes in the movie. But several of my students had appreciated the film. Rather than launch into an attack on Gibson’s work, Saperstein invited them to have their say.
When he finally did express his view, Saperstein began with these words: “If you believe that the birth of Jesus Christ is the most important event in human history, you cannot help but be moved by this movie.” Only then did he offer his critique.
Religious freedom will thrive and religion itself will be a force for good only if religious people can convey this sort of empathetic understanding of the truths that others hold dear. In faith as in science, finding the right answers inevitably involves questioning our own questions.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 31, 2014
“Typical, Old-Fashioned, Indulgent Louisiana Republican”: Why Nobody Who Knows Louisiana Believes Steve Scalise
House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) has admitted that he delivered a speech to a so-called “white rights” conference in 2002 that was held by an organization known as EURO, headed by the neo-Nazi leader David Duke. Scalise has also insisted that he shares American society’s abhorrence of such “hate groups” — and that he did not know what kind of group he was talking to. He is asking the public to believe that he did not notice any of the virulent racist and anti-Semitic talk by the Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and assorted white nationalists in attendance at this gathering.
But Louisiana Republicans have had a David Duke problem since 1989, when Duke won a state assembly seat. He had been a neo-Nazi ideologue since his youth; he had paraded one night in full Nazi uniform with a swastika armband at the state university; and he had made the “international Jewish conspiracy” central to his Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. Even after he was elected, Duke was still selling Holocaust denial books from his state legislative office.
Yet the Louisiana State Republican Party Central Committee refused to either investigate Duke’s views or pass a censure motion, despite the repeated efforts of Beth Rickey, a Central Committee member. When Duke said he had changed his beliefs, his fellow Republicans and many white Louisianans decided to believe him.
Then in 1990 and 1991 Duke ran in two consecutive statewide elections in Louisiana — for U.S. senator and governor — and won a majority of the white vote both times. The state was saved by black voters, whose ballots defeated him. Again, the state Republican Party refused to investigate Duke’s actual positions. Nevertheless, his worldview became the central issue in those campaigns. And after Duke equated affirmative action with the extermination of European Jews, President George H.W. Bush stepped in to denounce him. Once more, local Republicans remained silent. Scalise, who was 25 years old in 1990, could not have missed this debate, which made national news.
A few years later, Duke finally gave up his Republican “my views have changed” smokescreen. He published an Aryan primer as an autobiography in 1998, was convicted of tax fraud and went to federal prison in 2002, and began a prolonged public rant and rave about Jews that continues to this date. At the time of the EURO meeting with Scalise, Duke was overseas, attempting to avoid indictment, and addressed the gathering in Metairie, LA, via long-distance video hookup.
It is hard to believe that Steve Scalise, a sentient adult, missed all this, particularly as he was running for re-election to the state legislature in 2002. It is much easier to believe that he had the typical, old-fashioned, indulgent Louisiana Republican attitude toward David Duke. The question remains: Are there any national Republican leaders who will stand up, as President George H. W. Bush did in the 1990s, and speak the truth?
By: Leonard Zeskind, The National Memo, December 30, 2014
“The Faithful Are Spinning Out Of Control”: The Bizarre Behavior Of Christian Conservatives This Week
If Christianity had its own PR flack, he would be slamming his fist on the desk right about now, as the faithful are spinning out of control.
A Tennessee man, Ronnie Monday, and his friends thought they were doing the “Lord’s work,” by raising money to erect a massive billboard in the town of Portland that called homosexuality an abomination. It quotes Leviticus 18:22: “You shall not lie with a man as with a woman. It is an abomination.” To the right of the verse the billboard says, “Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin.” Yet what Monday didn’t address is that a few verses later in Leviticus, homosexuals are condemned to death. So much for loving the sinner.
The United States Air Force entered the religious battle this week when it said it would not let a veteran airman reenlist unless he swore an oath unto God. The airman, who has remained unnamed, signed the oath document, but crossed out the words “so help me God.” Bryan Fischer of the ultra-conservative American Family Association said that atheists should not even be allowed to serve in the armed forces. “There is no place in the United States military for those who do not believe in the Creator,” he said. “A man who doesn’t believe in the Creator … most certainly should not wear the uniform.”
How quickly Fischer dismisses the lives of those like Pat Tillman, an open atheist who lost his life not long after he walked away from his professional football career to fight Al Qaeda after 9/11. The American Humanist Association and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation quickly took action against the Air Force, which strongly defended the wording of the oath. Eventually, the organizations wore the Air Force down, and it dropped its religious enlistment requirement.
After the Air Force’s decision to drop the requirement, the 700 Club’s Pat Robertson went on an anti-Semitic tirade: “There’s a left-wing radical named Mikey Weinstein [president of MRFF] who has got a group about people against religion or whatever he calls it, and he has just terrorized the armed forces.” He continued, “You think you’re supposed to be tough, you’re supposed to defend us, and you got one little Jewish radical who is scaring the pants off of you.”
On the subject of the military, former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee declared in front of a crowd that the US should not fear a war with the Islamic militant group ISIS because Huckabee has read the Bible, and it contains a prophecy. “I got good news for all the dispirited and disquieted Christians in America who somehow are afraid that the Sons of Ishmael who are challenging us now in the Middle East will overwhelm the Sons of Isaac,” Huckabee said. “Let me assure you, I have read the end of the book! My dear friend, we win!”
For those who have not read the Bible, there is a massive lack of information about how to deal with ISIS, but that did not stop Huckabee, who even appeared on Fox News endorsing greater military action, saying dropping bombs is not enough to “eradicate ISIS.”
And last, if you are not familiar with Jesus’ famous sermon on the mount, Jesus blessed the poor and the hungry. But now he’s blessing the gun nuts? Pat Robertson, who can’t stay out of the news, has added a new verse: “Blessed are the fully armed because theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.”
Robertson was referring to earlier fear-mongering comments in which he claimed, “Violent attacks and even deaths on church property occur far more often than people realize.” But Robertson had good news for his viewers, saying, “The good news: You can protect yourself. What are you going to do, are you going to give church members AK-47s at the door to let them blow away those intruders?”
I don’t think Jesus meant handguns when he said, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”
By: Dan Arel, AlterNet, September 18, 2014
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