We lost more than a million jobs in the past few months, the headlines remind us. So last month's story about a Dutch court's ruling that Geert Wilders was "inciting hatred and discrimination"-and that "it is in the public interest to prosecute" him-understandably didn't make the American news.Did Wilders rip off a minority in a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme? No, he's a member of the Dutch parliament, and his precise villainy was releasing a 15-minute film.Entitled Fitna,it suggests a direct link between certain verses of the Koran and acts of terrorism.Not to be outdone, the United Kingdom this week banned Wilders from entering the country.Its reasoning: His"presence in the U.K. would pose a genuine, present, and sufficiently serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society."A letter from the home secretary went on to tell Wilders that "your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in your film Fitna and elsewhere,would threaten community harmony and therefore public security."In 2007, Cambridge University Press destroyed unsold copies of Alms for Jihad after it was sued by Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi-Irish businessman whom the book accused of financing al-Qaeda. So much for academics standing up against book-burning.In 2005, reporters from the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten were forced into hiding after publishing a series of 12 cartoons about Muhammad. Islamic fundamentalists found the images blasphemous and threatened to bomb the paper's offices and kill its cartoonists - apparently, in certain quarters, an alternative to a letter to the editor.Last year, at the urging of the Canadian Islamic Congress, author Mark Steyn was forced to defend himself against charges of racism and "Islamophobia" that were filed with three Canadian human-rights commissions, based on his columns in Maclean's magazine.And, following a 2008 U.N. resolution urging nations to outlaw "defamation of religion," several nations - including Italy, the Netherlands and France - are attempting to ban "hate speech" against religious groups.All of these incidents are calculated to intimidate critics of Islam in Europe and across the West. The message in the European Union is clear: Politicians, religious figures, and even private citizens with religiously and politically incorrect opinions will be subject not only to Muslim protest, but to criminal prosecution and violent retribution.What publisher will print Steyn's next book if it can be labeled a hate crime and banned in most countries? "Pretty soon, your little book is looking a lot less commercially viable," Steyn has said. "At the end of the day, there'll be a lot of...American books that will go unpublished here in America."In addition, these incidents deflect attention away from real-rather than trumped-up-religious discrimination. In the arena of actual persecution of religious minorities, Arab and Islamic nations are much of the problem.Look at the U.S. State Department's 2008 Report on International Religious Freedom. Among the dozens of limitations on religious freedom in the Arab-Islamic world are the crimes of apostasy - converting from Islam to another religion - and blasphemy against the prophet Muhammad, both punishable by death under Muslim Sharia law. Coptic Christians are, at best, second-class citizens in Egypt; Baha'is are savagely persecuted in Iran; and churches and synagogues are banned in Saudi Arabia, as is any non-Muslim religious activity in public.This is not a front- or even back-page story in the American press today. Why? Because it has nothing to do with the economy.The gathering storm I have been warning of for years has now formed over the West. Yet instead of fighting the gradual incursion of Sharia and the demands of an intolerant, even militant Islam, Westerners are cowering and fatalistic. Last year, the Archbishop of Canterbury conceded that acceptance of some parts of Sharia in Britain seemed "unavoidable."So how did the market do today?By Rick Santorum
Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
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http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/07/08/news/islam.php
Hate messages target Muslims in Michigan
Arab-American leaders are urging residents not to be afraid to voice their feelings about Mideast violence, despite a letter sent to city households that urged Muslims to "go back to Lebanon."
"We are Americans first and we should not let (some) differences be a reason for any form of hatred to exist among us," said Imad Hamad, regional director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).
"It comes as no surprise to us. It's unfortunate and a sad reality that every time there is a hostile situation, this is something that comes as a part of the typical negative backlash. Unfortunately some people use this as a way to silence people so they don't speak their mind."
On Monday, the ADC received several phone calls in response to the letter mailed to residents in Dearborn. The letter in part read, "The only way for the West to survive is to limit the immigration of Muslims. Your kind is not wanted in this country, this state, our city of Dearborn and this neighborhood."
The civil rights organization said it also received a newspaper clipping and a voicemail, both of which expressed Muslim residents should return to Lebanon. [Link]
Northern Ireland – Hate Capital of the West" - says University research
Northern Ireland is the hate capital of the western world, according to research conducted at the University of Ulster and which is to be published in the prestigious economics journal, Kyklos.
Not only does Northern Ireland – along with Greece – have the highest proportion of bigots, but the bigots are on average more bigoted than those in other countries.
The main target of the Northern Ireland bigots are homosexuals, followed by immigrants or foreign workers.
The study was carried out by Vani Borooah, Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Ulster and John Mangan, Professor of Economics at the University of Queensland.
Nearly 32,000 people in 19 European countries as well as in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA were asked as part of the Human Beliefs and Values Survey – Would you like to have persons from this group as your neighbours? The five groups were people of another race, immigrants or foreign workers, Muslims, Jews and homosexuals.
In Northern Ireland 44% of the 1,000 respondents did not want persons from at least one of the five groups as their neighbours. The province was closely followed by Greece (43%). The lowest proportion of bigots was in Sweden (13%), Iceland (18%), Canada (22%) and Denmark (22%).
As regards each of the five groups the percentage of respondents in Northern Ireland who would not like them as neighbours was homosexuals (35.9%), immigrants or foreign workers (18.9%), Muslims (16%), Jews (11.6%) and people of a different race (11.1%).
For the same groups, the average of all the countries surveyed was respectively 19.6%, 10.1%, 14.5%, 9.5% and 8.5%.
Homophobia was by far the main source of bigotry in most western countries: over 80% of bigoted persons in Northern Ireland and Canada and 75% of bigots in Austria, the USA, Great Britain, Ireland and Italy would not want homosexuals as neighbours.
The exceptions to this were the Scandinavian countries in which the main target of bigotry was Muslims: 74% of bigoted Danes, 68% of bigoted Swedes and 63% of bigoted Icelanders did not want Muslims as neighbours. The corresponding proportions for homosexuals in these countries were, respectively 37%, 44% and 43%.
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/660/context/archive
Muslims feel like 'Jews of Europe'
Minister's shock warning on rise of anti-Islamic prejudice
By Cahal Milmo, Chief Reporter
Friday, 4 July 2008
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Reuters
Mr Malik said that many British Muslims now felt like 'aliens in their own country'
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Britain's first Muslim minister has attacked the growing culture of hostility against Muslims in the United Kingdom, saying that many feel targeted like "the Jews of Europe".
Shahid Malik, who was appointed as a minister in the Department for International Development (Dfid) by Gordon Brown last summer, said it has become legitimate to target Muslims in the media and society at large in a way that would be unacceptable for any other minority.
Mr Malik made clear that he was not equating the situation with the Holocaust but warned that many British Muslims now felt like "aliens in their own country". He said he himself had been the target of a string of racist incidents, including the firebombing of his family car and an attempt to run him down at a petrol station.
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"I think most people would agree that if you ask Muslims today what do they feel like, they feel like the Jews of Europe," he said. "I don't mean to equate that with the Holocaust but in the way that it was legitimate almost – and still is in some parts – to target Jews, many Muslims would say that we feel the exact same way.
"Somehow there's a message out there that it's OK to target people as long as it's Muslims. And you don't have to worry about the facts, and people will turn a blind eye."
The claims are made in an interview to be broadcast on Monday in a Channel 4 Dispatches programme to coincide with the third anniversary of the London bombings of 7 July.
A poll to accompany the documentary highlights the growing polarisation of opinion among Britain's 1.6 million Muslims, who say they have suffered a marked increase in hostility since the London bombings.
The ICM survey found that 51 per cent of Britons blame Islam to some degree for the 2005 attacks while more than a quarter of Muslims now believe Islamic values are not compatible with British values. While 90 per cent of Muslims said they felt attached to Britain, eight out of 10 said they felt there was more religious prejudice against their faith since the July bombings.
The Dispatches film, "It Shouldn't Happen to a Muslim", presented by the writer and broadcaster Peter Oborne, examines claims that negative attitudes to Muslims have become legitimised by think-tanks and newspaper commentators, who use language that is now being parroted by the far right.
Mr Malik, who narrowly escaped serious injury when a car was driven at him at a petrol station in his home town of Burnley in 2002, said he regularly receives anti-Muslim hate mail at his constituency office in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, which has the highest BNP vote in the country and was home to Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the suicide attackers who killed 52 people in London in 2005.
The MP said the negative portrayal of Muslims in the media, including a story run by several national newspapers in December last year wrongly stating that staff in the Dewsbury and District Hospital had been ordered to turn the beds of Muslim patients towards Mecca five times a day, was a key example of how his co-religionists were being alienated from the mainstream.
He said: "It's almost as if you don't have to check your facts when it comes to certain people, and you can just run with those stories. It makes Muslims feel like aliens in their own country. At a time when we want to engage with Muslims, actually the opposite happens."
The Dispatches programme also speaks to Andy Hayman, the former Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner who was Britain's most senior anti-terrorism officer until he resigned last December. Mr Hayman, who was criticised for failing to tell senior Scotland Yard officers that an innocent man, Jean Charles de Menezes, had been shot dead after being mistaken for a suicide bomber, is asked why he thinks it is important to engage with Muslims expressing extreme views.
Mr Hayman said: "Because we're tackling head on the people that we feel are at the heartbeat of this whole complex agenda. Not to have a dialogue with them would seem that we are apprehensive, we're scared, we're frightened... So even if it's appeasement in some quarters, that is still a conversation that is not being had and needs to be had."
Mr Malik's comments were backed by Simon Woolley, a member of the Government's task force on race equality, and co-founder of Operation Black Vote. He said: "On an almost daily basis, there is rampant Islamophobia in this country, the effect of which is not for our Muslim community to get closer to a sense of Britishness but to feel further away from a feeling of belonging in British society."
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