In yet another blunder from the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Agence France-Press (AFP) just reported the case of 22-yr-old Nicholas George, an American college student who, this past August, was detained and questioned for almost five hours at the Philadelphia International Airport because he was carrying flashcards for his Arabic class. According to George’s lawsuit, filed through The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Wednesday February 10, 2010, he was "abusively interrogated" by TSA staff before getting handcuffed and held in an airport cell for two hours, waiting for FBI agents to come and interrogate some more. He was asked about 9/11, Osama bin Laden, the works—all while never being informed of his rights. Needless to say, he missed his flight back to school. Now maybe I can offer some insight here. I’m an American college student. I study Arabic. I may even have some Arabic flashcards lying around my apartment and at the bottom of my purse. But oh wait; I’m not a terrorist. I have to admit, I still get surprised when anything relating to Arabic and Muslim culture is automatically assumed villainous. And it’s not just the blatant racial profiling that occurs in the airport security lines (or in this case the study tool profiling?). The real scary stuff is the general accepted prejudice in America of Arab people or anyone who resembles an Arab person or in some way appreciates their culture. I’ve noticed this a lot recently--just keep your eye out for it, and it’s startlingly everywhere. There is such a frenzied energy to have a clear cut, identifiable enemy in our culture that we completely lose sight of who the real threats are, start detaining college kids studying for their mid-terms, teach our children to fear and hate an entire population of people, and instead forget that, ultimately, you know, everyone is a person, and our lives do not differ too greatly from each others’. Does that lesson come in a flashcard?
On January 15, 2010 the AP reported the French government’s draft of a law, citing “public security concerns,” to ban Islamic dress in public. This is a bold new step in France’s continued effort to ban such dress, specifically the face-covering dress they consider an expression of “Islamic extremism” worn by Muslim women: burqas, full dress which covers the entire body except for a slit for the eyes, and niqabs, veils that cover the face, which are sometimes worn with a sitar which covers the eyes with a sheer fabric. This law is not without precedent. In 2004 France passed a ban of Islamic dress, including hijab, or headscarves which do not cover the face, and other “ostentatious” expressions of religious faith in public schools. President Sarkozy has been outspoken in his support of a public ban on Islamic dress and since his party dominates French parliament, there is good reason to expect the ban will gain momentum. Further proof is Europe’s slow and steady progression into full-on anti-Islamism, like Switzerland’s November 2009 ban on minarets (of all things!). While a discussion of Muslim dress in France can easily turn into a discussion about whether Islamic law is fair to women, it shouldn’t. That is a different and valid discussion. This is a discussion about France’s laws purposefully targeting Muslims and infringing on their right to express their religion. Read More »
Screened at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival Jackie Salloum's 9 minute short, "Planet of the Arabs" is a montage of the dehumanizing and vilifying depictions of Arabs in contemporary American film.
Reading this story just now, my jaw literally dropped. A German judge refused to grant a woman who was being physically abused by her husband a quick divorce (that is, without the usual 1 year separation period) because—and I am serious—she is Muslim and the beating of one’s wife is “sanctioned” by the Koran.
So this judge is saying, basically, Muslim women have no reasonable right to demand protection from domestic violence because such violence is “normal” in Islam. Read More »
Do we hate all Muslims, or just some of them? The conservative mind today is confronted with difficult and troubling quandaries. With the lock-step obedience within the conservative movement and general ideological uniformity, disagreements among “pundits” on the right are typically rare. When they do occur, the results are bizarre and hilarious.
Dinesh D’Souza, the formerly anti-PC crusader turned pro-Muslim, anti-secularism cultural relativist, was put on a panel against Robert Spencer, author of popular bigotry-fodder book “The Truth About Muhammed.” Pitting these two hacks against each other led to perplexing results, as they each set up straw men of each other’s already ludicrous positions and clawed at them with weak and often contradictory logic.
Not used to having to digest shades of grey and complexity, the audience could not figure out whether to cheer or boo. When D’Souza pointed out that portions of the Koran and the Old Testament are hostile to non-believers, the response was definitely a boo. However, they seemed to agree both with Spencer’s assertion that Islam is inherently violent and Mohammed was himself essentially a terrorist, and D’Souza’s assertion that vilification of all Muslims will radicalize moderate Muslims. They wanted to believe, they want to love the Muslims, but, oh they're just so evil!
With D’Souza’s latest Islamist-apologizing tripe roundly denounced across the political spectrum, and Spencer’s cherry-picked piece of bigotry so poorly argued as to not even warrant serious analysis, perhaps one young attendee’s sentiments, addressed to me in incredulous response to D’Souza, express the confusion best: “but we can’t work with them! They want to shoot us in the face!”
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