Conquering hearts and minds

Condoleezza Rice announces a new turn in US strategy in a speech to USIP: "We must also do everything that we can to support and encourage the voices of moderation and tolerance and pluralism within the Muslim world.... Americans also need to hear the stories of the people of the Muslim world. We need to understand their challenges and their cultures and their hopes; to speak their languages and read their literature; to know their cultures in the deepest sense. Our interaction must be a conversation, not a monologue. We must reach out and explain, but we must also listen."

One sceptic asks: "why is it that in the three years since 9/11 you haven't given this kind of a speech to a Muslim audience in one of the five largest Muslim countries, nor has any senior administration official?"

US consulate Mumbai press release, 20 August 2004

Ali H. Aslan isn't impressed either: "Aren't voices of moderation and tolerance in the Islamic world muted, when Rumsfeld's Pentagon and Ashcroft's FBI treat every Muslim on earth and in the U.S. as a potential enemy and terrorist?"

Zaman, 26 August 2004

Muslim scholar condemns US decision to cancel visa

Geneva-born Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan has said he is "in shock" that he will not be able to take up a teaching post in the United States after his visa was revoked. The US State Department said it had cancelled the visa at the request of the Department of Homeland Security.

swissinfo, 25 August 2004

The Left and Islam

"Since September 11 2001, Islamophobia – fear and hatred of Muslims – has been on the rampage across the Western world. In the UK, racist tabloid newspapers daily churn out frenzied reports of Muslim clerics declaring jihad against the West. The scaremongering of newspapers like the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express has succeeded in inciting widescale violence and abuse directed against the entire Muslim population."

Eddie Truman in Scottish Socialist Voice.

Click to read more ...

CAIR calls for reversal of prof's visa revocation

A prominent national Islamic civil rights and advocacy group today called on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to reverse its decision to revoke the visa of an Islamic scholar who was due to begin teaching at the University of Notre Dame. The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said the DHS decision to revoke a visa previously granted to Tariq Ramadan, a well-known Islamic scholar who is often described as a "moderate" and a "reformer," sends the wrong message to the Islamic world about America's willingness to listen to what Muslims have to say.

CAIR news release, 24 August 2004

See also CAIR's letter to the DHS

Ramadan

"Muslim WakeUp! reports that Tariq Ramadan has been denied a visa by Homeland Security, and will not take up his teaching post at Notre Dame.... this a shameful, terrible decision, which will have wide ranging implications in American (alleged) attempts to reach Muslim moderates. When the United States attacks Islamist moderates like this, it does Osama bin Laden's work for him. Well done."

Abu Aardvark weblog, 24 August 2004

Hard to imagine Islamophobia

"The Finsbury Park mosque, the Muslim Association of Britain, Al Qaradawi and Islam itself are part and parcel of a reactionary movement that has wreaked havoc in the Middle East and North Africa and aims to do so here as well."

Maryam Namazie of the Worker Communist Party of Iran in WPI Briefing No.149

Oozing venom and jihad

"Expose the subversive activities of Islamist extremists around the world or in the United States, and speedy CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) pops up with accusations of Islamophobia."

Arnaud de Borchgrave in the Washington Times, 19 August 2004

We must be free to criticise without being called racist

"It is bizarre how the left has espoused the extreme Islamist cause: as 'my enemy's enemy', Muslims are the best America-haters around. The hard left relishes terrorism: a fondness for explosions and the smell of martyrs' blood excites their revolutionary zeal, without sharing a jot of religious belief."

Polly Toynbee in Guardian Comment article

British Council official in anti-Muslim row

Muslim groups and individuals have flooded the British Council with complaints after learning that one of its senior press officers allegedly wrote controversial Sunday Telegraph articles attacking "the black heart of Islam".

The government-funded body, which recently commissioned a handbook on Islam "to prevent ignorant comments about Muslims being made in [the] national press", has suspended Harry Cummins while it investigates the claims, which were first disclosed in the Guardian Diary.

He denies writing the articles, which have prompted calls for the Press Complaints Commission to intervene.

They appeared under the byline "Will Cummins", which the Sunday Telegraph later described as a pseudonym.

Muslim organisations say the comment pieces incite racial and religious hatred, and the British Council describes the articles as deeply offensive.

But the Sunday Telegraph has refused to rule out publishing further contributions from the author of the articles. Its editor, Dominic Lawson, told the Guardian that he did not regret printing them.

The allegation is deeply embarrassing for the British Council, which works to improve relations between communities.

Last year, Mr Cummins helped to promote a seminar "to debate press freedom and responsibilities with emerging and potential Muslim leaders".

"Will Cummins" has compared Muslims to Nazis and argued that Muslim voters have a "global jihadi agenda". One of his articles states: "All Muslims, like all dogs, share certain characteristics." Another argues: "It is the black heart of Islam, not its black face, to which millions object."

Other articles by the author have claimed that "Muslim foreigners ... have forced themselves on us", and that "Christians are the original inhabitants and rightful owners of almost every Muslim land and behave with a humility quite unlike the menacing behaviour we have come to expect from the Muslims who have forced themselves on Christendom".

The author described voters in Leicester and Birmingham as "local Janjaweed" – in a reference to the atrocities committed in Darfur, Sudan – and claimed that Islam is "sanctified by the principle ... that any civilisation, however repulsive, has the same value as any other".

The British Council's director general, David Green, has told the Muslim Council of Britain: "There is no place in the British Council for people who publish such hateful utterances."

Guardian, 6 August 2004

No, we don't want to conquer the world

"The ferocity of recent attacks on Muslims and Islam in the mainstream British media has led many to question what is driving these attempts to incite hatred and fear of our community. Anyone reading the British press over the past few weeks might be excused for imagining that the country is threatened by hordes of Muslims living within its borders, determined to subvert British values and convert its people to Islam, by hook or by crook."

Anas Altikriti in the Guardian, 5 August 2004