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HOW GLOBAL ANTI-MUSLIM BIGOTRY BECAME ACCEPTABLE
#36
THE ENEMIES OF ISLAM ARE BEING IDENTIFIED AND A DAY OF RECKONING IS COMING AS THEY WILL BE MADE TO ACCOUNT. THE MAIN REFLECTION TODAY IS THAT IT IS CLEAR THAT THERE IS A NEED FOR ALL TO UNDERSTAND HOW THE ORIGINAL ISLAMIC WORLDVIEW CONCEPTUALISES WHO IT'S ENEMIES AND ALLIES ARE. JUST AS THE MODERN WORLD OF SECULAR NATION STATES CONCEPTUALISE BELONGING, IDENTITY, CITIZENSHIP, NATIONALITY AS WELL AS TRAITORS AND ENEMIES OF THE STATE SO DOES ISLAM. WE NEED A MODEL WHICH DIFFERENTIATES THE FOLLOWING CATEGORIES AND THE NATURE OF RELATIONSHIPS IN THE FORTHCOMING RIGHTLY GUIDED ISLAMIC KHILAFATE. 

THIS NEEDS TO BE VIEWED TOTALLY SEPARATE FROM ISIS WHICH WAS A CREATION AND INTELLIGENCE ASSET OF THE ENEMIES OF ISLAM. THERE IS HUGE IGNORANCE AND  CONFUSION AND A DELIBERATE BLURRING OF LINES BY VESTED INTERESTS. FOR INSTANCE HOW ON EARTH CAN JIHAD AGAINST FOREIGN OPPRESSIVE COLONISATION AND IMPERIALISM BE THE SAME AS NIHILISTIC TERRORISTS. ALSO BECAUSE THIS IS NOT ARTICULATED PROPERLY THE NATURE OF THE CONTEMPORARY STRUGGLES BETWEEN THE UNIVERSAL STRUGGLE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL BECOMES COMPLEX. AS A STARTER WE CAN STATE THAT THE FOLLOWING CAMPS NEED REVIEW AND CONCEPTUALISATION. WHAT IS THEN REQUIRED IS ON HOW THESE COMMUNITIES ACTUALLY BEHAVED IN POLITICAL AND MILITARILY TERMS. 

COMMUNITY OF BELIEVERS IN GOD -     MUMINEEN
HYPOCRITES AND TRAITORS-                  MUNAFIQOON   
DOGS OF HELL -                                        KHARIJITES/TAKFIRIS 
JEWS AND CHRISTIANS-                          AHL I KITAB   
PAGANS AND IDOLATERS-                        MUSHRIKEEN 
ATHEISTS AND DISBELIEVERS-                KAFIROON      



ARAB REGIMES ARE THE WORLD’s MOST POWERFUL ISLAMOPHOBES 
Middle Eastern governments have forged alliances with right-wing groups in the West dedicated to anti-Islam bigotry.
OLA SALEMHASSAN HASSAN
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/29/arab-regimes-are-the-worlds-most-powerful-islamophobes



In 2017, at a public panel in Riyadh, the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, issued a warning about Islamists in Europe. “There will come a day that we will see far more radical extremists and terrorists coming out of Europe because of lack of decision-making, trying to be politically correct, or assuming that they know the Middle East, and they know Islam, and they know the others far better than we do,” Zayed said. “I’m sorry, but that’s pure ignorance.” The message was clear: European leaders would face a future endemic of Islamic extremism if they continued to tolerate the presence of what he described as radical extremists and terrorists in the name of human rights, freedom of expression, and democracy.

Although the statement is two years old, a clip was recently circulated by a prominent Emirati on social media, Hassan Sajwani, in an entirely different context: in the wake of the terrorist attack allegedly carried out by an Australian white supremacist against Muslim worshipers in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, that led to 50 deaths. Sajwani, who has family links to both the Emirati government and the Trump family (his uncle is the founder and chairman of Damac Properties, which developed the Trump International Golf Club in Dubai), then posted tweets that echo the type of fear-mongering and dog-whistle attacks on Muslims that have been widely credited with inspiring the Christchurch attacks.



It’s just one example of an often-overlooked trend: the culpability of Arab and Muslim governments in fueling anti-Muslim hate as part of their campaigns to fight dissent at home and abroad. By trying to justify repression and appease Western audiences, some of these regimes and their supporters have forged an informal alliance with conservative and right-wing groups and figures in the West dedicated to advancing anti-Islamic bigotry.

Arab regimes spend millions of dollars on think tanks, academic institutions, and lobbying firms in part to shape the thinking in Western capitals about domestic political activists opposed to their rule, many of whom happen to be religious. The field of counterextremism has been the ideal front for the regional governments’ preferred narrative: They elicit sympathy from the West by claiming to also suffer from the perfidies of radical jihadis and offer to work together to stem the ideological roots of the Islamist threat.

Based on dozens of conversations conducted over several years, we found that autocratic regimes in the region carefully cultivate conservative and far-right circles in the West that they believe lean toward their own anti-Islamist agendas. The two sides’ political goals don’t completely overlap: Western Islamophobia can be far more vehement and sweeping than the variety supported by Arab governments. Nevertheless, both sides find the partnership beneficial. Arab propagandists claim there is an inherent connection between so-called political correctness and a tendency to downplay ideologies that lead to terrorism—claims that are seized on by Western conservatives to legitimize their own arguments. “Our threshold is quite low when we talk about extremism,” the Emirati foreign minister 
told Fox News a month after the 2017 panel discussion in Riyadh. “We cannot accept incitement or funding. For many countries, the definition of terror is that you have to carry a weapon or terrorize people. For us, it’s far beyond that.”

Such campaigns by Arab governments go beyond an effort to simply explain the precise threats posed by Islamists—which do indeed exist. Instead, they often involve scare tactics to play up the threat and create an atmosphere in which an alternative to these regimes becomes unthinkable from a Western policy standpoint. Such an environment also enables these regimes to clamp down on dissent at home with impunity. Terrorism becomes a catchall term to justify repression. In Saudi Arabia, even atheists are defined as anti-terrorism laws.

These patterns played out for more than a decade but intensified in recent years, and they proved to be effective instruments to win friends and influence enemies.  David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader who visited Damascus in 2005 to show solidarity with the Syrian regime against Zionism and imperialism, frequently expressed support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad despite the dictator’s vicious campaign against his own people.
In a 2017  tweet, he wrote, “Assad is a modern day hero standing up to demonic forces seeking to destroy his people and nation – GOD BLESS ASSAD!” Similar Assad-friendly sentiments have been expressed by far-right figures in Europe.


In August 2015, the prominent and influential Dubai businessman Mohammed al-Habtoor published an eyebrow-raising opinion piece in The National, an English-language daily in the UAE, explaining his support for the then controversial presidential candidate Donald Trump, describing him as a “a strategist with a shrewd business mind” despite his incendiary remarks about Muslims. The support from Habtoor, who is close to the Emirati government, suggested that these governments, or figures close to them, were happy to strike alliances with anti-Islam activists in the West—not in spite of their rhetoric, but because of it. In an answer to a question about Trump’s anti-Muslim remarks, he later told Bloomberg that those were “political talk,” and “talk is cheap.”

As these regimes face more pressure, they deploy fears of extremism and terrorism to garner support. For example, as European countries increasingly became critical of Saudi Arabia last year after the growing casualties in the Yemen war, the imprisonment of women activists, and the murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Riyadh turned to the right wing for support. Among other efforts, a delegation of Saudi women was dispatched to meet with the far-right bloc of the European Parliament. According to Eldar Mamedov, an advisor to the European Parliament’s social democrats, Saudi Arabia subsequently became a divisive issue in Brussels, as left-of-center forces pushed for resolutions against the kingdom while right-wing forces opposed them.


After the military coup in Egypt in 2013, the regime in Cairo and its regional backers were in full gear to exaggerate the risks of extremism and promote Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as the strongman who was willing to take on not just the extremists but also Islamic thought. 
statement he made in 2015 about the need for an Islamic reformation to review, and presumably discard, centuries-old Islamic traditions became heavily cited by his defenders in Washington and other capitals as evidence of his anti-Islamist credentials.


AMERICA’s ISLAMOPHOBIA IS FORGED AT THE PULPIT
White evangelicals’ apocalyptic fantasies are driving U.S. policy.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/26/americas-islamophobia-is-forged-in-the-pulpit/?utm_source=PostUp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=11933&utm_term=Flashpoints%20OC

The first time I remember hearing Islam equated with terrorism from the pulpit, I was a 17-year-old junior at Heritage Christian School in Indianapolis, where my mom was—still is, in fact—an elementary teacher. It was 1998, long before Islamophobia seized the Western mainstream. My family attended a small, nondenominational evangelical church in the suburb of Carmel, where my dad was the music pastor.

“A good Muslim,” our head pastor, Marcus Warner, intoned that Sunday morning, “should want to kill Christians and Jews.” He insisted that this was the only conclusion possible from a serious reading of the Quran. As a doubting young evangelical who would later become an agnostic, this extreme statement made me uncomfortable even then. Today, in the wake of the shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, it should be considered every bit as offensive as the worst anti-Semitic tropes .

But a harsh double standard has been in effect, as the brouhaha over the comments by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) proved. The United States recognizes anti-Semitism for the poison it is, and polices—at least on the left—even accidental falling into its tropes. But the religiously inspired Islamophobia I grew up with continues to shape Washington’s foreign policy—and Islamophobic statements too often pass without criticism in the public sphere.



To be sure, the statements about Israel by Omar, one of the first two Muslim women ever elected to U.S. Congress, did conjure up anti-Semitic tropes. In a recent op-ed in the Washington Post, she chose her words more carefully, avoiding the rhetoric of “allegiance” that rightly caused many to criticize her language. Some of that criticism, however, was not only made in bad faith—it was shaped by the very Islamophobia that darkly mirrors anti-Semitism.


The presidency of Donald Trump has been 
shaped by the fear of decline in power and influence among conservative white Protestants


. This moment of backlash against increasing diversity and democratization is familiar. Not so long ago, the dual-loyalty trope was employed by American Protestants not only to impugn the patriotism of Jews, but also of Catholics, prominently during the 1960 election, when John F. Kennedy ultimately became the United States’ first Catholic president. There is a similar notion in play today when conservatives—often evangelical Christians, along with a small number of Jewish Americans—traffic in conspiracy theories about the supposed infiltration of the U.S. government by the Muslim Brotherhood and suggest that Muslims seek to impose sharia law on the United States.

But the most damaging impact of religious Islamophobia may be in foreign policy. Islamophobes like former CIA head and current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo loom large in the Trump administration. Under Trump more than under previous presidents, U.S. foreign policy has been shaped by an anti-pluralist, fundamentalist form of Christianity whose adherents exhibit a particularly virulent animosity toward Muslims. White evangelicals make up not only Trump’s base but the single most nativistdemographic in the United States today.


During the Cold War, evangelical Protestants, most of whom adhered (and still adhere) to a set of eschatological beliefs based on a 19th-century interpretation of the Book of Revelation and other biblical texts  considered prophetic, tended to associate the primary enemies of Christ with the Soviet Union. The historically improbable founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948 was used to prop up the validity of their understanding of biblical prophecy, and Hal Lindsey’s popular book The Late Great Planet Earth, published in 1970, became the standard evangelical narrative of “the end times,” popularizing an interpretation of the eschatological scheme known as dispensational premillennialism.


Lindsey represented Russia as the kingdom of Magog, which was “prophesied” to play a leading role among the forces of evil in the Battle of Armageddon. Since the end of the Cold War, and especially in recent years as some evangelicals have embraced Russian President Vladimir Putin because of his stance on “traditional values,” evangelicals have struggled to find a consensus replacement candidate for Magog. Meanwhile, as anti-Islamic sentiment has increased among evangelicals, predominantly Muslim powers (such as Iraq during the Iraq War) have sometimes been floated as possibilities, and evangelical author Joel Richardson has suggested the Antichrist will arise from Islam.


The influence of evangelicals’ end-times beliefs on U.S. policy toward Israel is a serious concern. Both these strands of popular evangelical thinking—dispensational premillennialism and Islamophobia—can be found in Pompeo, an Evangelical Presbyterian who has expressed support for the views of Islamophobic conspiracy nut Frank Gaffney, and who has vowed to struggle against evil “until the rapture.” To be sure, Pompeo has more recently said, “We’re all children of Abraham,” but when you understand that evangelicals are taught that Jews are descended from Isaac and Arabs from Ishmael, and that there will never be peace between them, that statement takes on a different, coded meaning.

American evangelicals’ actions on the political and geopolitical stage are not primarily targeted at bringing about the apocalypse—but they are certainly not trying to prevent it.  Evangelicals seek to follow God’s will as they understand it, and their most common understanding of biblical prophecy suggests that Israel must expand its borders to align with those of the ancient biblical kingdom God promised to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and that Israel must rebuild the temple—the site of which is currently occupied by the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex, the third-holiest site in Islam—before the end times can come. This is why evangelicals have long since widely supported, and lobbied for, the recognition of Jerusalem as the undivided capital of a Jewish state.

 Trump’s willingness to pursue the radical agenda of apocalyptically minded white evangelicals was on display not only in his administration’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but also in the choice of Protestant pastors he brought along to speak at the embassy’s opening. John Hagee, who has written numerous books about the end times, has characterized the Holocaust as part of God’s plan to gather the Jews back in Israel, and Robert Jeffress, a man who had his church choir perform a sort of hymn called “Make America Great Again” in 2017, has made no secret of his belief that Jews who do not convert to Christianity will go to hell.  Views like those of Pompeo, Richardson, Hagee, and Jeffress are not innocent.

Even if they generally take greater care to avoid explicitly racist statements like those found among contemporary white nationalists, their religious language is a mere veneer on bigotry, and their words add fuel to the fire that results in mass violence, whether in the United States or abroad. The consequences of white-supremacist hate have recently played out in devastating attacks on both Jews and Muslims, in the Tree of Life syngagogue shooting in Pittsburgh that took 11 lives on October 27, 2018, and in the attack on two mosques in Christchurch that took 50 lives this month, on March 15.

In a gesture of solidarity, the Tree of Life Congregation has raised more than $58,000 for the victims of the New Zealand mosque shootings. The act recalls the ways in which the Minnesota Muslim community of Somali immigrants—many of them former refugees—from which Omar comes has generally worked in concert with the local Jewish community to promote civil rights. And while there are legitimate ways to press Omar to make sure she uses language critical of Israeli policy rather than critical of the Jewish people, those who would use her presence to engage in fearmongering over Islamic “infiltration” or “creeping sharia” should be given no quarter in our public sphere.

Unfortunately, such views are common among the white evangelicals who are exerting unprecedented influence on the Trump administration, 72 percent of whom support some form of Muslim ban. The hold of such nativism in the highest echelons of American power is frightening and dangerous. It will produce more mass violence and further destabilization of the Middle East—a much greater threat than is posed by criticizing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
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HOW GLOBAL ANTI-MUSLIM BIGOTRY BECAME ACCEPTABLE - by Admin - 03-07-2010, 11:10 PM
RE: HOW GLOBAL ANTI-MUSLIM BIGOTRY BECAME ACCEPTABLE - by globalvision2000administrator - 03-30-2019, 03:56 PM

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