Category: Social Behavior

Destruction of The First Amendment

It’s all about Fear

 

Huffington Post reports on Zaytuna College, the first Muslim college in the United States.  It was opened recently in the San Francisco Bay area.  The school’s opening was also reported on some conservative blogs as being the first part of an invasion of Islam.  Now we have a Florida minister planning to burn copies of the Koran on September 11 because he fears an invasion. We hear conservative members of Congress and conservative candidates asking for investigations of congressional members to determine if they are anti-American. There is something very disturbing about this call to concern.  This is a country that holds freedom of religion and speech very dear.  Those two freedoms are articulated in the first amendment to our Constitution.  This is a hysterical call to fear that reminds me of Senator Joseph McCarthy.   

 

You may recall that Senator Joseph McCarthy held hearings that were in search of communists in America.  Everyone he called to give testimony was implied to be a communist with the intent of over throwing the United States government.  He destroyed the reputation and lives of many people in Hollywood, the government, and elsewhere with various innuendos.

 

Is that what we want now in 2010?

America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution

A worthwhile read by Angelo M. Codevilla from the July 2010 – August 2010  American Spectator.

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets’ nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.” And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

The Subversive Theology of Imam Rauf

This article was posted on the New Republic web site.  It is written by Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph. D. program in Communications at Columbia. The web site also provides comments that are for the most part intolerant.  Gitlin’s next book, The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel. 

Still, despite this article re-locating the mosque in lower Manhattan is the right thing to do.

—

The fervent mosque-haters have this much right: Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Sufi leader of the Cordoba Initiative that plans to build an Islamic center on Park Place near the site of the World Trade Center, is subversive. But what he wants to subvert is not the United States of America. What he wants to subvert are dictatorships in Islamic nations.

Imam Rauf’s third book, published in 2005 but unavailable to me last week when I wrote about him and his earlier work, is called What’s Right with Islam is What’s Right with America. In these pages, Rauf proves just as Islamic as his detractors say. He is downright idealistic about Islam and hearty about its prospects. He has been scouting out America for a long time. And what is it that he finds here to gladden his Islamic soul? It’s right there on p. 176:

“…the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution.”

The imam goes on to say that these documents “express the Islamic ideal, which is itself but an expression of the Abrahamic ethic.”  Yes, “the American Constitution and system of governance uphold the core principles of Islamic law.” And here’s a way of putting it that never tempted Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich: “The overarching American religion that all Americans live under is ‘Islamic’ in the sense that it is fully compliant with and expresses the Islamic Shariah.” In Rauf’s understanding, Sharia is predicated on religious pluralism, which is “a fundamental human right under Islamic law.”

In fact—don’t tell Sean Hannity—it’s too late to resist. Satan is well ensconced here. “America is substantively an ‘Islamic’ country, by which I mean a country whose systems remarkably embody the principles that Islamic law requires of a government.”

No wonder the Imam is at this moment lecturing in the Gulf States on the State Department’s dime, to discuss “Muslim life in America and religious tolerance,” according to the AP—a trip that Governor Tim Pawlenty, guzzling a lot of tea in a hurry, calls “disgusting.”

No wonder the Bush State Department made similar use of him to win hearts and minds. He’s promoting the American social and political system. He believes that “democracy and liberty, in a peculiarly American way, provide a manifestation of the Abrahamic ethic.” If Muslims outside America “recognize in the American form of governance a genuine substantive workable expression and model of their centuries-old longing for the kingdom of heaven on earth,” he continues, “they can formulate their understanding of an Islamic state along these lines.” In other words, he wants to Americanize the Muslim world in the way that counts—by promoting our political institutions. You can see what Republicans object to, though: He says nothing about promoting the filibuster or repealing the Fourteenth Amendment.

Imam Rauf’s revisionism extends so far as to trash most putatively Islamic states—since 656 C.E., that is, when “the Muslims succumbed to dynastic rule, a paradigm of governance that did not display Islamic religious values.” No wonder it’s been a rough 13+ centuries for Islam ever since. But the moment, he argues, is ripe for American Muslims, for “no contradiction exists between Islam’s theology and the longing of many Muslims for democratic values and equality of opportunity. … Islam’s theology and jurisprudence demand it.” That is, the American system is the answer to an Islamic prayer.

The book closes with an appendix containing a fatwa issued by five Muslim clerics on September 27, 2001, at the request of the most senior Muslim chaplain in the American armed forces. Ending his book with a fatwa! Yes! Cunningly, it’s a “Fatwa Permitting U. S. Muslim Military Personnel to Participate in Afghanistan War Effort.”

What’s Right with Islam, by the way, was published by HarperSanFrancisco, which last I looked is owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Does he know what kind of poison bears his imprimatur?

TOLERANCE

To tolerate is the same as to abide, put up with, endure, accept, stomach, and allow.  I have a difficult time abiding the word “tolerate.”  The words, “put up with”, says to me “I am going to tolerate this person or this situation.”  Notice I have differentiated between the word “tolerate” and the words “put up with.”

 

Of course this has been brought to the forefront by the proposed building of a mosque and Islamic cultural center near the World Trade Center property in NYC.

 

What’s the difference in the words I use?  If I have to tolerate people who are intolerant it makes me ill.  Here is the problem.  You are different from me in beliefs, appearance, and language.  You say things that I find offensive.  In my heart I know what is the right thing to do.  Therefore I will “put up with” your non-sense in the name of tolerance.

Is The United States Just a Dream?

The United States has always been a beacon of hope.  Sadly the GOP has adopted a strategy of fear in America.  Just listen to their non-stop spiel on television and radio.  Even their publications project the same theme.  They say we are being invaded by Latinos and Islam wants to turn America in an Islamic state.  The government plans to take away your guns.  The government is being run by a group of communists or socialists that are intent on changing the character of America.

We are all victims of the GOP fear mongering.  The result of their unproven lies is that we are being distracted from addressing the real problems facing the nation.  There are terrorists who want to destroy the United States but we never discuss how to protect ourselves.  We are facing a serous financial situation that has left millions unemployed but we are not discussing ways to resolve this issue.  We do have a serious problem of illegal immigration but no one is talking seriously about ways to solve the problem.

The media, both conservative and liberal are to blame for much of our problem.  The commentators spend too much of their time condemning those that disagree with their views.

America needs to stop the noise and start addressing the problems like adults.  Leave out the political rhetoric.  If we don’t, the United States will be remembered as the dream that never became reality.

Living in a Multicultural Society

This letter came to me just today.  I believe it answers the question, Can Muslims live in a multicultural society? Or does it ask the question!

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Pardon me, but I chuckle at the thought of having ‘the head Iman’ come to VBS (Valley Beth Shalom is a conservative Jewish congregation).  There is no head Iman.  Let me tell you of a personal experience of mine:
 
I am active with the American Jewish Committee, which does internationally what AIPAC does domestically.  At one event, our guest speaker was a Muslim Doctor from Phoenix, AZ.  I’m going out on a limb here, I feel pretty confident that as a Doctor, he may have come across a Jew or two.
 
He spoke of his goal to create an organization of fellowship between Muslims, Christians and Jews, a venue to bring about a better understanding of each other; that, in fact, we do share common goals and values. 
 
As he spoke of his endeavors, I had to ask:  Doctor, change begins with one.  What do you do when, while sitting in your mosque with your family, your Iman begins his vitriolic diatribe against the infidels?
 
His answer:  I say nothing, I am in fear of my life and the life of my family.
 
This is in America!  This is in the land of the free!  And yet, one well-educated, upper middle-class American Muslim fears even speaking out!  This is a tragedy, this is appalling, and this is his reality. 
 
And this is our reality.
 If You Will It – It Is Not A Dream – T. Herzl
 
ALYSE GOLDEN BERKLEY, Esq.
BERKLEY > BERKLEY
Encino, California

Women Living Under Sharia Law

 

The cover of the Aug. 9 issue of Time Magazine shows a photo of Aisha, an 18-year-old Afghan woman whose nose and ears were cut off in 2009 under orders from a local Taliban commander as punishment for fleeing her husband’s home. (Jodi Bieber, Institute for Time Magaizne/AP)

There are no words that can explain this atrocity.  I was happy to learn that this young woman will be treated at the Grossman Burn Center in Los Angeles.  We can’t protect the entire world.  We can’t even protect our own citizens from violence.  It is obvious that the culture of Afghanistan is totally different from the West.  What we consider evil they consider correct.  Armies will not change their beliefs.  I do not know how to change their views of the world.

Desperate stakes for women under Sharia

Washington Examiner Editorial

August 10, 2010

It is impossible to view Time magazine’s cover photograph of Aisha, an 18-year-old Afghan girl whose nose and ears were severed by her husband and brother-in-law on the order of a Taliban commander, without shuddering in recoil. Her “crime” was nothing more than fleeing the hellish home of in-laws who had beaten and enslaved her. That Aisha’s only recourse in the face of such abuse was to run and hide is testimony to the reality that, in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world that Sharia law prevails, women are at best second-class citizens. Sharia is the vehicle by which the most oppressive tenets of extreme Islamic religion become the civil law of any society on which it is imposed. In many such places, daily life for women and girls remains today much as it was a millennium ago — the unrelieved tedium, oppression and drudgery of chattel.

It would thus be a terrible mistake to dismiss Aisha as a nightmarish exception to the rule. As Examiner columnist Diana West noted Sunday, “similar scenarios play out beyond the wilds of the Taliban zone wherever Sharia culture flowers, an expanding zone that now includes urban centers of the Western world from Berlin to London to Atlanta to Calgary.” Mutilations like Aisha’s are far from the worst that can happen to women under Sharia law; the United Nations estimates that at least 5,000 women are murdered every year in “honor killings” by Muslim family members aggrieved by a wife or daughter thought to have disgraced her kin. As Fox News’ recent reporting has made clear, such crimes happen in America, too, and will likely become more frequent occurrences as Muslims here demand, as their co-adherents already are in Britain and on the continent, that they be allowed to live under Sharia separate from the established civil law.

Forced to Retire, Some Take Social Security Early

In an AP article “Paul Skidmore’s office is shuttered, his job gone, his 18-month job search fruitless and his unemployment benefits exhausted. So at 63, he plans to file this week for Social Security benefits, three years earlier than planned.” “Like Skidmore, 63-year-old Jan Gissel of Tustin, Calif., also was forced into retirement early. She turned to unemployment benefits when her technical support business failed and filed for Social Security last September. Together, the checks are keeping her afloat.”

I can relate to their situations.  It was three months until my 65th birthday when my employer sold out to a competitor.  I received a very modest severance package and they extended my health insurance, employer paid, until my birthday.  I applied for unemployment insurance.  The official date for my social security would not occur until age 65 years and four months.  You are allowed to apply for Social Security up to four months prior to your first benefit check.  So I applied for that option.  However I continued to search for a job.  After all, living on Social Security alone would be a shock to most people.

Congressman John Boehner, appearing on Meet the Press, hinted about extending eligibility for Social Security to age 70.  If you find yourself unemployed at age 60 or later you will not easily find employment except as a greeter at Wal-Mart.

MR. GREGORY:  And so you favor raising the retirement age?

REP. BOEHNER:  David, there are a lot of options about how you solve this, but I don’t want to get the cart before the horse.  I think it’s important to have this conversation.  It’s going to be a difficult conversation, but it’s time to have it and it’s time to come up with some solutions that are done in a bipartisan way to help address these problems.

Fareed Zakaria Returns ADL Award

(Aug. 7) — The Anti-Defamation League said it is “stunned” that Newsweek columnist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria is returning an award from the group in protest of its stance over the planned mosque near ground zero in New York City.

Zakaria returned the award, saying that the ADL’s calls for the project to be relocated compromised its mission to fight discrimination.

“I am not only saddened but stunned and somewhat speechless by your decision,” ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman said in a letter on the group’s website. “I would have expected you to reach out to me before coming to judgment.”

The planned expansion of an Islamic community center, including a mosque, a few blocks from the site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks has led to bitter debate. Families of the victims say the center would be an insult to the memory of the dead, while figures such as Mayor Michael Bloomberg stated that forcing its relocation would be an un-American act of intolerance.

The ADL took a more nuanced position. It said that the project’s leaders had the right to go ahead with the project as they saw fit. Still, the ADL argued that the center should be moved out of sensitivity towards the raw feelings of those affected by the World Trade Center terrorist attacks, which killed more than 2,700 people.

“We are ever mindful of the tragedy which befell our nation there, the pain we all still feel,” the ADL said last month. “We believe the City of New York would be better served if an alternative location could be found.”

Zakaria said this stance betrayed the ADL’s principles. He applauded the Islamic center as an example of moderate Islam that is compatible with American ideals.

The 46-year-old returned the Hubert H. Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize that the ADL awarded him in 2005, along with the $10,000 prize that went with it.

“What is at stake here is the integrity of the ADL and its fidelity to its mission,” Zakaria said in a letter to the group. “This decision will haunt the ADL for years if not decades to come.”

Still, the ADL isn’t giving up hope on Zakaria. Foxman said that the journalist would be free to renounce his position with no hard feelings.

“I am holding on to your award and check in hope that you will come to see that ADL acted appropriately and you will want to reclaim them,” said Foxman in the letter . (Aug. 7) — The Anti-Defamation League said it is “stunned” that Newsweek columnist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria is returning an award from the group in protest of its stance over the planned mosque near ground zero in New York City.

Zakaria returned the award, saying that the ADL’s calls for the project to be relocated compromised its mission to fight discrimination.

“I am not only saddened but stunned and somewhat speechless by your decision,” ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman said in a letter on the group’s website. “I would have expected you to reach out to me before coming to judgment.”

The planned expansion of an Islamic community center, including a mosque, a few blocks from the site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks has led to bitter debate. Families of the victims say the center would be an insult to the memory of the dead, while figures such as Mayor Michael Bloomberg stated that forcing its relocation would be an un-American act of intolerance.

The ADL took a more nuanced position. It said that the project’s leaders had the right to go ahead with the project as they saw fit. Still, the ADL argued that the center should be moved out of sensitivity towards the raw feelings of those affected by the World Trade Center terrorist attacks, which killed more than 2,700 people.

“We are ever mindful of the tragedy which befell our nation there, the pain we all still feel,” the ADL said last month. “We believe the City of New York would be better served if an alternative location could be found.”

Zakaria said this stance betrayed the ADL’s principles. He applauded the Islamic center as an example of moderate Islam that is compatible with American ideals.

The 46-year-old returned the Hubert H. Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize that the ADL awarded him in 2005, along with the $10,000 prize that went with it.

“What is at stake here is the integrity of the ADL and its fidelity to its mission,” Zakaria said in a letter to the group. “This decision will haunt the ADL for years if not decades to come.”

Still, the ADL isn’t giving up hope on Zakaria. Foxman said that the journalist would be free to renounce his position with no hard feelings.

“I am holding on to your award and check in hope that you will come to see that ADL acted appropriately and you will want to reclaim them,” said Foxman in the letter .