Flying While Black

Flying While Black
If you want to screen Muslims as potential terrorists, you'll have to target blacks.

Slate.com
By William Saletan

Posted Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2011, at 8:13
AM ET

Two months ago, I criticized Republican
presidential candidate Herman Cain for
prejudging Muslims the way racists
prejudge blacks. Cain argued that
Muslims should be subjected to special
loyalty tests or barred from cabinet
positions. "This nation is under attack
constantly by people who want to kill all
of us," he told CNN's John King. "I am
going to take extra precautions if a
Muslim person who is competent wants
to work in my administration." When
Glenn Beck asked Cain whether Catholics
or Mormons should face the same loyalty
test as Muslims, Cain said no, "because
there is a greater dangerous part of the
Muslim faith than there is in these other
religions."

Last month, after going to Tennessee to
support bigots who opposed construction
of a mosque, Cain apologized for "any
comments that may have betrayed my
commitment to the U.S. Constitution and
the freedom of religion guaranteed by it."
He said of peaceful Muslims, "In my own
life as a black youth growing up in the
segregated South, I understand their
frustration with stereotypes."

For this apology, Cain has been
denounced by Islamophobes on the right.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet
Napolitano took similar abuse for
rejecting religious profiling. In June, a
questioner told Napolitano: "In most of
the cases since 9/11 that we've made
arrests, it wouldn't be profiling to
discover that most of the suspects or the
convicted parties have been men,
typically under 30 or under 35, often
Muslim. … Why wouldn't the department
focus more of its attention on that
category of individual who's turned up
most often as the suspect?" Napolitano
replied that behavioral profiling was
more accurate than profiling by sex, age,
or religion. In response, several
conservative Web sites, including Beck's,
accused her of defying "logic" and "
common sense."

The logic of Muslim profiling is simple.
First, Muslims are more likely than non-
Muslims to plan or commit acts of terror
against the United States. Second,
Muslims are more likely than non-
Muslims to sympathize with al-Qaida or
believe that suicide bombing can be
justified. Previous polling by the Pew
Research Center supports this claim. But
a new survey report from Pew adds a
twist to the data: Statistically, the group
most deserving of scrutiny under this
rationale isn't Muslims. It's black
Muslims.

The survey report, released yesterday,
presents a table (on page 5) breaking
down the data by race. One question
asks: "How much support for extremism,
if any, is there among Muslims living in
the U.S.?" Among all U.S. Muslims, 21
percent say there's a great deal or a fair
amount of support. Among native-born
U.S. Muslims, the number is 32 percent.
Among black native-born Muslims, it's 40
percent.

Another question asks: "Do you have a
favorable or unfavorable opinion of al-
Qaida?" Among all U.S. Muslims, 5
percent report a favorable view. Among
native-born U.S. Muslims, the number is
10 percent. Among black native-born
Muslims, it's 11 percent.

A third question asks: "Some people
think that suicide bombing and other
forms of violence against civilian targets
are justified in order to defend Islam
from its enemies. Other people believe
that, no matter what the reason, this k
ind of violence is never justified. Do you
personally feel that this kind of violence
is often justified to defend Islam,

sometimes justified, rarely justified, or
never justified?" Among all U.S. Muslims,
8 percent say suicide bombing is often or
sometimes justified. Among native-born
U.S. Muslims, the number is 11 percent.
Among black native-born Muslims, it's 16
percent.

If you think the way Cain did—that we
should take "extra precautions" with
certain groups because the percentage of
people in those groups who might want
to kill us is bigger than it is in other
groups—then Pew's findings suggest
scrutiny of Muslims isn't enough. You
need to zero in on black Muslims. Look at
the two guys who have been caught
trying to blow up planes to the U.S. since
9/11: shoe bomber Richard Reid and
accused underwear bomber Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab. Not to mention
Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the
guy who shot up the military recruiting
center in Arkansas.

I don't see presidential candidates
advocating this kind of heightened
scrutiny. Evidently, racial profiling of
blacks is out of fashion. It's been
replaced by discrimination against
Muslims, ostensibly justified by 9/11 and
the threat of Islamic terrorism. But if
group data warrant extra screening of
Muslims, they also warrant extra
screening, in particular, of blacks. Or they
warrant neither. Logically, those are your
options.

SOURCE: http://www.slate.com/id/2302812/

Bogus court filings spotlight little-known sect

By TOM BREEN
Associated Press
2011-08-02 09:10 AM

From New Jersey to California, police, courthouse officials and real estate agents are being confronted with a baffling new problem: bogus legal documents filed by people claiming to follow an obscure religion called Moorish Science. Their motives range from financial gain to simply causing a nuisance.

No one is more exasperated by the phenomenon than the leaders of the century-old Moorish Science Temple of America, who say the growing crop of "paperwork terrorists" has nothing to do with their faith or its teachings.

"It's just distressing that some individuals would take something as pure and righteous as this organization and try to tarnish it," said Christopher Bennett-Bey, grand sheikh of the group's temple in Charlotte, one of more than 30 located around the country.

It's not clear why the flimflam artists are invoking the group. But one expert said divisions dating back to the death of the sect's founder have resulted in small pockets of people who claim to be followers but have little understanding of the faith.

The bad filings include deeds, liens and other documents, often written in confusing pseudo-legal jargon and making outlandish claims about being exempt from U.S. law. In some cases, filers have actually moved into foreclosed houses and changed the locks. Other times, people seeking to slip their mortgages have used bogus documents to waste the time and money of their banks. Fake liens have also been maliciously filed to target enemies.

"The ideas are particularly attractive to people who are hurting economically, although let's be candid: For some people it's just pure greed," said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama.

Law enforcement can pursue theft or fraud charges if a case warrants it, but states' laws vary on whether filing sham paperwork is a crime in itself. Lawmakers in North Carolina failed to pass a law making bad filings a crime this year.

National numbers on the scheme aren't available, but the area around the largest city in North Carolina has been a hot spot. In 2011 alone, more than 200 bogus legal documents have been filed with Mecklenburg County by people claiming to be followers of Moorish Science, with another few dozen in neighboring Union County.

As long as a legal document is properly formatted, county officials have to file it alongside valid paperwork, according to Mecklenburg County Register of Deeds David Granberry. The content, however, is often outlandish and includes strange punctuation and capitalization or lengthy digressions about the 14th Amendment, the Constitution or maritime law.

"If we can legally reject it for some reason, we'll do that. But as soon as they figure out how to correct it, we'll get a stream of these documents because word gets around," he said.

Having a bogus lien or deed legally purged requires the county _ or the subject of the lien _ to go through a potentially lengthy process that often involves hiring lawyers. A document with a $50 filing fee can easily end up costing the county $2,000, Granberry said.

The tactics being used by the Moor impostors originated with tax-dodgers and white supremacist groups in the 1980s, experts said.

"These are people who engage in the most bizarre leaps of logic. They literally believe that if you lowercase the `u' in the phrase United States, you will break the bonds of government tyranny and become a free man," said Potok, the expert with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The occupation of foreclosed homes appears to be a new wrinkle, Potok said. Such cases have been recorded in Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, California and elsewhere. They often end in the arrests of the squatters.

Joe Pipitone, a realtor in Vineland, New Jersey, encountered the problem earlier this year. After selling a home that had been foreclosed on, he got a call from the new owner to say that someone was already living in the $300,000 house. Pipitone was baffled to find that a deed had been filed claiming ownership by a woman saying she was a member of the Moorish Science Temple. Police said the woman, who was arrested and held on $85,000 bond, had changed the locks and put the utilities in her name.

"I've been selling real estate for 15 years, and I've never seen anything like this," Pipitone said. "You'd think nobody would be stupid enough to try something like this."

Leaders of the largest Moorish Science group are baffled by the tactic.

"I don't understand the underlying motive," Bennett-Bey said. "I think it's just out of convenience, or they're looking for some status."

Moorish Science followers trace their faith back to 1913 and revere its founder, North Carolina native Timothy Drew, as a prophet. They call him the Noble Drew Ali. The faith blends aspects of Islam with elements of other faiths and philosophies, and has its own scriptures, generally called the Holy Koran or the Circle 7 Koran. The Moorish Science Temple taught that the people called blacks were actually the descendants of "Asiatic Moors" or Moroccans who had been in North America for hundreds of years.

Establishing a base in Chicago, the group aimed to instill a sense of pride in its members, decked out in fezzes and bearing identity cards proclaiming "I am a citizen of the USA!" at a time when blacks were legally relegated to second-class status. To make an explicit link with their proclaimed Moorish heritage, members of the group added "Bey" or "El" to their names. At its height, tens of thousands of people belonged to the organization.

"The Moorish Science of Temple of America was founded for the express purpose of uplifting fallen humanity," said Azeem Hopkins-Bey, the group's national spokesman. "We teach that our members must learn to love instead of hate."

After Ali's death in 1929, the group suffered a number of schisms and lost followers to groups that included the Nation of Islam.

Today, numerous groups claim affiliation with Moorish Science. Some consist only a handful of members and in many cases have little understanding of the faith, said Spencer Dew, a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.

"There are folks who call themselves Moors or Moes without knowing anything about the history of Moorish Science," said Dew, who teaches a summer class for the Chicago Police Department on religious groups and crime.

The Moorish Science Temple of America is working to distance itself from the people filing bogus legal claims, calling them "radical and subversive fringe groups" in a recent statement. Moorish leaders are looking into legal remedies, and Bennett-Bey has been advising authorities on how to distinguish registered members from impostors.

"It's like coming to this country and saying you're an American citizen," he said. "If you haven't gone through the process and gotten the proper documentation, you can call yourself whatever you want, but that doesn't make it true."

Drawing U.S. Crowds With Anti-Islam Message

March 7, 2011
Drawing U.S. Crowds With Anti-Islam Message
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
The New York Times

FORT WORTH — Brigitte Gabriel bounced to the stage at a Tea Party convention last fall. She greeted the crowd with a loud Texas “Yee-HAW,” then launched into the same gripping personal story she has told in hundreds of churches, synagogues and conference rooms across the United States:

As a child growing up a Maronite Christian in war-torn southern Lebanon in the 1970s, Ms. Gabriel said, she had been left lying injured in rubble after Muslims mercilessly bombed her village. She found refuge in Israel and then moved to the United States, only to find that the Islamic radicals who had terrorized her in Lebanon, she said, were now bent on taking over America.

“America has been infiltrated on all levels by radicals who wish to harm America,” she said. “They have infiltrated us at the C.I.A., at the F.B.I., at the Pentagon, at the State Department. They are being radicalized in radical mosques in our cities and communities within the United States.”

Through her books, media appearances and speeches, and her organization, ACT! for America, Ms. Gabriel has become one of the most visible personalities on a circuit of self-appointed terrorism detectors who warn that Muslims pose an enormous danger within United States borders.

Representative Peter T. King, Republican of Long Island, will conduct hearings Thursday in Washington on a similar theme: that the United States is infiltrated by Muslim radicals. Mr. King was the first guest last month on a new cable television show that Ms. Gabriel co-hosts with Guy Rodgers, the executive director of ACT! and a Republican consultant who helped build the Christian Coalition, once the most potent political organization on the Christian right.

Ms. Gabriel, 46, who uses a pseudonym, casts her organization as a nonpartisan, nonreligious national security group. Yet the organization draws on three rather religious and partisan streams in American politics: evangelical Christian conservatives, hard-line defenders of Israel (both Jews and Christians) and Tea Party Republicans.

She presents a portrait of Islam so thoroughly bent on destruction and domination that it is unrecognizable to those who study or practice the religion. She has found a receptive audience among Americans who are legitimately worried about the spread of terrorism.

But some of those who work in counterterrorism say that speakers like Ms. Gabriel are spreading distortion and fear, and are doing the country a disservice by failing to make distinctions between Muslims who are potentially dangerous and those who are not.

Brian Fishman, a research fellow at both the New America Foundation in Washington, and the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy at West Point, said, “When you’ve got folks who are looking for the worst in Islam and are promoting that as the entire religion of 1.5 or 1.6 billion people, then you only empower the real extremists.”

Ms. Gabriel is only one voice in a growing circuit that includes counter-Islam speakers like Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and Walid Shoebat. What distinguishes Ms. Gabriel from her counterparts is that she has built a national grass-roots organization in the last three years that has already engaged in dozens of battles over the place of Islam in the United States. ACT! for America claims 155,000 members in 500 chapters across the country. To build her organization, Ms. Gabriel has enlisted Mr. Rodgers, who had worked behind the scenes for the Christian Coalition’s leaders, Ralph Reed and the television evangelist Pat Robertson. (Ms. Gabriel herself was once an anchor for Mr. Robertson’s Christian television network in the Middle East).

As national field director, Mr. Rodgers planted and tended Christian Coalition chapters across the country, and is now using some of the same strategies as executive director of ACT! Among those tactics is creating “nonpartisan voter guides” that rank candidates’ responses and votes on issues important to the group.

Just as with the Christian Coalition’s voter guides, the candidates whose positions most often align with ACT!’s are usually Republicans. Mr. Rodgers previously served as campaign manager for Patrick J. Buchanan’s presidential run in 1996, and as a consultant for John McCain in 2008.

Ms. Gabriel and Mr. Rodgers declined to be interviewed in person or over the telephone, but agreed to respond to questions by e-mail. They permitted interviews with only their national field director and two chapter leaders they selected, though half a dozen other interviews were conducted with chapter leaders before they were told not to talk.

Ms. Gabriel says she is motivated not by fear or hatred of Islam, but by her love for her adopted country.

“I lost Lebanon, my country of birth, to radical Islam,” she wrote. “I do not want to lose my adopted country America.”

She insists that she is singling out only “radical Islam” or Muslim “extremists” — not the vast majority of Muslims or their faith. And yet, in her speeches and her two books, she leaves the opposite impression. She puts it most simply in the 2008 introduction to her first book, “Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America.”

“In the Muslim world, extreme is mainstream,” she wrote. She said that there is a “cancer” infecting the world, and said: “The cancer is called Islamofacism. This ideology is coming out of one source: The Koran.”

In what ACT! is calling “Open a Koran” day this September, the group plans to put up 750 tables in front of post offices, libraries, churches and synagogues and hand out leaflets selectively highlighting verses that appear to advocate violence, slavery and subjugation of women.

In the last year, the group played a key role in passing a constitutional amendment in Oklahoma banning the use of Shariah, a body of Islamic law derived from the Koran and from the Muslim prophet Muhammad’s teachings, sayings and acts. Most Muslims draw selectively on its tenets — in the same way that people of other faiths pick and choose from their sacred texts.

But group members and their allies have succeeded in popularizing the notion that American Muslims are just biding their time until they gain the power to revoke the Constitution and impose Shariah law in the United States.

“We can’t let Shariah law take hold,” said Susan Watts, who leads a large chapter in Houston.

ACT! members are challenging high school textbooks and college courses that they deem too sympathetic to Islam. A group leader in Eugene, Ore., signed up to teach a community college course on Islam, but it was canceled when a Muslim group exposed his blog postings denouncing Islam and denying the scope of the Holocaust.

A chapter in Colorado recently featured a guest speaker on “How to minister to Muslims,” and “Conversion success stories.” Mr. Rodgers said in a written response that ACT! does not encourage such activities.

Ms. Gabriel’s approach and her power appear rooted in her childhood trauma in the civil war in southern Lebanon. The war was a chaotic stew in which ever-shifting alliances of clan-based militias made up of Christian, Shiite, Sunni, Palestinian and Druse made war on one other, often with the backing of other countries. But in the rendering Ms. Gabriel shares with her American audiences, it was black and white. As her father explained to her, “The Muslims bombed us because we are Christians. They want us dead because they hate us.” (The refrain became the title of her first book.)

She moved to Israel in her early 20s to work for Middle East Television. Ms. Gabriel often mentions in lectures that she was an anchor for the network, but does not reveal that Middle East Television was then run by Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network to spread his politically conservative, Pentecostal faith in the Middle East.

On air as a reporter, Ms. Gabriel used the name Nour Saman. She married an American co-worker and in 1989 moved to the United States. They started a film and television production company, which says it has produced programs on terrorism for “Good Morning America” and “Primetime.”

She said she uses a pseudonym, voted on by her organization’s board, because she has received death threats.

Ms. Gabriel has given hundreds of lectures, including to the Heritage Foundation and the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Va. Her salary from two organizations she founded, American Congress for Truth and ACT! for America, was $178,411 in 2009. And the group’s combined income was $1.6 million.

In Fort Worth, Ms. Gabriel spent nearly an hour after her speech signing books and posing for pictures with gushing fans.

“She really opened up my eyes about Islam,” said Natalie Rix Cresson, a composer, clutching a signed copy of Ms. Gabriel’s book. “I didn’t realize it was so infiltrated in the schools, everywhere.”

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Lebanon.

Read it all here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/us/08gabriel.html

A War-Hardened Filmmaker Delves Into Islam

July 29, 2011
A War-Hardened Filmmaker Delves Into Islam
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
The New York Times

On his way home from covering the Persian Gulf war, the filmmaker Greg Barker stayed overnight in a small Egyptian village. Early the next morning, an undulating sound awakened him. For someone raised in Southern California, where predawn interruptions usually come from car alarms, it took some time to realize he was hearing the muezzin’s call to prayer.

In that moment, Mr. Barker sensed both epiphany and rebuke. Something about the summons to worship clearly mattered enormously to the people now heading toward the mosque. Yet even after working for months as a journalist in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, reporting on a war in the midst of the Muslim world, Mr. Barker had to admit that he knew virtually nothing about Islam.

Now, 20 years later, the curiosity and challenge of that moment have reached fruition in the form of the documentary “Koran by Heart.” The film follows three children as they compete in an international contest to memorize and recite from the Koran, the Muslim holy book. Fittingly, it will be shown on HBO on Monday as the Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins.

“Koran by Heart” simultaneously embraces and subverts a familiar documentary genre. As several critics noted when it played last spring at the Tribeca Film Festival, it follows the formula of cute, precocious kids under win-or-lose pressure that was popularized by the 2002 film “Spellbound” and “Mad Hot Ballroom” in 2005.

Unlike a spelling bee or a dance tournament, though, the International Holy Koran Competition, held annually in Cairo, has consequences beyond triumph or tears. In Mr. Barker’s supple, subtle hands, the contest provides a means of exploring the tension within Islam between the kind of fundamentalism typified by rote, literalist instruction and the modernity outside the madrasa’s door.

“I was interested in Islam as a force in the world,” Mr. Barker, 48, said in a Skype interview from his home in the Los Angeles area. “The struggles, the conversation about modernity within the faith. It’s not what most people are aware of. I was looking for a way to put a human face on the religion and on the struggle. And as a filmmaker, I was looking for a way in.”

Before embarking on the project, Mr. Barker had established himself as a filmmaker of artistic and political consequence with documentaries like “Ghosts of Rwanda,” a retrospective on the genocide there, and “Sergio,” which explored the assassination of the United Nations’s ambassador to Iraq in a truck bombing that killed 22 people.

About two years ago, Mr. Barker and Sheila Nevins, the president of HBO Documentary Films, separately heard about the Koran competition. With the cable network’s backing, Mr. Barker assembled a crew, navigated the labyrinth of Egypt’s bureaucracy and began filming the two-week contest last August.

Even as Mr. Barker was granted access, skepticism and hostility also greeted the project. While he was limning Islam through the contest, the organizers and participants were expressing their attitudes toward the West to the documentary’s creative team.

“The big question, over and over again, time after time, without fail, was, ‘Why are these people making the movie?’ ” recalled Razan el-Ghalayini, 25, an American Muslim and associate producer of the film. “ ‘Don’t Americans and Christians hate Islam?’ I don’t think even I understood the extent to which people felt that way.”

Amid that climate, Mr. Barker managed both to grasp the pageantry of the competition — 110 children and young adults from as far afield as Italy, Nigeria, Pakistan and Australia, all being tested on a text of 200,000 Arabic words and their ability to improvise melodies as they chant — and to zero in on the characters who would ultimately supply the film’s deeper themes.

These were three 10-year-olds: Nabiollah Saidoff from Tajikistan, Rifdha Rasheed from the Maldives and Djamil Djieng from Senegal. After the contest ended, Mr. Barker and his crew followed all three back to their home countries.

A prodigy at Koran recitation, fawned over by elderly judges as if he were Harry Potter at Hogwarts, Nabiollah turns out to be illiterate in Tajik. His sole education has come from the imam of a madrasa that the Tajik government shut down for its fundamentalist leanings.

“The problem,” the principal of a secular school explains in the film, “is small rural schools, where children have just one teacher, can lead young people to join extremist groups.”

In seeming contrast, Rifdha, the daughter of two accountants, is a straight-A student and aspiring scientist. Her father, however, has become a fervent Muslim, dismissive of the Egyptians as not observant enough. He informs Rifdha that he plans to move the entire family to Yemen, and that, even if she is educated, her future will be as a housewife.

That intimate drama attests to the words offered during the film by Maumoon Gayoom, a former president of the Maldives: “We have always practiced a very moderate form of Islam in the Maldives. ...But the trend — to go back in history, to return to early Islam — is felt all over the Muslim world.”

It would be an unconscionable spoiler to reveal here what happens to Rifdha and Nabiollah by the documentary’s end, or to divulge how they fare in the contest. Suffice it to say that they exemplify both the concept of the umma — a sense of Muslim peoplehood that transcends race, class, geography and nationality by means of its common text — and the specter of unquestioning obedience to scripture.

“For me, it all comes down to education,” Mr. Barker said. “If we were making a film about evangelical Christians memorizing the Bible, and that’s all they did, we’d be troubled by that. With regard to Islam, we have a problem with that narrow approach, which can lead to extremism and, in the worst cases, to terrorism. As long as they’re getting a broad education, their religion is their own business.”

E-mail: sgf1@columbia.edu



Read it all here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/30/us/30religion.html

Killings in Norway Spotlight Anti-Muslim Thought in U.S.

July 24, 2011
Killings in Norway Spotlight Anti-Muslim Thought in U.S.
By SCOTT SHANE
The New York Times

The man accused of the killing spree in Norway was deeply influenced by a small group of American bloggers and writers who have warned for years about the threat from Islam, lacing his 1,500-page manifesto with quotations from them, as well as copying multiple passages from the tract of the Unabomber.

In the document he posted online, Anders Behring Breivik, who is accused of bombing government buildings and killing scores of young people at a Labor Party camp, showed that he had closely followed the acrimonious American debate over Islam.

His manifesto, which denounced Norwegian politicians as failing to defend the country from Islamic influence, quoted Robert Spencer, who operates the Jihad Watch Web site, 64 times, and cited other Western writers who shared his view that Muslim immigrants pose a grave danger to Western culture.

More broadly, the mass killings in Norway, with their echo of the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by an antigovernment militant, have focused new attention around the world on the subculture of anti-Muslim bloggers and right-wing activists and renewed a debate over the focus of counterterrorism efforts.

In the United States, critics have asserted that the intense spotlight on the threat from Islamic militants has unfairly vilified Muslim Americans while dangerously playing down the threat of attacks from other domestic radicals. The author of a 2009 Department of Homeland Security report on right-wing extremism withdrawn by the department after criticism from conservatives repeated on Sunday his claim that the department had tilted too heavily toward the threat from Islamic militants.

The revelations about Mr. Breivik’s American influences exploded on the blogs over the weekend, putting Mr. Spencer and other self-described “counterjihad” activists on the defensive, as their critics suggested that their portrayal of Islam as a threat to the West indirectly fostered the crimes in Norway.

Mr. Spencer wrote on his Web site, jihadwatch.org, that “the blame game” had begun, “as if killing a lot of children aids the defense against the global jihad and Islamic supremacism, or has anything remotely to do with anything we have ever advocated.” He did not mention Mr. Breivik’s voluminous quotations from his writings.

The Gates of Vienna, a blog that ordinarily keeps up a drumbeat of anti-Islamist news and commentary, closed its pages to comments Sunday “due to the unusual situation in which it has recently found itself.”

Its operator, who describes himself as a Virginia consultant and uses the pseudonym “Baron Bodissey,” wrote on the site Sunday that “at no time has any part of the Counterjihad advocated violence.”

The name of that Web site — a reference to the siege of Vienna in 1683 by Muslim fighters who, the blog says in its headnote, “seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe” — was echoed in the title Mr. Breivik chose for his manifesto: “2083: A European Declaration of Independence.” He chose that year, the 400th anniversary of the siege, as the target for the triumph of Christian forces in the European civil war he called for to drive out Islamic influence.

Marc Sageman, a former C.I.A. officer and a consultant on terrorism, said it would be unfair to attribute Mr. Breivik’s violence to the writers who helped shape his world view. But at the same time, he said the counterjihad writers do argue that the fundamentalist Salafi branch of Islam “is the infrastructure from which Al Qaeda emerged. Well, they and their writings are the infrastructure from which Breivik emerged.”

“This rhetoric,” he added, “is not cost-free.”

Dr. Sageman, who is also a forensic psychiatrist, said he saw no overt signs of mental illness in Mr. Breivik’s writings. He said Mr. Breivik bears some resemblance to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who also spent years on a manifesto and carried out his mail bombings in part to gain attention for his theories. One obvious difference, Dr. Sageman said, is that Mr. Kaczynski was a loner who spent years in a rustic Montana cabin, while Mr. Breivik appears to have been quite social.

Mr. Breivik’s declaration did not name Mr. Kaczynski or acknowledge the numerous passages copied from the Unabomber’s 1995 manifesto, in which the Norwegian substituted “multiculturalists” or “cultural Marxists” for Mr. Kaczynski’s “leftists” and made other small wording changes.

By contrast, he quoted the American and European counterjihad writers by name, notably Mr. Spencer, author of 10 books, including “Islam Unveiled” and “The Truth About Muhammad.”

Mr. Breivik frequently cited another blog, Atlas Shrugs, and recommended the Gates of Vienna among Web sites. Pamela Geller, an outspoken critic of Islam who runs Atlas Shrugs, wrote on her blog Sunday that any assertion that she or other antijihad writers bore any responsibility for Mr. Breivik’s actions was “ridiculous.”

“If anyone incited him to violence, it was Islamic supremacists,” she wrote.

Mr. Breivik also quoted European blogs and writers with similar themes, notably a Norwegian blogger who writes under the name “Fjordman.” Immigration from Muslim countries to Scandinavia and the rest of Europe has set off a deep political debate across the continent and strengthened a number of right-wing anti-immigrant parties.

In the United States, the shootings resonated with years of debate at home over the proper focus of counterterrorism.

Despite the Norway killings, Representative Peter T. King, the New York Republican who is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he had no plans to broaden contentious hearings about the radicalization of Muslim Americans and would hold the third one as planned on Wednesday. He said his committee focused on terrorist threats with foreign ties and suggested that the Judiciary Committee might be more appropriate for looking at non-Muslim threats.

In 2009, when the Department of Homeland Security produced a report, “Rightwing Extremism,” suggesting that the recession and the election of an African-American president might increase the threat from white supremacists, conservatives in Congress strongly objected. Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, quickly withdrew the report and apologized for what she said were its flaws.

Daryl Johnson, the Department of Homeland Security analyst who was the primary author of the report, said in an interview that after he left the department in 2010, the number of analysts assigned to non-Islamic militancy of all kinds was reduced to two from six. Mr. Johnson, who now runs a private research firm on the domestic terrorist threat, DTAnalytics, said about 30 analysts worked on Islamic radicalism when he was there.

The killings in Norway “could easily happen here,” he said. The Hutaree, an extremist Christian militia in Michigan accused last year of plotting to kill police officers and planting bombs at their funerals, had an arsenal of weapons larger than all the Muslim plotters charged in the United States since the Sept. 11 attacks combined, he said.

Homeland Security officials disputed Mr. Johnson’s claim about staffing, saying they pay close attention to all threats, regardless of ideology. And the F.B.I. infiltrated the Hutaree, making arrests before any attack could take place.

John D. Cohen, principal deputy counterterrorism coordinator at the Department of Homeland Security, said Ms. Napolitano, who visited Oklahoma City last year for the 15th anniversary of the bombing there, had often spoken of the need to assess the risk of violence without regard to politics or religion.

“What happened in Norway,” Mr. Cohen said, “is a dramatic reminder that in trying to prevent attacks, we cannot focus on a single ideology.”


Read it all here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/25/us/25debate.html

Developers of Islamic Center Try a New Strategy

August 1, 2011
Developers of Islamic Center Try a New Strategy
By ANNE BARNARD
The New York Times

A year after controversy engulfed plans to build a Muslim community center and mosque in Lower Manhattan, the project’s developers are quietly moving ahead: In recent months they have hired a paid staff, started fund-raising drives and continued holding prayers and cultural events in their existing building two blocks from ground zero.

But they have also embraced what they call a slower, more deliberate and more realistic approach to the project, acknowledging it will take years of hard work to determine what kind of facilities Muslim and non-Muslim visitors want and need, to raise money, and to build public support.

That means it could be five years before they even try to begin any physical transformation of the property, now a bare-bones building that once housed a Burlington Coat Factory store. And the Muslim center might never become the 15-story, $100 million edifice that the developers had once envisioned, and that some opponents had labeled a “megamosque.”

When the plans were announced last year, there were angry protests from some relatives of 9/11 victims, politicians and others who said it would be insensitive to build a Muslim institution close to where Islamic radicals attacked the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. The furor was fanned by Internet-based activists who viewed Muslim influence as a threat and called the project a “victory mosque.” The developers, unprepared for the outcry, were thrown into disarray, trying to defend a plan that was still embryonic.

Sharif El-Gamal, the lead developer, who controls the property at 45-51 Park Place, has spent the past year trying to regroup. He has severed ties with the project’s original imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf. He has crisscrossed the country to attract donors, built relationships with neighborhood groups and Muslim organizations and recruited the aunt of a 9/11 victim to his advisory board — all things he says he should have done before going public last year.

“Everything was backward,” Mr. El-Gamal, 37, acknowledged in an interview on Wednesday in his Chelsea real estate office. “We’re going back to basics.”

Mr. El-Gamal said his vision remained: a Muslim-led community center modeled on the Jewish Community Center on the Upper West Side, where his children learned to swim. It would be open to all, with a pool, a theater and cultural, religious and interfaith programming. And the site, which is already used for Muslim worship, would include a mosque.

He said the ultimate form of the center, called Park51, and its building would be determined after consultation with two main audiences, residents of Lower Manhattan and Muslims who live in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Mr. El-Gamal also said he would assess the community response to the events now held at Park51’s makeshift space, varying from art exhibits and yoga and Brazilian martial arts classes to Muslim holiday observances and a discussion for Muslim and non-Muslim children about bullying.

“If the community only wants four or five floors, it’s going to be four or five floors,” Mr. El-Gamal said.

One thing that is not in question, he said, is the center’s location. Legally, he is entitled to operate a religious institution there; the project required no zoning approval, though it was voluntarily presented to Manhattan’s Community Board 1, which approved it in May 2010.

Prayers have been held in the building since 2009, when Mr. El-Gamal and his partners bought it to provide prayer space for Muslims who work downtown and had worshiped for decades in two small, crowded mosques nearby.

The 10th anniversary of 9/11 this fall poses a new challenge for the center. Pamela Geller, a blogger who drove much of the opposition, has called for a protest on Sept. 11 near Park51; her Web site promotes a film, “The Ground Zero Mosque: Second Wave of the 911 Attacks.” The language employed by Ms. Geller and Robert Spencer, another blogger who writes about threats from Islam, is under new scrutiny after their views were cited by Anders Behring Breivik, who confessed to killing scores of people in Norway on July 22 because of his fears of a Muslim takeover; Ms. Geller and Mr. Spencer have denied any responsibility for Mr. Breivik’s actions.

They are not the only opponents. In the campaign for a special election to fill an open House seat serving Brooklyn and Queens, the Republican nominee, Bob Turner, is accusing his Democratic opponent, David I. Weprin, of being insufficiently hostile to the Muslim center.

Mr. El-Gamal said he was disturbed that his project had been swept up in public discussion of 9/11, which he recalls as “an attack on my city.”

“To see that you’re in the middle of causing neighbors or other human beings angst or distress or adding to their grief is not a pleasant feeling,” he said. “At the same time, we had nothing to do with those events, and those events defaced our religion.”

Park51 has not decided whether to hold a formal event on 9/11 or simply mourn and remember in private. “We want to do what is most respectful and appropriate,” said Katerina Lucas, the chief of staff. Ms. Lucas, a recent graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, is one of Park51’s five staff members.

Inside the unmarked building, the center is busy with events that showcase its multiple goals. Throughout Ramadan, the Muslim holy month that begins this week, the space will host nightly meals to break the fast, and other events. This fall, the center plans an exhibit called NYChildren Photography, by Danny Goldfield, a Brooklyn photographer who is trying to take pictures of one New York City boy or girl born in each of the world’s countries. In July, at a preview of the exhibit, a band played and several dozen visitors nibbled snacks and admired portraits of children from Japan, Guinea and Afghanistan.

And last Friday in the building, the planners held a dinner for New York Muslim groups to raise money for the mosque, which will be called PrayerSpace. Fund-raising is being done separately for the mosque and the community center, though the same people oversee both efforts; money will not be accepted from sources that Mr. El-Gamal said did not reflect “American values.” He said he was seeking to raise $7 million to $10 million to finance a “transitional phase” of both facilities.

Leaders of several Muslim community organizations, some of whom were upset last year that they were not consulted about Park51 before it became the center of national controversy, said in interviews that Mr. El-Gamal had mended fences with them.

At the same time, Mr. El-Gamal said he would no longer have an imam as the center’s public face. Personality conflicts and philosophical and tactical disagreements ended his relationship with Mr. Abdul Rauf, whose views were criticized by opponents and whom some Muslims said was out of touch with their concerns.

Mr. Abdul Rauf said last week that he had spent recent months lecturing on tolerance and American Islam and working to establish a Muslim center at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York and writing a book.


Read it all here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/nyregion/new-quiet-effort-for-big-islamic-center-near-ground-zero.html