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U.S. Administration Wrongly Advocates the Islamist Interpretation of Islamophobia
Algemeiner ^ | May 22, 2013

Posted on 05/23/2013 4:48:30 AM PDT by SJackson

The burqa and the niqab.

The State Department issued a report denouncing what it called “a spike in anti-Islamic sentiment in Europe and Asia.” It said that “Muslims also faced new restrictions in 2012 in countries ranging from Belgium, which banned face-covering religious attire in classrooms, to India[,] where schools in Mangalore restricted headscarves.”

The State Department report confuses religious persecution, which is to be condemned, with politicization of religions, which is a matter of debate and includes strategies of which the U.S. government should not be a part. If countries ban the right to pray, broadcast, and write about theology — any theology — this would be against human rights. But Belgium and India do not ban religions per se. In fact, they are more tolerant regarding diverse religious practice than most of the members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The Obama administration is not criticizing secular European and Asian governments for deciding to ban prayer or theologically philosophical dissertations, but rather criticizing these countries for banning the hijab or niqab in public places.

The administration understands the wearing of the hijab as a religious injunction for all Muslims. This is not the case, as senior theologians have decreed, including al Azhar, and the niqab is not a universal Muslim obligation, as one can see in 53 Muslim-majority countries. It is a matter of choice. The organized groups calling for a systematic imposition of the niqab are Islamist forces. This translates politically into an official endorsement on the Obama administration’s part of the Islamist political agenda under the camouflage of religious rights.

The Obama administration, by using the charge of Islamophobia against countries that oppose the political agenda of an ideological and political faction comprising those known as Salafists and Khomeinists, has become a partner with these factions against secular, liberal, reformist movements who do not abide by the niqab rule. It is one thing to defend religious communities and something else to defend the agenda of ideological factions. The niqab is part and parcel of the ideological agenda advocated by the Islamists, not a tenet held by all Muslims. If the Obama administration is worried about the Islamist agenda not yet met by European and Asian countries, it should claim so, but the administration cannot claim defense of a religious injunction to all Muslims while the latter have no consensus on the matter.

It has been noted over the past few years that U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East, the Arab world, and Muslim-majority countries has come increasingly under the influence of pressure groups, identified also as “lobbies,” implementing the doctrinal and political agendas of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian Khomeinist regime. The State Department has been made to believe that the Islamist agenda and the beliefs and values of all Muslims are one, which is a grave mistake.

The Obama administration should have learned from recent lessons as well as those from the past. First, it should have learned that popular majorities in the countries of the Arab Spring, particularly in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Yemen, are not necessarily followers of Islamist principles. Rather, strong oppositions representing a vast swath of civil society are demonstrating vividly against the Islamist regimes produced by the Arab Spring.

The issue of hijab and niqab is one of the many that divide Muslim-majority societies. The Brotherhood and the Iranian regime claim that the veil should be a matter of the female’s uniform –not only in the region, but also for the women of Muslim communities in the West. This is the reason their lobbies are portraying the hijab and niqab as an obligation to all Muslim women — and thus a collective religious right above all other considerations in secular societies, including gender equality and public security matters. Yet the veil, as simply an expression, cannot be imposed on all Muslims, nor can it be extrapolated to be understood as a fundamental right to all members of society.

We therefore recommend that the U.S. government and other governments around the world make a basic distinction. The rights of prayer and its offshoots are universal to Muslim communities; such rights should then have consequences in and on Western and other non-Muslim countries. But the matter of hijab and niqab is a political right, not a religious one. And as a political right, it follows the limitations placed on it by the laws of the land. Even political rights can be obtained given hospitable circumstances, but the United States should not be siding with one political faction against another in an ideological debate in the Muslim world and among Muslim communities in the West and Asia.

If Washington espouses the agenda of Islamists, it becomes part of the industry of Islamophobia — that is, to create fear about religious persecution in order to support the political agenda of authoritarian Islamist factions.


TOPICS: Editorial; Government; Politics/Elections; War on Terror
KEYWORDS:

1 posted on 05/23/2013 4:48:30 AM PDT by SJackson
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To: SJackson

Why is the STATE DEPT giving MANPADS to al Qaeda,
and inviting TERRORISTS to the homeland?


2 posted on 05/23/2013 4:52:56 AM PDT by Diogenesis (Vi veri veniversum vivus vici)
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To: SJackson

banning the right to pray, broadcast, and write about theology must not be done in a republican society. That said Moslems should be deported 100% including home-grown ones.Moslem ammbassadors should be restricted to some island off the coast where they can have nice embassies but meetings with them must be conducted on the island. that would put a crimp in the UN but I guess we would have to move it out of the borders of the country, too, or make the Moslem members participate via Skype.


3 posted on 05/23/2013 4:56:08 AM PDT by arthurus (Read Hazlitt's Economics In One Lesson ONLINE http://steshaw.org/econohttp://www.fee.org/library/det)
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To: SJackson
The burqa and the niqab

These are not American. Get them out of the US. If they want these let them have what goes with them in their homelands.

4 posted on 05/23/2013 5:07:14 AM PDT by Rapscallion (In Benghazi they died; Obama, Clinton and Rice lied. God may forgive. I do not.)
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To: SJackson
Islamic extremism

Redundant noun


Daniel Greenfield : Radicals, Moderates, and Islamists

5 posted on 05/23/2013 5:13:08 AM PDT by tomkat
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To: arthurus

Islam is NOT just a religion. It is a political system that is incompatible with our Constitutional republic. Therefore isalm should be outlawed here. Just as communism is outlawed here (Our Constitution requires the states to have a republican form of government)

Islam must be banned from the USA, and no moslem should EVER be allowed here. The koran commands all moslems to be terrorists.


6 posted on 05/23/2013 5:15:16 AM PDT by John O (God Save America (Please))
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To: SJackson

Does anyone expect anything different from our State department when our President is a Muslim.


7 posted on 05/23/2013 5:26:55 AM PDT by Venturer
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To: dennisw; Cachelot; Nix 2; veronica; Catspaw; knighthawk; Alouette; Optimist; weikel; Lent; GregB; ..
Middle East and terrorism, occasional political and Jewish issues Ping List. High Volume

If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.

..................

8 posted on 05/23/2013 5:30:20 AM PDT by SJackson (The Pilgrims—Doing the jobs Native Americans wouldn’t do !)
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To: SJackson

I’m just going to put this out there, stating the obvious imho:

Islam advocates its own form of governing. Thus, Islam is anti-government with exception to historically-islamic cultures that accept that form of governance.

If Christianity advocated for religious law, it would be promptly trounced upon by the government as an ‘anti-government political organization’ and all benefits & rights accorded a ‘religion’ removed.

Islam is not a religion: It is a political ideology that promotes itself above all others, religious and political, using ‘religion’ as an emotional tool to control the populace, its ‘believers’.

Islam does not merit protections of being grouped among other religions. US law is not being applied equally. If serious questions were asked about Islam in an open debate, it would become patently clear to even the most uninformed, low-information, bipedal C02-polluter...


9 posted on 05/23/2013 5:38:05 AM PDT by logi_cal869
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To: SJackson

Islam is a social form of cancer.

Fear of cancer is not irrational.

Drastic treatments to rid a body of cancer - every last individual cell, even if it not invading or destroying healthy tissue at the moment - is not irrational.

Ignoring cancer, or dismissing currently-harmless cancer cells, is irrational.


10 posted on 05/23/2013 6:19:49 AM PDT by dagogo redux (A whiff of primitive spirits in the air, harbingers of an impending descent into the feral.)
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To: SJackson

Why shouldn’t they? We have a Mozlem president and head of CIA and MB members hired and appointed, all over the place.


11 posted on 05/23/2013 7:08:29 AM PDT by little jeremiah (Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. CSLewis)
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To: Diogenesis

If Washington espouses the agenda of Islamists, it becomes part of the industry of Islamophobia — that is, to create fear about religious persecution in order to support the political agenda of authoritarian Islamist factions.


IF? IF?? That’s exactly what it is - a part of the industry of Islam!


12 posted on 05/23/2013 7:10:17 AM PDT by little jeremiah (Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. CSLewis)
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To: SJackson

“The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

—BARACK OBAMA, From remarks to the United Nations following the murder of four Americans by Islamic terrorists at a U.S. diplomatic post in Libya, Sept. 11, 2012


13 posted on 05/23/2013 11:02:11 AM PDT by Brad from Tennessee (A politician can't give you anything he hasn't first stolen from you.)
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