Muslim stereotypes challenged in US

BBC ^ | 2-6-04 | Jacky Rowland

[mathurine]

no doubt soon we will have a mohammedanism advocate in every college and club on the payroll. All you have to do to get a job in America is to have a loud-mouth and one will be created for you. These jobs, of course, are pure inventions, requiring nothing of value, but, of course, lead nowhere, which, in turn . requires one to consider the possibility of further protestations over the lack of advancement opportunities for people like that.

[Jorge]

Not surprising, when the message is a very direct "I am just waiting for the moment to kill you and everyone like you".

If that is the message, I am not one bit afraid of these radicals. We've been kicking their sorry butts all over this world in both the culture wars and in military force.

They are losers. In this and the next world.

[Woahhs]

Are you aware of the meaning of the hijab? It has a political, not a religious meaning. And that political meaning is that the wearer is a supporter of murder in the name of Islam.

Can you source this, please. All I can find is Muslim boiler plate on the subject.

[thoughtomator]

There were other reasons for taking up and defending hijab. One was the growing reaffirmation of nation identity and rejection of values and styles seen as western. In response to Egypt's catastrophic loss to Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War, and the seeming failure of secularism, there also was a push to return to Islamic laws which had been abandoned. Modernization was seen as negative, a phenomena which encouraged people to reject not only Islamic but all indigenous traditions. Wearing hijab came to symbolize not the inferiority of the culture in comparison to western ways, but its uniqueness and superiority.

The real surge toward donning hijab came with Iran's revolution. Women were seen as key elements in achieving changes in public morality and private behavior. Unveiled women were mocked, called unchaste "painted dolls," and were punished if they appeared in public without proper covering. In countries beyond Iran in the 1970s, demonstrations and sit-ins appeared over opposition to the required western style dress code for university students and civil servants.

From Women in World History

Further info on this from Amir Taheri

The practical purpose of the hijab is to mark the women already conquered by Islam, to spare them the treatment that Islam has in store for non-Muslim women - rape, murder, and slavery.

[Capriole]

If anyone cares: I live in Montgomery County, Maryland. I read the crime reports every week. I have not seen any report of any woman in the county being stabbed for wearing a hijab. In fact, I can't find a report of a woman of any description being stabbed while walking down the street. Is anybody surprised? This sounds to me like a lot of the self-pitying hysteria that sprung up after 9-11 when there were all these false stories about Moslems being harassed or assaulted.

[ozzymandus]

If they don't like being stereotyped as terrorists, maybe they should quit being stereotypical terrorists.

[eleni121]

Where were you on 9/11?
Muslims already attacked from within.
Invasion isn't just hordes of armies hitting our beaches and fighting us.
An invasion can subtly occur from within. This is not new. The Communists were actively undermining our freedom and principles for years...are they done? NOT!

[Valin]

If they don't like being stereotyped as terrorists, maybe they should quit being stereotypical terrorists.

You mean like this?

Open Letter from an Arab-American Student (Worthwhile reading)
FrontPageMagazine.com June 2, 2003
Oubai Mohammad Shahbandar
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/921658/posts?page=1
(snip)
The frontlines of this war stretch across the entire globe and into our classrooms, our homes, our places of worship, into every aspect of our everyday lives. But don't tell this to our tenured terror appeasers who hide behind the intellectual credentials that have been bestowed on them by the anti-American university system.

They have never known the humiliation of living under the iron rule of an Islamic despotism. I have. They have never tasted the cruel bitterness of forced silence in the shadows of a dictatorship. I have. They have never seen the face of evil. I have. For I was born and raised in Syria, the country enslaved by Hafez El-Assad. I was one of the fortunate victims of this tyranny because my family was able to emigrate to American a land of freedom. Yet in the free universities of this country legitimacy is bestowed on the very forces that oppress my former countrymen and I am instructed to be compassionate towards my own oppressors and to be hostile to the country that has liberated me.

I have had to witness the post 9-11 "teach in" sponsored by our university president's "Campus Environment Team" entitled "Understanding the 'other,'" which sought to place moral equivalency between America and the terrorists who attacked us. I have had to listen to inanities about the attack like that of a member of the university-sponsored Diversity Awareness Programming Board who said, " we must remember that 9-11 was about diversity too." I have been subjected to the humiliating prospect of the university's anti-American, anti-war poetry reading, sponsored by our English Department last April. I have had to watch our unversity president, Michael Crow, provide a platform for the former Swedish Ambassador so he could spill his anti-American bile before a university audience. I have had to listen to the Administration's guest Mary Francis Berry denounce the most tolerant nation in the world as a racist oppressor. I have had to walk daily by the mural plastered on the Memorial Union and sponsored by the university's "progressive coalition" and funded by the university itself which features a map of the United States with "Racist Nation" and "Bush is Racist" and "What about the Arabs" written across it.

This August I will be heading to Israel to study counter terrorism under a program hosted by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy. I, a Muslim Arab was able to attend this program largely due to the gracious sponsorship of David Horowitz, a Jew. No multicultural sensitivity class made that possible. I will not stand idly by as our professors and our universities pave the road for terror's long march into humanity's last sanctuary of freedom.

What contribution will you make to the cause of liberty, to our nation's security?

I am a Muslim American Arab and I am willing to fight for my country. How about you?



"It is easy to fly into a passion--anybody can do that--but to be angry with the right person and at the right time and with the right object and in the right way--that is not easy, and it is not everyone who can do it."
-- Aristotle
Can you?

[tedkrack]

"The invasion began almost 20 years ago,it is going full speed as we type. There is but a few years left to save our country as we knew it. Our government, both parties, have no interest in saving us because to speak and do the necessary things would cost them the next election. 15% of the electorate can control a country. Lots of polititions in lots of countries are currently afraid to alienate the muslem population because they would lose the next election. It will soon be the third rail of politics here then all will be lost. Devide and conquer. Have we ever been this divided?? We are getting close."

You could not be more correct. Look at what's happened to France about 40 years or so of unrestrained Muslim immigration; France is lost, or almost so, despite the fact that Paris recently woke up and realized the country would soon be a Muslim country. I fear Britain is well along the same path. We're next, unless we wake up NOW.