Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Sunday, September 26, 2010
People Behind the Mosque on 60 minutes
Here's a clip the 60 minutes episode featuring the people behind Park 51.
Friday, September 24, 2010
Michael Moore on Islamic Community Center
Micheal Moore on the Brian Lehrer show (WNYC) on Setember 22, 2010. First ten minutes of the segment.
Rutgers Professor on Islamophobia
Hot Topics: Examining Islamophobia in America
September 22, 2010
The planned construction of a Muslim community center near the World Trade Center has put Islam squarely in the center of a national debate over religious freedom and protecting the sanctity of a site where thousands perished in the 9/11 attacks. Against the backdrop of the mosque controversy, a Florida pastor threatened to burn the Muslim holy book and battles over mosques have broken out in other communities around the country. The events sparked a Time cover story: “Is America Islamophobic?” At a recent summit in New York City, U.S. Muslim organizations joined in solidarity to support the project in spite of a rise in anti-Muslim sentiments and rhetoric that has accompanied the debate. Deepa Kumar, a professor of media studies at the School of Communication and Information, weighs in on the anti-Muslim fervor and the role of the media in shaping public perception. Kumar’s area of research includes media, war, and imperialism as well as Islam, the Middle East, and U.S. foreign policy. She is active in social movements for peace and justice.
Rutgers Today: Do you think there is widespread fear of and animosity toward Muslims in the United States?
Deepa Kumar: Unfortunately, yes. I don’t think, however, that this anti-Muslim attitude comes from regular Americans. Rather, since the events of 9/11, the mainstream media and the political elite have helped generate an attitude toward Muslims that has been largely negative. Most recently, this rhetoric has been taken up a few notches by forces such as the Tea Party Initiative. The controversy around the planned Islamic community center in lower Manhattan was polarized by groups on the far right of the political spectrum. One such group is "Stop Islamization of America," which is based on the premise that Muslims are conspiring to take over the U.S. These forces managed to frame the debate in such a way that you either had to support the families of 9/11 or the center. This is a false choice, since many of the victims’ families have come out in support of the center. But given this limited choice, people who otherwise might not harbor anti-Muslim sentiments found themselves against the center.
Rutgers Today: Do you support the plan to build an Islamic center near the World Trade Center?
Kumar: I believe Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is trying to change public perceptions of Muslims to counteract images of fear and terror associated with Islam. He chose the location two blocks from ground zero so he could present a different face of Islam, one that is more representative of the more than 1.5 billion Muslims around the world who have no sympathy for the actions of the extremists. Shouldn’t we, as a country that guarantees religious freedoms, permit him to offer a different perspective of his culture?
Rutgers Today: If you feel most Americans don’t have animosity toward Muslims, why do you think anti-Muslim rhetoric is prevalent?
Kumar: The majority of Americans have been manipulated by a politics of fear generated after the events of 9/11. Every country that seeks to obtain the consent of its citizens for war must construct an enemy that is feared and hated. When President George W. Bush declared that we were involved in a “war on terror,” we were told that the new enemy was the vicious Muslim terrorist. This generated a politics of fear similar to that which existed during the Cold War when we were told to fear the Soviet Union and “communists” in our midst. After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were vilified and more than 100,000 descendants of Japanese origin in the U.S. were put into concentration camps. Over half a century ago, Japanese Americans were collectively blamed for the attack at Pearl Harbor. Today all Muslims are viewed as responsible for the events that took place on 9/11.
Rutgers Today: Do you think this level of tension always existed between Muslims and non-Muslims in America? If so, why now are the tensions so apparent?
Kumar: Strains of anti-Muslim attitudes have existed in the United States for over a century. Yet, we did not witness large-scale discrimination against Muslims and Arabs in the way we have since 9/11. As civil rights groups have documented, not only have Muslims been the victims of hate crime they also have been racially profiled, imprisoned indefinitely without the ability to go to court, deported, and tortured in secret CIA prisons around the world. Just like during World War II, when there was no public outcry around the mass punishment being meted out to Japanese and Japanese Americans; today, too, there isn’t enough attention cast on the violations of Muslim Americans’ civil liberties.
Unfortunately, the logic that all Muslims are worthy of suspicion has been accepted without much debate. For example, in 2006, when a company based in the United Arabs Emirates was contracted to manage several U.S. seaports, the new management became a debate about national security and whether a foreign company could be trusted to run these ports. Yet, the ports were previously being run by a British company. The underlying argument was that Muslims cannot be trusted.
Rutgers Today: What role do you think the media has played in shaping the perception of Muslims? Have the media encouraged or discouraged fear toward Muslims?
Kumar: Hollywood has produced a steady stream of films that reinforce stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims. These stereotypes include images of Arab men as barbaric, violent, gaudy, lascivious, and of Muslim majority countries as uncivilized, misogynistic, irrational, and undemocratic.
The mainstream news media in the U.S. take their cues from the “primary definers of news;” that is, people who are the key political and economic leaders. These members of the political elite, with some notable exceptions, have branded the Muslim community as untrustworthy and anti-American. Largely, mainstream media have not deviated from this script.
Over the last few months, however, we have witnessed a few counter examples. As the backlash against the Islamic community center grew more hostile, some media outlets started to push back because the notion of religious freedom had come under attack. The very notion of the U.S. as a multiracial and open-minded society was under threat. In this context, Time magazine did a cover story titled “Is America Islamophobic?” The New York Times questioned America's religious tolerance in the days leading up to the proposed Quran-burning set to take place in Florida. The Quran-burning which was averted in Florida but carried out elsewhere are, in my opinion, reminiscent of the cross-burnings in the South that served to intimidate African Americans.
Rutgers Today: Do you think there is widespread fear of and animosity toward Muslims in the United States?
Deepa Kumar: Unfortunately, yes. I don’t think, however, that this anti-Muslim attitude comes from regular Americans. Rather, since the events of 9/11, the mainstream media and the political elite have helped generate an attitude toward Muslims that has been largely negative. Most recently, this rhetoric has been taken up a few notches by forces such as the Tea Party Initiative. The controversy around the planned Islamic community center in lower Manhattan was polarized by groups on the far right of the political spectrum. One such group is "Stop Islamization of America," which is based on the premise that Muslims are conspiring to take over the U.S. These forces managed to frame the debate in such a way that you either had to support the families of 9/11 or the center. This is a false choice, since many of the victims’ families have come out in support of the center. But given this limited choice, people who otherwise might not harbor anti-Muslim sentiments found themselves against the center.
Rutgers Today: Do you support the plan to build an Islamic center near the World Trade Center?
Kumar: I believe Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is trying to change public perceptions of Muslims to counteract images of fear and terror associated with Islam. He chose the location two blocks from ground zero so he could present a different face of Islam, one that is more representative of the more than 1.5 billion Muslims around the world who have no sympathy for the actions of the extremists. Shouldn’t we, as a country that guarantees religious freedoms, permit him to offer a different perspective of his culture?
Rutgers Today: If you feel most Americans don’t have animosity toward Muslims, why do you think anti-Muslim rhetoric is prevalent?
Kumar: The majority of Americans have been manipulated by a politics of fear generated after the events of 9/11. Every country that seeks to obtain the consent of its citizens for war must construct an enemy that is feared and hated. When President George W. Bush declared that we were involved in a “war on terror,” we were told that the new enemy was the vicious Muslim terrorist. This generated a politics of fear similar to that which existed during the Cold War when we were told to fear the Soviet Union and “communists” in our midst. After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were vilified and more than 100,000 descendants of Japanese origin in the U.S. were put into concentration camps. Over half a century ago, Japanese Americans were collectively blamed for the attack at Pearl Harbor. Today all Muslims are viewed as responsible for the events that took place on 9/11.
Rutgers Today: Do you think this level of tension always existed between Muslims and non-Muslims in America? If so, why now are the tensions so apparent?
Kumar: Strains of anti-Muslim attitudes have existed in the United States for over a century. Yet, we did not witness large-scale discrimination against Muslims and Arabs in the way we have since 9/11. As civil rights groups have documented, not only have Muslims been the victims of hate crime they also have been racially profiled, imprisoned indefinitely without the ability to go to court, deported, and tortured in secret CIA prisons around the world. Just like during World War II, when there was no public outcry around the mass punishment being meted out to Japanese and Japanese Americans; today, too, there isn’t enough attention cast on the violations of Muslim Americans’ civil liberties.
Unfortunately, the logic that all Muslims are worthy of suspicion has been accepted without much debate. For example, in 2006, when a company based in the United Arabs Emirates was contracted to manage several U.S. seaports, the new management became a debate about national security and whether a foreign company could be trusted to run these ports. Yet, the ports were previously being run by a British company. The underlying argument was that Muslims cannot be trusted.
Rutgers Today: What role do you think the media has played in shaping the perception of Muslims? Have the media encouraged or discouraged fear toward Muslims?
Kumar: Hollywood has produced a steady stream of films that reinforce stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims. These stereotypes include images of Arab men as barbaric, violent, gaudy, lascivious, and of Muslim majority countries as uncivilized, misogynistic, irrational, and undemocratic.
The mainstream news media in the U.S. take their cues from the “primary definers of news;” that is, people who are the key political and economic leaders. These members of the political elite, with some notable exceptions, have branded the Muslim community as untrustworthy and anti-American. Largely, mainstream media have not deviated from this script.
Over the last few months, however, we have witnessed a few counter examples. As the backlash against the Islamic community center grew more hostile, some media outlets started to push back because the notion of religious freedom had come under attack. The very notion of the U.S. as a multiracial and open-minded society was under threat. In this context, Time magazine did a cover story titled “Is America Islamophobic?” The New York Times questioned America's religious tolerance in the days leading up to the proposed Quran-burning set to take place in Florida. The Quran-burning which was averted in Florida but carried out elsewhere are, in my opinion, reminiscent of the cross-burnings in the South that served to intimidate African Americans.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
NYC Surveys
Check out ConcernedNewYorkers' photostream on flickr to see people writing in action and their various answers.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Boston University Panel on Manhattan Mosque Debate--9/16
On Thursday, September 16, Boston University will host a panel on the ground zero Muslim community center and mosque controversy. It begins at 7pm and is free and open to the public.
BU Panel to Ponder Manhattan Mosque Debate
Prejudice, 9/11’s unhealed wounds, or both?
By Rich Barlow
Protesters want the proposed Islamic center built elsewhere. Photo by asterix611. Stephen Prothero (below), a CAS religion professor, moderates the September 16 forum. Photo by Vernon Doucette
Months of arguing haven’t quelled the firestorm over a proposed Islamic cultural center and mosque two blocks from Manhattan’s Ground Zero. The issue has dominated newspaper editorials, the networks’ Sunday morning shows, and water cooler conversations in offices around the country. The Ground Zero Mosque Controversy: What You Need to Know, a College of Arts & Sciences forum tomorrow night, seeks to dispel what the speakers call Americans’ mistaken beliefs about Islam.
“Controversies like the so-called mosque at so-called Ground Zero don’t come out of nowhere,” says forum moderator Stephen Prothero, a CAS religion professor. (He says “so-called” because the mosque is more than a mosque and would not be in the footprint of the Twin Towers.) “They come out of a history of western caricatures of Islam and America’s reluctant march toward tolerance.”
“Our conversation in America about religion is really impoverished, and I think it’s impoverished because we don’t know much about religion,” says Prothero, whose 2007 bestseller Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn’t speaks to that topic.
Scheduled panelists are Teena Purohit and Kecia Ali, both CAS assistant religion professors, and Cristine Hutchison-Jones (GRS’11), a PhD candidate in religion and society.
The proposed Manhattan project calls for a tower of up to 15 stories, with a mosque, auditorium, and pool. It is the brainchild of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who leads a mosque in Manhattan’s financial district, his wife, Daisy Khan, and New York–born investor Sharif el-Gamal. Survivors of 9/11 victims are split over the project, some calling it a fitting rebuff to al-Qaeda’s homicidal intolerance and others insisting it would stoke their grief. Pollsters report that two-thirds of Americans say the center should be built elsewhere. Rauf said this week that “everything is on the table” as backers seek a resolution to the controversy.
The anger about the project, says Ali, “rests on the idea that Muslims aren’t and can’t ever really be Americans. But that’s nonsense. Muslims have a centuries-long history in the United States, first as slaves, then as voluntary immigrants, and increasingly as native-born immigrants.” Her aim at the forum will be “to sketch briefly what Islam in America, and American Islam, looks like, so that rather than dealing with an imaginary Muslim, a mental construct composed of all the worst stereotypical images, we can have conversation that rests solidly on fact.”
Purohit believes the current debate shows that Americans are “ill-equipped to respond to Islamophobic statements perpetuated by the media. I will talk about this problem of representation in the media and briefly address the diversity of Muslim religious practices.” Hutchison-Jones says she’ll discuss the opposition in the context of intolerance towards other denominations in American history.
Prothero, who supports the mosque project, believes that “there are principled reasons to oppose it that are not rooted in bigotry,” notably, deferring to survivors’ families and others for whom the project’s location would cause real pain. But while he finds those arguments sincere, he doesn’t find them persuasive, as they equate the 9/11 attacks with Islam, when most Muslims do not endorse terrorism. Last month, he blogged that such “tortured logic” undergirded the Anti-Defamation League’s opposition to the project.
His blog post also decried politicians like Newt Gingrich, former Republican House speaker, who called the center’s backers “radical Islamists.” (Although Rauf has said the United States was an accessory to the 9/11 attacks, he denounced them and terrorism and has no links to radicals, according to the New York Police.)
Yet Prothero remains optimistic that anti-Islam bigotry will subside. “What was it Martin Luther King [GRS’55, Hon.’59] talked about—the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice? I do think the moral arc of American history bends toward more and more religious tolerance. What’s happening here is we’re having birth pangs of tolerance toward Muslims.”
The Ground Zero Mosque Controversy: What You Need to Know begins at 7 p.m. on Thursday, September 16, at the College of Arts & Sciences, Room 222, and is free and open to the public.
Rich Barlow can be reached at barlowr@bu.edu.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
The Cordoba Initiative Blog
Feisal Abdul Rauf's September Op-Ed in the NY Times
By FEISAL ABDUL RAUF
Building on Faith AS my flight approached America last weekend, my mind circled back to the furor that has broken out over plans to build Cordoba House, a community center in Lower Manhattan.I have been away from home for two months, speaking abroad about cooperation among people from different religions. Every day, including the past two weeks spent representing my country on a State Department tour in the Middle East, I have been struck by how the controversy has riveted the attention of Americans, as well as nearly everyone I met in my travels.
We have all been awed by how inflamed and emotional the issue of the proposed community center has become. The level of attention reflects the degree to which people care about the very American values under debate: recognition of the rights of others, tolerance and freedom of worship.
Many people wondered why I did not speak out more, and sooner, about this project. I felt that it would not be right to comment from abroad. It would be better if I addressed these issues once I returned home to America, and after I could confer with leaders of other faiths who have been deliberating with us over this project. My life’s work has been focused on building bridges between religious groups and never has that been as important as it is now.
We are proceeding with the community center, Cordoba House. More important, we are doing so with the support of the downtown community, government at all levels and leaders from across the religious spectrum, who will be our partners. I am convinced that it is the right thing to do for many reasons.
Above all, the project will amplify the multifaith approach that the Cordoba Initiative has deployed in concrete ways for years. Our name, Cordoba, was inspired by the city in Spain where Muslims, Christians and Jews co-existed in the Middle Ages during a period of great cultural enrichment created by Muslims. Our initiative is intended to cultivate understanding among all religions and cultures.
Our broader mission — to strengthen relations between the Western and Muslim worlds and to help counter radical ideology — lies not in skirting the margins of issues that have polarized relations within the Muslim world and between non-Muslims and Muslims. It lies in confronting them as a joint multifaith, multinational effort.
From the political conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians to the building of a community center in Lower Manhattan, Muslims and members of all faiths must work together if we are ever going to succeed in fostering understanding and peace.
At Cordoba House, we envision shared space for community activities, like a swimming pool, classrooms and a play space for children. There will be separate prayer spaces for Muslims, Christians, Jews and men and women of other faiths. The center will also include a multifaith memorial dedicated to victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.
I am very sensitive to the feelings of the families of victims of 9/11, as are my fellow leaders of many faiths. We will accordingly seek the support of those families, and the support of our vibrant neighborhood, as we consider the ultimate plans for the community center. Our objective has always been to make this a center for unification and healing.
Cordoba House will be built on the two fundamental commandments common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam: to love the Lord our creator with all of our hearts, minds, souls and strength; and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. We want to foster a culture of worship authentic to each religious tradition, and also a culture of forging personal bonds across religious traditions.
I do not underestimate the challenges that will be involved in bringing our work to completion. (Construction has not even begun yet.) I know there will be interest in our financing, and so we will clearly identify all of our financial backers.
Lost amid the commotion is the good that has come out of the recent discussion. I want to draw attention, specifically, to the open, law-based and tolerant actions that have taken place, and that are particularly striking for Muslims.
President Obama and Mayor Michael Bloomberg both spoke out in support of our project. As I traveled overseas, I saw firsthand how their words and actions made a tremendous impact on the Muslim street and on Muslim leaders. It was striking: a Christian president and a Jewish mayor of New York supporting the rights of Muslims. Their statements sent a powerful message about what America stands for, and will be remembered as a milestone in improving American-Muslim relations.
The wonderful outpouring of support for our right to build this community center from across the social, religious and political spectrum seriously undermines the ability of anti-American radicals to recruit young, impressionable Muslims by falsely claiming that America persecutes Muslims for their faith. These efforts by radicals at distortion endanger our national security and the personal security of Americans worldwide. This is why Americans must not back away from completion of this project. If we do, we cede the discourse and, essentially, our future to radicals on both sides. The paradigm of a clash between the West and the Muslim world will continue, as it has in recent decades at terrible cost. It is a paradigm we must shift.
From those who recognize our rights, from grassroots organizers to heads of state, I sense a global desire to build on this positive momentum and to be part of a global movement to heal relations and bring peace. This is an opportunity we must grasp.
I therefore call upon all Americans to rise to this challenge. Let us commemorate the anniversary of 9/11 by pausing to reflect and meditate and tone down the vitriol and rhetoric that serves only to strengthen the radicals and weaken our friends’ belief in our values.
The very word “islam” comes from a word cognate to shalom, which means peace in Hebrew. The Koran declares in its 36th chapter, regarded by the Prophet Muhammad as the heart of the Koran, in a verse deemed the heart of this chapter, “Peace is a word spoken from a merciful Lord.”
How better to commemorate 9/11 than to urge our fellow Muslims, fellow Christians and fellow Jews to follow the fundamental common impulse of our great faith traditions?
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