Muslim Heretics Conference

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Incendiary author spares no targets

5:00AM Saturday May 24, 2008
By Christopher Garland

‘An attack on civilisation.’ Photo / Reuters

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With the late afternoon sunlight making a last gasp into his Washington DC apartment, Christopher Hitchens, one of America’s most prominent journalists and provocative authors, tries to ignore the minor commotion of President George W. Bush’s motorcade passing the streets below.

Without pausing, Hitchens, a British-born American citizen, proceeds to finish his story about that devastating early September morning in New York more than six years earlier.

“It irritated me that the President, standing not far from the rubble of the Twin Towers, said that you’re either with America or with the terrorists,” Hitchens recalls as he describes walking through the badly shaken streets of lower Manhattan, his first American home, scanning the countless missing persons posters.

“The President described it as an attack on America. I would prefer to say that it was an attack on civilisation.”

For Hitchens, 59, the events that day were part of what he calls a series of “test moments” - periods when one’s ethical beliefs are placed on trial by external challenges or crises.

Channelling one of his influences, George Orwell, Hitchens viewed the terrorist attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington DC as a moment to respond - which he did, by becoming an advocate for the invasion of Iraq, a move leftist critics saw as opportunistic and imperialist.

Hitchens wrote a series of columns for Vanity Fair and the Nation after the attacks that revolved around his disgust for the perpetrators while saluting the stoicism of New York City that he claimed harkened back to the “British phlegm during the Blitz”.

Since 9/11, Hitchens has employed an aggressive rhetoric over what he has called “Islamofascism” or “fascism with an Islamic face”.

“There was a time when you could publish a book that said ‘Muhammad sucks’ as long as you were not and never had been a Muslim,” Hitchens said. “Now you can’t. The aggression [of fundamental Islam] is mounting all the time.

“And I’m very, very determined that this does not go unchallenged.”

In late 2002, Hitchens resigned from his position at the Nation after writing that the publication had become “the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft [former US Attorney-General] is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden”.

Moving even further away from the liberal left, Hitchens began his unwavering support for US military intervention.

“Shall I take out the papers of citizenship?” Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair in December 2001. “Wrong question. In every essential way, I already have.”

Recalling 9/11 today, Hitchens attempts to place it in a larger history of “test moments” - which include the death sentence placed upon his friend, the novelist Salman Rushdie, by the Ayatollah Khomeini and the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.

“There’s a poem by I forget whom [the poet Robert Lowell] with a line that says ‘To every man and nation comes the moment to decide’.

“It’s a time when you look around at people and you think ‘it really matters to me what you say now. I want to know, without any ambivalence, where you stand, what you think’.”

Hitchens leaves no doubt where he stands and what he thinks with his blistering critiques of well-known figures including Mother Theresa, Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Last year, he took on religion with God is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything. His prose bristles with contempt for its dogma and its association with violence across the globe from Northern Ireland to Beirut.

On this day, relaxing with a post-lunch espresso, Hitchens’ opinions pour forth. Perhaps it is just the typical eclecticism, but the conversation flits from memories of New Zealand - he fondly recalls meeting David Lange and visiting the West Auckland vineyards - to caustic indictments of many things and many people.

For a few moments, Hitchens turns his full attention to the presidential race. Hillary Clinton is “full of ****”. He thinks that Michelle Obama and her “terrible” speeches will undoubtedly become the target of another Republican “swiftboat campaign” to derail husband Barack Obama.

However, it is Republican nominee John McCain who receives the full brunt.

“You look at McCain’s swollen, senile face with his glassy eyes. And it’s only ****ing May - what’s he going to be like in January when he takes the oath - and that’s the beginning of four years. All the say is ‘age could be an issue’. No - he’s senile. He’s coming apart before our eyes.”

Geo-politics is up next. Comparing the hurried, colonial construction of Israel and Pakistan, Hitchens argues that the latter is “a partly rogue, partly failed state. Pakistan is not a real country. And I must say that I feel the same when I go to Israel.”

Hitchens shares his beautiful, if somewhat stark, apartment with his wife, the journalist Carol Blue, and daughter Antonia (he has two children from his first marriage to Eleni Meleagrou, a lawyer who lives in London).

Born into a military family on April 13, 1949, a birthday he shares with Thomas Jefferson (about whom Hitchens penned a short book in 2005), Hitchens’ fascination with history and politics was piqued at a young age.

“I was brought up on navy bases in England and in the Mediterranean at a time when - we thought - the British Empire was all gone forever.”

He went to Oxford then to a job at the New Statesman.

Working in London in the mid-1970s during the height of the IRA’s bombing campaign, Hitchens also had his first taste of war reporting - a subject that would be the fuel of a great deal of his later journalism.

“The first breaking story I ever covered as a reporter was in Ulster. And the first time I saw any violence or any war was in my own country. ”

He moved to the United States in the early 1980s. For some time, the popular image of Hitchens as the hard-drinking, heavy-smoking, swaggering, globetrotting journalist has rivalled the attention given to his journalistic output.

He still enjoys a drink - sipping on a scotch in the early evening, he claims “alcohol is a good friend but a bad master”. He has cut down his daily intake, which he once wrote was enough “to kill or stun a small mule”, and has quit smoking.

His views on the war in Iraq and his critiques of militant Islam keep him in demand from publishers.

For Hitchens, who believes the war in Iraq is not only a necessary undertaking but also a winnable venture, the stakes could not be higher. He draws a rather gruesome picture of what he imagines will result from sectarian insurgents gaining control of the Middle East’s keystone.

“The grandchildren [of today's insurgents] in Iraq will be able to afford a bandana, a semi-automatic weapon to guard a neighbourhood block - which will be nothing more than potholes, burning tyres, and puddles of rancid water …

“Where the only cultural activities are going [to] the mosque, stoning women, attending the executions of rival Islamic sects - that will be life.”

Later, Hitchens walks out towards the streets of Dupont Circle with a bounce in his step. The enemy is clear, the battle has begun.

“Those who advocate jihad, suicide, murder and Sharia law are considered just part of the mosaic of gorgeous diversity.

“Well, they’re not - fundamentalists are the negation of diversity. Unless you say that not all positions are equally valuable, how do we condemn them?”

Incendiary author spares no targets - 24 May 2008 - NZ Herald: World / International News

Communities in Prague and Brno respond with tolerance to inflammatory posters
By Markéta Hulpachová
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
June 11th, 2008 issue

MICHAEL HEITMANN/The Prague Post

Yosef Sharif, a Charles University postgraduate student from Libya, says his imam preaches open-mindedness and understanding.

HEATHER FAULKNER/The Prague Post

Munib Hassan Alrawi, director of the Brno Islamic Foundation, says education is key to tolerance.

Earlier this year, 17 Danish newspapers spurred a new wave of protests in the Muslim world by reprinting an infamous set of caricatures depicting the Prophet Muhammad. Intended to express solidarity and press freedom, the “blasphemous” cartoons did not go unnoticed by Islamic extremists.

An audio warning from Osama bin Laden appeared on the Internet in March, and an Al Qaeda operative claimed responsibility for a June 2 bombing that decimated the Danish Embassy in Islamabad as a warning against religious disrespect.    

Meanwhile, an unknown group of locals took to the streets of Brno and Prague, plastering reprints of the cartoons and other anti-Islamic fliers near the hubs of the cities’ Islamic communities.

In March, the anonymous distributors spread dozens of fliers depicting Muhammed with an ignited bomb instead of a turban near Brno mosques, prompting a critical reaction from the Foreign Affairs Ministry.

“In his time, the Prophet Muhammad did not know what a bomb was. It’s sheer mockery,” said Foreign Affairs Minister Karel Schwarzenberg. “In my opinion, such posters are an expression of intolerance and aggression. I consider it a sad truth that something like this has appeared in the Czech nation. It has nothing to do with freedom of speech.”

When the following criminal investigation failed to identify the perpetrator, Brno police were forced to shelve the case. “Finding out who pasted up these fliers is extremely difficult,” Brno police spokeswoman Andrea Procházková said in a March 20 statement.

After a two-month hiatus, the posters began appearing near Prague mosques May 31. Aside from the turban bomb posters copied from Danish newspapers, the newest fliers include the distributor’s own renderings: They depict Muhammad as a devil-horned pedophile.

All of the posters are emblazoned with the caption “May be provocative, but the freedom of speech is still more important!” and include the address of an unfinished Web site that lists links to anti-Islamic films including Fitna, a 15-minute interpretation of violent passages in the Koran by right-wing Dutch deputy Geert Wilders.

On the Web site, the anonymous author compares Islam to a “dormant volcano.”

“If it has a small role in the society, like in the Czech Republic, it can even seem like a problem-free religion. But that doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous,” the author wrote. “In some parts of the Euro-Atlantic civilization, the rough and reproachable aspects of radical Islam are already evident.”

Peaceful teachings

Despite such comments, local Muslims remain steadfastly placid. When asked about the inflammatory posters that recently appeared in the city, Yosef Sharif, a Charles University postgraduate student and Muslim from Libya, merely shrugged and smiled.

“We don’t feel a problem with anybody,” he said, shortly after emerging from Friday prayer at the Islamic Cultural Center in Prague. “Here, the community is not as big as in Germany and France. … Our imam persuades us not to make any crazy comments, to be open-minded and understanding.”

Inside the mosque, the imam himself reiterated Sharif’s pacifist outlook.

Eleven years after founding the Prague Islamic Cultural Center, he emphasized the importance of secularity and requested that his name not be published to avoid the politicizing of his statements.

“I discourage any demonstrations or protests against [the caricatures],” he said. “Muslims here prefer to be patient and not to cause any problems for authorities, who are friendly. Any problem may endanger the government’s supportive attitude.”

By urging moderation and discouraging displays of conservative Islam such as “long beards, long robes and big yellow hats,” the imam advises local Muslims to adapt to Czech society.

“In some countries, there may be radical Muslims. They stage protests and irritate lots of people, but this is not our way,” he said. “Muslims do not follow politics. They do not follow political aims by using religion.”

Instead of inciting protests, local Muslims should deal with the caricatures’ distributors in a peaceful manner, he said.

“This group could not harm the attitude toward Muslims, because the majority of people understand that this is wrong,” he said. “It’s nothing new — the Prophet Muhammad was also harassed in his time, but he was patient. We should learn from the prophet to forgive these people, because he did the same.”

To prevent the spread of intolerance, Munib Hassan Alrawi, director of the Brno Islamic Foundation, encourages openness and education.

“When a Czech person receives enough information about Islam, his attitude usually becomes completely different,” he said.

Miroslav Mareš, an expert on political and religious extremism from the Masaryk University in Brno, said the moderate nature of the local Muslim community — which is relatively small in comparison with France, Germany or Holland — was partly strategic.

“It is true that a majority of local Muslims are secular. They tend to distance themselves from anyone with a more dogmatic approach to Islam,” he said. “They do not want to upset their social position here.”

Unlike the resident Muslims who view the Czechs as tolerant and understanding, Mareš expressed reservations about local attitudes toward Islam.

In recent years, citizens signed petitions against the construction of mosques in Czech towns like Orlová in north Moravia or Teplice, north Bohemia, he said.

“As long as the community is small, it won’t create any conflict,” he said. “But, if it became larger, the Czechs would see it as a problem, even if [the Muslims] remain peaceful.”

Markéta Hulpachová can be reached at mhulpachova@praguepost.com

The Prague Post Online: News: Locals react to anti-Muslim sketch

New school policies weighed amid flap over Islam assembly

© 2008 The Associated Press

Yahoo! Buzz

FRIENDSWOOD, Texas — Controversy from an Islamic group visiting a junior high school after a Muslim student was stuffed in a trash can has school trustees weighing a ban on religious presentations by outsiders.

The proposal came Tuesday at a Friendswood ISD school board meeting, packed with about 200 residents divided over the Islamic culture assembly to seventh- and eigth-graders last month.

Some parents, talk radio hosts and Christian clergy have criticized Friendswood Junior High, where the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Houston discussed basic beliefs of Islam to about 900 students.

Parents were not notified about the CAIR presentation, which was a violation of a school policy. The school district has acknowledged that was a mistake.

Robin Lowe, the school’s principal at the time, took another job in the district last week amid the uproar. But most who spoke at the meeting Tuesday blasted the school board for not supporting Lowe, the Houston Chronicle reported.

“This community has been embarrassed. You can turn that around and make yourselves and your community proud,” Friendswood resident Tom Burke said.

Friendswood ISD Superintendent Trish Hanks described the trash can incident as a “random, impulsive act” that had nothing to do with religious preference or ethnicity. But she told the crowd that CAIR viewed it as a “hate crime” and reported it to the FBI.

The school board is scheduled to vote next month on Hanks’ proposal that only school district teachers will address religious topics in the future.

New school policies weighed amid flap over Islam assembly | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

By Philip Pullella

VATICAN CITY, June 11 (Reuters) - The world is obsessed by Islam, according to the Vatican’s point man for relations with other religions.

Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran also said he did not want an impression to grow that there are different classes of religion.

Tauran’s department, the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue, oversees relations with all non-Christian religions except Judaism and is preparing new guidelines for Catholic dialogue with them.

The new guidelines will not have special emphasis on Islam, Tauran said in an interview with the religious website terrasanta.net which specialises in Holy Land affairs.

“No, it has to have regard for all religions. What was interesting about our discussions was that we did not concentrate on Islam because in a way we are being held hostage by Islam a little bit,” he said.

“Islam is very important but there are also other great Asiatic religious traditions. Islam is one religion,” he said.

“Yes, the people are obsessed by Islam.”

Tauran said he would be travelling to India soon and there he wanted to “give this message that all religions are equal”.

“Sometimes there are priorities because of particular situations, but we mustn’t get the impression there are first-class religions and second-class religions”.

In March, the Vatican and Muslim leaders agreed to establish a permanent official dialogue, known as “The Catholic-Muslim Forum”, to improve often difficult relations and heal wounds still open from a controversial papal speech in 2006.

Catholic-Muslim relations nosedived after Pope Benedict delivered a lecture in Regensburg, Germany, that was taken by Muslims to imply Islam was violent and irrational.

CHURCH IN SAUDI ARABIA?

Muslims around the world protested and the pope sought to make amends when he visited Turkey’s Blue Mosque and prayed towards Mecca with its Imam.

Tauran declined to discuss what he knew of reports of talks between the Vatican and Saudi Arabia aimed at eventually opening a Church there. In March, official Saudi media said King Abdullah, who held an unprecedented meeting with Pope Benedict last year, planned to launch an effort at dialogue between Islam, Christianity and Judaism to help end inter-religious tension.

There are 1.2 million Christians in Saudia Arabia, nearly a million of them Catholics. Most are migrant workers and are not allowed to practice their faith in public or wear signs of their faith.

Tauran said he believed talk of building a church in Saudi Arabia was “premature”. He expected a gradual evolution that would start by Christians being allowed to hold services in hotels or embassies.

Tauran described the falling Christian population in the Holy Land because of instability and conflict as “a disaster because the place where Christ lived, died and rose again could become a museum, and this is precisely what we don’t want”. (Editing by Robert Woodward)

News | Africa - Reuters.com

By Viola Gienger

June 11 (Bloomberg) — A Saudi government-controlled school in a Washington suburb uses textbooks that explicitly promote violence and intolerance of other religions, according to a U.S. religious-freedom panel that obtained some of the materials.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, established by Congress in 1998, said today it acquired 17 textbooks used at the Islamic Saudi Academy during this academic year after the State Department failed to turn over texts it had received from the Saudi government.

“The most problematic texts involve passages that are not directly from the Koran but rather contain the Saudi government’s particular interpretation of Koranic and other Islamic texts,” the commission wrote in a four-page statement. “Some passages clearly exhort the readers to commit acts of violence.”

The commission aims to pressure the State Department to hand over the books it received and the Saudis to eliminate disparaging or hate-promoting references from their educational materials, as the government pledged to do in July 2006. The Saudi ambassador to the U.S. serves as chairman of the board at the 933-student academy located near Alexandria, Virginia, a suburb of Washington.

The State Department designated Saudi Arabia in 2004 as a “country of particular concern” on religious freedom. The country is a major American ally in the Middle East and the second-largest source of oil imported by the U.S.

Demands on Saudis

The religious-freedom panel called last October for the State Department to close the school until Saudi officials produce textbooks to prove the academy doesn’t encourage religious intolerance or violence. Neither the Saudi government nor State has turned over any textbooks, so the books were gathered from other sources, including a congressional office, the commission said.

The commission cites two examples of passages that directly encourage violence. One, in a 12th-grade textbook on the Koran, says it is permissible for a Muslim to kill a convert from Islam, as well as “an adulterer or someone who has murdered a believer intentionally,” the commission said in its statement today.

Another 12th-grade text indicates a Muslim “can take the life and property of someone believed to be guilty” of polytheism, the commission wrote.

The Saudi interpretation of Islam considers that category to include Shiite and Sufi Muslims as well as Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists, according to the commission. Saudis follow a Sunni form of Islam.

Intolerance Accusation

The commission cited other passages that it says implicitly promote intolerance.

One begins, “The cause of the discord: The Jews conspired against Islam and its people,” according to an excerpt quoted by the commission.

The academy, founded in 1984, has developed a growing home- study department for education and testing of Saudi students in several states. More than 90 percent of students go on to study at American universities, according to the school’s Web site.

Nail al-Jubeir, a spokesman for the Saudi Embassy in Washington, didn’t immediately return a telephone message seeking comment. He said in October that the school doesn’t use inflammatory or extremist material and that the teaching staff includes non-Muslims.

The school’s director-general, Abdullah Al-Shabnan, didn’t immediately return a message left on voice mail at his office.

To contact the reporter on this story: Viola Gienger in Washington at vgienger@bloomberg.net.

Bloomberg.com: Africa

KONYA, Turkey — For the past week I’ve been traveling around Turkey with eight other Hoosiers on a trip sponsored by the Indianapolis-based Holy Dove Foundation. Our group from Indianapolis is diverse: Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Jewish, Caucasian and African-American. For all of us, this is our first trip to Turkey.

As I write this, we are in the city made famous by the great 13th-century Sufi Muslim poet and philosopher Rumi, whose mystical approach to Islam inspired the Whirling Dervishes and Ottoman sultans as well as centuries of devotees worldwide.

Holy Dove Foundation is part of the Gulen movement, a Turkish Muslim organization that is committed to fostering interfaith and inter-cultural dialogue and understanding. The officially non-political movement has several million followers in Turkey and includes professional associations, media outlets and dialogue centers. It has established well-respected schools throughout the world that stress science and math education.

We have encountered groups similar to our own from California, Colorado, Missouri and Oklahoma. An important goal of these “dialogue trips” is to expose American clergy, academics and other professionals to the moderate Islam found in Turkey, which is 99 percent Muslim. Islam as practiced in Turkey represents a tolerant and open-minded approach to the faith, one which is rarely if ever covered by the U.S. media.

In our travels we have enjoyed dinners and conversations in the homes of local Turkish families, and we have all been overwhelmed by the genuine, heartfelt hospitality. We were provided with feasts of delicious Turkish cuisine and the evenings ended with our hosts presenting us with gifts. We brought our own gifts to exchange, unique items from Indiana.

These were the homes of traditional, middle-class Muslim families, with most of the women wearing hijabs, the Muslim headscarf. It was their understanding of Islam and its traditions that inspired their warm and welcoming hospitality.

The Turks I have observed here seem to approach life with a live-and-let-live attitude toward others. Women in the latest revealing fashions walk down the street hand in hand with girlfriends in traditional Muslim dress, and secular Turks and foreigners openly consume alcohol at restaurants without rebuke from observant Muslims seated nearby.

Umar al-Khattab, the imam of Masjid al-Fajr, the mosque just south of Marian College, and a member of our tour group, has traveled throughout the Muslim world but sees something unique in Turkey. “Islam in Turkey appears to offer more flexibility in how people choose to practice their faith,” he observed. “In other countries, there is a perceived norm of how people are supposed to practice Islam. Those who don’t do as expected are seen as going against the grain of society. Turkey is different.”

Turkey’s democratic political system can offer an important counter-model to the repressive theocracies of Iran and Saudi Arabia.

But Turkey is engulfed in a constitutional crisis. The 85-year old Republic of Turkey is officially secular. Whereas Iran requires women to wear headscarves, Turkey bans the headscarf from public buildings and universities. This effectively bars observant Muslim girls from acquiring a college education in Turkey.

The Supreme Court, in a manner that many Turks view as overreaching its authority, has just overturned a constitutional amendment rescinding the headscarf ban that had been passed by the democratically elected governing party, the moderately Islamist Justice and Welfare Party.

There is intense distrust between the secular and religious political parties here. Observant Turks are asking for greater freedom to practice their faith, but their secular opponents fear this could be the first step in turning Turkey into another Iran. The great irony is that Turkey’s approach to Islam is far more moderate and welcoming of diversity than what exists in many other Muslim-majority countries today.

Turkey can show the world that democracy and Islam can be compatible. The tougher question, however, may be whether Turkey’s hard-line secularism and democracy are compatible.

Atlas is assistant professor of political science and director of The Richard G. Lugar Franciscan Center for Global Studies at Marian College. Contact him at patlas@marian.edu

Turkey balances democracy and Islam | IndyStar.com | The Indianapolis Star