House hearings on radicalize the Muslim

just remembered the good news though, a couple of typical-looking rancher types in the post office, complaining about congress wasting time on muslims

push these people enough and they'll wake up and recognize that new form of a substance they're used to seeing every day

plop, plop, moooooooooo

 

nah, it's warm, up in the 20s, maybe 30s?

spring is in the air, sort of . . .

 

thought this was kinda interesting: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2044047,00.html

i still say islamic extremism is more a problem than a lot of the extreme leftists of this board like to realize

 

No one is saying it's not a problem, nobody said that period. The problem is though it's much more of a problem in actual Muslim countries half way around the Earth than it is here, it's completely irrelevant to hold a hearing on Muslim extremists when far right extremists are by far a much larger problem, both literally by numbers and the amount of attacks perpetuated by them both in the last decade and the 1990's compared to Muslims, it's nothing more than a scapegoating witch hunt reminiscent of the days of "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the communist party?", especially coupled with the xenophobic attitudes a lot of Americans already publicly show towards Muslims it's just adding fuel to the fire.

It's just going to create most tense stand offs as people holding up signs saying GO HOME RAGHEADS are now going to feel more justified in their vile actions. It's going to create more incidents like the one in NYC 2-3 years ago when a marine beat the shit out of a Greek Orthodox priest who was touring the city and asked him for directions because the guy had an accent and as with most Orthodox priests had a long flowing beard(the kind most Americans associate with Muslims), so of course this Orthodox priest asking for directions was obviously a Muslim looking for something to blow up.*commence the beating*

*edit*
It was Tampa, not NYC
We're supposed to be trying to stop this kind of thing, not be given some kind of credence to these paranoid nutjobs.

 

baffled, seems like the guy who wrote the article is also somewhat unafraid . . . did you read it?

 

This article was written by a moderate Muslim woman, Asra Nomani, in the Washington Post. She is a professor at Georgetown University.

In Defense of Peter King's Hearings

By Asra Nomani

Credit: Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post
When I heard that Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) was going to hold hearings on the issue of radicalization inside our American Muslim community, I thought: It's about time.

As those hearings begin on Thursday, all of us need to grab a front row seat. This is a discussion we desperately need to have as a nation because for far too long we have lived in a culture of denial, fueled in part by Muslim community leadership that--like just about any community tends to do until prodded--denies our problems rather than admits them.

I arrived in this country in 1969 as a four year old from India and, after 42 years as an American-Muslim, I can say without a doubt: an ideology of extremism has crossed across our borders, and radicalization is a real threat inside our communities in the U.S., often times unchallenged because members of our Muslim community are intimidated to speak out against it. We have brave leaders and activists who do, but usually at great cost to their social standing in the community.
To me, the hearings are not a "witch hunt." Rep. Peter King is not a 21st century Joe McCarthy, the senator who led hearings on communism in the 1950s. I believe he is an American, like so many, frustrated and annoyed by the largely recalcitrant posture of our community to admitting our problems. In Congress, we have had honest debate about everyone's dirty laundry--from BP to the Big Three automakers. There has been discussion in the halls of Congress about "Jewish extremists," "white supremacists," the Ku Klux Klan and clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Muslims should not be exempt from critical examination, just because its lobby takes a defensive posture--just like all special-interest groups tend to do.

If we have any doubts, as Muslims, about our divine injunction to truth-telling, even about our own community, we need look no further than the Qur'an, which states:

Oh ye who believe!
Stand out firmly
For justice, as witnesses
To God, even if it may be against
Yourselves, or your parents
Or your kin

- "Al-Nisa" (The Women),
Qur'an, 4: 135

Instead of circling the wagons with a public relations campaign of victimization, Muslims should rise to the occasion and honestly discuss what we all know: there is a very real interpretation of Islam inside our communities that threatens to convert our youth and others to extremism. It is expressed through publishing houses, imams, YouTube videos, websites and arm-chair ideologues.

We need to have an open conversations about how extremist Islam gets into the heads of Muslims such as would-be Time Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Hassan and so many others. We need to own up to the fact that some within Islam have a problematic interpretation, and we need to have the moral courage to be honest about it. We will not shame ourselves. We will not shame Islam. There is no shame in honesty. In fact, I think we would engender more good will--and invite less anger and rage by folks frustrated by our stonewalling.

Like most Muslims, I've seen rigid, puritanical interpretations creep into the American Muslim community, starting in the 1970s with the exportation of the dogmatic Wahhabi ideology from Saudi Arabia, fueled by the oil money that gave the Saudis a largess from which to pump its ideas into the world. In my hometown community of Morgantown, W.V., I saw the Saudi ideology express itself with mandates that women and men sit strictly segregated from each other at our community potluck dinners, rather than the family style arrangements we'd been enjoying. I felt a crisis of faith and didn't think there wasn't a place for me as I came of age as a fierce, strong-willed girl.

For most of my life I quietly bypassed traditions instead of directly challenging them. I distanced myself from the Muslim community, just like many of us do when we see dangers in our community that seem easier to ignore than challenge. With 9/11, I had my wake up call; then, on Jan. 23, 2002, my friend, Wall Street Journal bureau chief Daniel Pearl, was kidnapped by Muslim militants in Pakistan and later beheaded by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described 9/11 mastermind.

I recognized that the stakes were huge for how Muslims expressed themselves in the world. Muslims like me sat silently while militants wrenched the religion from us and declared they were the protectors of the faith. I went on the pilgrimage to Mecca, and, in Saudi Arabia, I saw first-hand the exit ramp that told "non-Muslims" that they couldn't enter Mecca. In Mecca, I realized how far we had departed from the Islamic principles of social justice, women's rights or tolerance that my parents had taught me.

My immersion into darkness and my experience in the light of the hajj transformed me. It made me recognize that we each have a role in standing up to the extremists in my religion who try to intimidate us into respecting and following them. Starting in 2003, at my mosque in Morgantown, my family and I challenged the interpretations of Islam that assigned women the back door and led our imam to tell us we couldn't be friends with the Jews and the Christians. When my family and I challenged the community to tackle our problems with radicalization, what happened? The men at the mosque voted to put me on trial to be banned from the mosque, they fired my father from the board and other families disinvited our family from potluck dinners. Today, as part of a Pray In movement, other women and I are thrown out of mosques in the Washington, D.C., area because we refuse to pray in the second-class areas reserved for women.

For far too long, our nation has had a politically correct stance when it comes to the question of militancy, extremism and radicalization inside Islam. In the name of interfaith dialogue, we have pulled our punches on the very serious and real issues of extremist interpretations of Islam, issuing feel-good statements such as, "Islam is a religion of peace." We try to be polite and not offend. So many well-intentioned people who are critics about issues inside their own faiths are joining the bandwagon, trying to defend Islam and Muslims, as if the faith and the community are monolithic, but our best defense, I believe, is honesty about the good, bad and ugly.

The purpose of religion is to inspire in us the best of human behavior. That includes truth-telling.

Asra Q. Nomani is the author of Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam. Her struggles in the hometown mosque in West Virginia are featured in the PBS documentary, "The Mosque in Morgantown." She teaches journalism at Georgetown University.

 

Yeah but how many of them were started by people who in the past have said things like:

Not to mention has also supported the IRA(which is a freakin terrorist group by any regards of the world terrorism.), and is one of the most vocal opponents against immigration in the congress.

Despite what Machiavelli said, sometimes the means don't justify the ends, even if the general mission could be considered a good thing, the context in how it's started is often more important. Peter King is a serious xenophobe and not just against Muslims, yet thinks terrorism is completely fine as long as white Catholics are doing it.

 

The problem is caused by one or two radical cultures in the Middle East, not individual communities in the U.S. These hearings are a modern day inquisition, based on fear and intolerance.

 

Well I think white christian terrorists take the cake! But let's keep it light here since we're discussing a terrorism hearing chaired by a radical christian and former IRA supporter that is looking in to how radical american muslims are for following a different book of fairytales! ... low hanging fruit!

 

Well put.

 

The best irony is all of this is Peter King should be the one having to answer questions, he was supporter of the IRA, not the new, let's do things by voting IRA, I mean the blowing shit up all around England and Northern Ireland IRA, he literally supported a group that's a terrorist group by all definitions of the word terrorism. But hey they're white and Catholic, so they're the good guys.

 

I choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself.... Allaha Akbar.. :devil:white devil..

 

i liked the muslim radicalization expert that was on the colbert report today or yesterday. he was talking about how radical muslims are a problem, but the house meeting was retarded since it was a bunch of non-experts making decisions they knew nothing about. they should have had experts on muslim radicalization testifying 'n stuff but instead they just had a buncha ingoramuses winging it

 

True, the these hearings om Muslim radicals could be done better, with more experts.
It is a problem but needs to be investigated properly.

 

It is retarded because it singles out Muslims. Yes, it's a given that there should be well-informed, competent people there testifying. But realy, if you want a show then bring everybody up, especially those who carry out the most terrorist acts in the US - people who look like the chairman. And speaking of retarded, thatan unrepentent IRA backer is the one chairing the show is something worthy of a Colbert Report in itself.

 

muslim extremists have declared war on america. i really don't see a problem in declaring war back. it's just political correctness bs. yeah, ignorant illiterate morons might take it the wrong way and generalize muslim=bad when it's muslim extremists=bad, but not tackling a specific issue just 'cause theyre a specific group is kinda retarded. we're still in "fuck you jihad" mode here in the west from 9/11. that's what the people want. there've been psychos and rednecks doing stupid shit for a while. this holy war crap has only been going on lately. as long as muslim extremists continue to target us, i really dont see anyone not pointing a finger at muslim extremists anytime soon. deservedly so

 

America stopped declaring war decades ago. It's been waging war, however, on Muslims for a long time now; and if supplying the weaponry that has been bombing and killing Muslims for decades hasn't been America waging war, by proxy, on extremist, moderate, adult, young, and elderly Muslims alike, it's only because it hasn't been a war but a massacre.

What is? PC - the most overused term. A show trial...

Yeah that would be retarded...

but not tackling a specific issue just 'cause theyre a specific group is kinda retarded.

Do you realize the statement can apply to all groups? Let's try it with the group that's responsible for the greatest number of terrorist attacks in the US: but not tackling a specific issue just 'cause theyre a specific group is kinda retarded.

Yup it does apply to white males too.

 

The Islam hearings are bad enough, but what's really worrying me and should be worrying you is that we rarely stop at one group to target. Once they've successfully targeted one, it usually spreads. I'm wondering, who here thinks that the Pagans will be next? They've already started spouting rhetoric (Palin's "witchcraft" fiasco, anyone?) against us. And just think about all the laws that have been proposed in the last few months targeting women in general. The witches are next, mark my words.

After Islam, who all can be targeted? Buddhists? Hindus? D&D dorks? Goths and emos? Even if we ignore the racism inherent in these hearings, we have to think about the precedents being set.

Just for the record, I am NOT trying to be insensitive to Islam here. But enough others have discussed it that my adding would be a bit superfluous and I feel personally threatened by this mess.

 

Strange how Jesus is one of the most quoted prophets in the Quran...

 

How did that poem go, Aurantia?

I can't remember who said that, I may have seen it on a bumper sticker once. Poignant, nonetheless.