CAIR
Documenting Islamophobia on the rise in the USA – Calling CAIR
to Account for its Omissions
By
Zahir Ebrahim | Project
Humanbeingsfirst.org
Monday,
July 04, 2011 | Last updated July 05, 2011 3:00 PM PST
Introduction
The
following letter was sent to CAIR, The Council on American-Islamic
Relations, forwarding them my comment to the article
“Islamophobia on the rise in USA” which highlighted their
report, with a short preamble prefacing that comment.
First,
some context for non-Muslim readers who might be unfamiliar with
matters peculiar to Muslims which Muslims implicitly understand, and
which often forms the unarticulated sub-text of our communications
amongst each other:
-
AOA is the internet vernacular for the greeting 'Assalaam O Alekum'.
It loosely means 'may peace be with you'.
-
“jihad-un-nafs” is the Qur'anic concept of inner courage
and strength one must acquire in oneself (
يُجَاهِدُ
لِنَفْسِهِ
ۚ Holy
Qur'an Surah Al-Ankaboot, 29:6) in order to strive for truth and
justice in practice before one will in fact ever be able to practice
truth and justice (
وَتَوَاصَوْا
بِالْحَقِّ
Holy
Qur'an Surah Al-Asr 103:3) in one's conduct with fellow man. It is
often referred out of context as simply the “inner struggle”
for the control of the “self”. That out-of-context
meaning typically relegates it to a meaningless spiritual battle of
no consequence to alleviating the suffering
of fellow man from all causes, including tyranny. It is among the
many hijackings of the religion Islam by its venerable imperial
scholars, experts, narrators, and mullahs who have served empire
throughout history unto the present day, and the ignorant peoples of
all stripes who bow before these “experts” without using
their own commonsense, to turn Islam, the religion of implementing
justice for oneself as much as for fellow man, into merely one of a
gibberish religion of rituals and soulful Arabic recitations.
-
As Muslims, we love wearing our religion upon our forehead. We are
also perhaps the most ritualistic pious people on earth. Our mosques
are full of heaven seekers. But when it comes to implementing the
core meaningful constructs of the religion which transcend the
rituals of piety, we are the proverbial empty drum – make a lot
of noise. We love to carry the banner of "Islam" in our
names, titles, institutions, national constitutions,
etc. The non-Muslim not entirely taken in by our show of pious
rituals would surely have noticed that more we use the word "Islamic"
in our designations and affiliations, more we appear to please false
gods while making all our pretenses to the
One True God we proclaim to worship.
-
Between being useful idiots and pleasing false gods, the choice is
often straightforward for us Muslims. Do both. No outsider can tell
the difference anyway. It has many advantages – for when
caught, we can proclaim we were fooled, that we didn't know. Works
great – on the one hand it serves the interests of the false
gods du jour, on the other it protects us from retribution if ever
the false gods change and new ones become our masters.
-
Unlike Christians and Christianity, we have two completely separate
words to designate the people who proclaim to follow the religion or
are born into that culture (Muslims) vs. the divine religion (Islam).
Any time you see one terminology aliasing for another, you might do
well to remember that there is some axe to grind somewhere. Bernard
Lewis is the venerable master of this obfuscation now being amiably
carried by CAIR, when he began his treatise “Crisis of Islam –
Holy War and Unholy Terror” with the following gem:
“It
is difficult to generalize about Islam. To begin with, the word
itself is commonly used with two related but distinct meanings, as
the equivalents both of Christianity, and Christendom. In the one
sense, it denotes a religion, as system of beliefs and worship; in
the other, the civilization that grew up and flourished under the
aegis of that religion. The word Islam thus denotes more than
fourteen centuries of history, a billion and a third people, and a
religious and cultural tradition of enormous diversity.”
(Bernard Lewis, Crisis of Islam, pg. 1).
That
last sentence is the diabolical deception with which imperial
craftsmanship subverts our religion: “The
word Islam thus denotes more than fourteen centuries of history, a
billion and a third people, and a religious and cultural tradition of
enormous diversity.”
According
to the Author of the Holy Qur'an upon which the religion of Islam is
based, the word Islam denotes only, and only, the following: “This
day have I perfected for you your religion and completed My favor on
you and chosen for you Islam as a religion;” (
الْيَوْمَ
أَكْمَلْتُ
لَكُمْ دِينَكُمْ
وَأَتْمَمْتُ
عَلَيْكُمْ
نِعْمَتِي
وَرَضِيتُ
لَكُمُ الْإِسْلَامَ
دِينًا ۚ Holy
Qur'an, Surah Al-Maida 5:3)
That
is the only, repeat only, context in which the word “Islam”
can be legitimately used. It is the only context in which Qur'an has
used it – as indicating a divine religion, quite separate from
its followers, and the affairs of its followers. That separation of
terminology is itself espoused in the Holy Qur'an by virtue of having
a separate terminology. It is in fact a
distinction of Islam in comparison to all the other Abrahamic
religions which do not feature such a clear separation. This
is why followers of Prophet Muhammad for instance are not called
Mohammedans, nor believers of Islam
Islamic, except by the prejudicial orientalists.
The word designated in the Holy Qur'an for
them is Muslims.
All
who misuse the Qur'anic terminology, Muslims and non-Muslims alike,
are either ignorant peoples, or, the respected apprentices of
Machiavelli. In the latter case, they deliberately
try to subvert the religion of Islam by associating
it with the inglorious deeds, and the kingly history of Muslims. One
can immediately see the result of such gratuitous binding –
read the afore-cited book of Bernard Lewis if one is a naïve
baby only born yesterday and magically became a scholar overnight.
Based
solely on that premeditated collateral damage to language –
drawing false associations by overloading semantics in an already
well-defined nomenclature, also the principal basis of subliminally
as well as cognitively binding something virtuous with something
abhorrent such that when the virtuous is mentioned, the abhorrent
naturally springs to mind – that Samuel Huntington, the late
circus clown of empire at Harvard, diabolically made the following
statement in his treatise “The Clash of Civilizations”:
“The
underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It
is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the
superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of
their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the US
Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose
people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe
that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the
obligation to extend that culture throughout the world. These are the
basic ingredient that fuel conflict between Islam and the West.”
(Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of
World Order, 1996, pg. 217)
Since
when did Islam become a civilization? A civilization is an aggregate
of peoples. Whereas Islam is a religion. A religion can be practiced
in any civilization and by any peoples, including right here in the
USA.
Such
premeditated collateral damage to language enabled forging the US
foreign policy in the aftermath of 9/11
against the cleverly devised Hegelian construct of “militant
Islam”, to mask what Zbigniew Brzezinski termed “imperial
mobilization” in his own
treatise, “The Grand Chessboard”, pg. 36.
The
roots of Islamophobia are very distinguished indeed. It is the twain
of Islamofascism and militant Islam –
the pretext for the 'War on Terror'. One cannot be examined in
isolation from the other any more than leaves of a tree can be
examined in isolation from its DNA. 'Tis rather obvious!
We
Muslims understand this sub-text of the War on Terror – even
when we refuse to say it out loud in public. One can hear it in
hushed living-room conversations throughout
the Muslim world. We might act cowardly in public – but we
aren't so stupid when we stare in the mirror.
While
one expects empire and its instruments to indulge in such
diabolically specious story-telling, and they do – from academe
to politicians to newsmedia – one does not expect the
self-proclaimed representatives of its victims to do the same. But
this anomalous behavior resoundingly echoes
in every instance of Muslims' representation today, from mosques to
secular non-profit institutions like CAIR.
The one thing which perhaps sheds some penetrating light on this vile
zeitgeist is the following insight of
Martin Luther King Jr. into a colonized mind:
“The
white establishment is skilled in flattering and cultivating emerging
leaders. It presses its own image on them and finally, from imitation
of manners, dress, and style of living, a deeper strain of corruption
develops. This kind of Negro leader acquires the white man’s
contempt for the ordinary Negro. He is often more at home with the
middle-class white than he is among his own people. His language
changes, his location changes, his income changes, and ultimately he
changes from the representative of the Negro to the white man into
the white man’s representative to the Negro. The tragedy is
that too often he does not recognize what has happened to him.”,
-- (Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope, pg.
307)
All
that is the primary reason why Professor Hatem Bazian is cc'ed on my
letter to CAIR. As a well-known Muslim scholar of SF-BAY Area who
graces many a Friday sermon in Bay Area mosques, someone whom I know
(but who may not know me as I am only a plebeian once found sitting
quietly in the audience but no longer bother), and one who is
acknowledged prominently in the CAIR report by CAIR's Executive
Director on page-5 “I would like to extend my thanks to the
following people who contributed to the production of this report:
Khadija Athman and Dr. Hatem Bazian”, the good professor
must publicly account for its short-comings alongside CAIR and their
other technical advisors.
Page-2
of the CAIR report squarely lays the blame for the grotesque
omissions I charge them with, only upon CAIR and their technical
advisors:
“This
report is co-sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley’s
Center for Race and Gender and the Council on American-Islamic
Relations (CAIR). The Center for Race and Gender is responsible for
the special sections on Park 51 and the 2010 election. CAIR is
responsible for all other material in the report. This report was
finalized on Dec. 1, 2010. All information is accurate to the best of
our knowledge through that date.”
-
And lastly, we see below an example of that axe of “useful
idiot” being grinded by CAIR while
keeping the core-axioms for the worship of their false gods intact
and untouchable. CAIR might do well to replace “Islamic”
with “Muslim” in their title to become The
Council on American-Muslim Relations which is certainly
more appropriate for an organization dealing with Muslim affairs in
America rather than dealing with the religion of Islam. Then, at
least ordinary ill-informed plebeians like me won't get confused by
their omissions and half-narratives which are the staple of any
polished propaganda system of the Mighty Wurlitzer.
I
look forward to hearing what excuse CAIR will bring forth to explain
their omissions – “didn't know” (useful idiot) or
“conspiracy theory” (using the narrative of their own
false gods).
With
all the preceding sub-text of implicitly understood matters among
Muslims behind us, reproduced below is my letter to CAIR objecting to
their report. Preamble is in [] brackets.
To:
CAIR <info@cair.com>, <info@sfba.cair.com>
Subject:
CAIR Documenting Islamophobia on the rise in the USA – Calling
CAIR to Account for its Omissions By Zahir Ebrahim
Cc:
Professor Hatem Bazian <hatemb@berkeley.edu>,
Cc:
Prof. Evelyn Nakano Glenn Director Center for Race & Gender
<englenn@berkeley.edu>
Date:
Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 6:51 PM
PST
[
AOA, The glossy 68-page CAIR report is how many of us are co-opted
into muttering half-truths in the name of conscience, activism,
dissent, representation, etc., when we do find the courage to give up
our stoned silence. I am not sure which is better, half-truth
documenting crimes against humanity (a Jewish proverb says: “a
half truth is a full lie”), or, pathetic silence of the
spectators in the face of crimes against humanity (which all books of
wisdom and retrospective law (such as Nuremberg) say is criminal)?
What I have learnt personally in this respect are two things. 1) That
half-truths are part of Machiavellian political science. It always
serves someone's purpose. And sometimes, rather often times, quite
unbeknownst to its narrators/actors. That's
called a "useful idiot" serving someone else's interests
but with the best noble motivations of one's own. Read the Mighty
Wurlitzer Report.
And 2) That silence is either a calculated part of wise cowardice,
or, a lack of an abundance of foolish courage. Take your pick. It
follows that speaking the bold truth in completeness without any
omissions, must be the act of “jihad-un-nafs” – no?
Thank you, Zahir Ebrahim, Project Humanbeingsfirst.org ]
Hello.
Thank
you for the link to CAIR document (Same
Hate, New Target: Islamophobia and Its Impact in the United States
January 2009-December 2010)*. It will certainly come
in handy one day if Muslims ever become like our Jewish brethren –
the eternal victims. The Jews have perfected the art of seeking
endless claims, as noted in the Press Release ( Did
You or Your Family Take Palestinian Property during the Jewish
Zionist Era Since 1948? June 27, 2011 ). But we shall
surely “better that instruction” (Shakespeare in Merchant
of Venice)**. Just kidding....
But
this PDF document of CAIR serves little purpose other than being a
Mighty Wurlitzer piece as a limited hangout. What else is the point
of this documentation may I ask?
Does
its colored and glossy 68 pages lend any insight whatsoever into the
motivation, the WHY Islamophobia is on the rise in USA – what
was the purpose to craftily seed it to begin with? It didn't
materialize overnight you know.
Here
is a passage from the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington's 1996
book, quoting professor emeritus of Princeton University, Bernard
Lewis from his 1990 article in the Council on Foreign Relations' rag,
Foreign Affairs, crafting “Muslim
Rage” to define the framework for 9/11 and the War on Terror a
full decade before it:
“In
1990 Bernard Lewis, a leading Western scholar of Islam, analyzed 'The
Roots of Muslim Rage,' and concluded: 'It should now be clear that we
are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues
and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less
than a clash of civilizations - that perhaps irrational but surely
historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian
heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both.
It is crucially important that we on our side should not be provoked
into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against
our rival.'” (Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and
the Remaking of World Order, 1996, pg. 213)
Sadly,
such motivations are neither disclosed nor deconstructed by the
high-falutin glossy 68 page brochure of CAIR and their hoity-toity
academics acknowledged on pages 8-9 of that document. Perhaps I just
scanned it too fast – perhaps CAIR has addressed it elsewhere
and wanted to keep this brochure for the claimants' courts of the
future....
If
interested, and tired of reading empire's useful idiots who, in order
to ensure that imperial crumbs continue to fall on their academic
plates, continually shy away from any bold and accurate articulation
of truth (not that they don't know it – most Muslims such as
these learned souls surely must, but all are silenced by the
expectation of rewards, continued employment, or loss of benefits if
they speak up) by telling half-stories and
partial truths, read it here: 'War
on Terror' is not about 'Islamofascism' – Please get with the
real agenda you people!
That
explains why Islamophobia was seeded in the USA and EU, starting with
Bernard Lewis' fiction of “Muslim Rage”.
We
only see its backlash flourishing by the natural process of weed
multiplication in any fertile green lawn.
The natural social dynamics of engineering consent are far better
understood by the hectoring hegemons than the common
man can comprehend. Such processes, occasionally
“tickled” by the odd Qur'an burning parties here and
there which appear to be officially
protected (by virtue of nothing ever happens to the Qur'an burners),
keep the notion of Islamophobia alive for good measure. And useful
idiots like CAIR document them for our benefit, without lending any
insight into the matter. Wonderful....
But
the primary purpose has already been served by seeding the mantra of
“Islamofascism” and “Muslim Rage”. (We
already harvested the perpetual War on Terror, the Fortress America,
the definition of the “domestic terrorist” to make a
successful police-state in Fortress America, and most bountiful of
all harvests, the never-ending pretexts for “imperial
mobilization” of Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski to achieve the “global
governance” of the bankster oligarchy.)
Thus,
it is now fine for all the list of accolades for the "BEST"
on page 13 onwards in the glossy CAIR brochure to stand up to
Islamophobia. Hegelian Dialectic requires both sides of the
fabricated coin to be present. Both sides are fabricated, and
patently false. (How does one tell it is a Hegelian Dialectic? By
observing that both sides, the Islamophobes and those opposing it,
keep the core-lies of empire very much intact. And they each do it by
omission!)
In
so far as it goes, CAIR is still the only Muslim organization that
does whatever little it does. I am not sure if I should be thankful
for its generosity of purpose, which it is, or pull my remaining hair
out for its useful idiot's role in America, which it also is.
Zahir
Ebrahim
Project
Humanbeingsfirst.org
Comment
submitted for: “Islamophobia
on the rise in USA”
*
PDF also archived at:
http://humanbeingsfirst.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/cacheof-cair-islamophobiareport2009-2010.pdf
**
Shakespeare's passage in context: “If you prick us, do
we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do
we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like
you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. The villainy
you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better
the instruction.”
Source
URL:
http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2011/07/cair-report-islamophobia-rising-usa.html
Mirror
URL:
http://bloghumanbeingsfirst.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/cair-report-islamophobia-rising-usa-zahir-ebrahim/
PDF
URL:
http://humanbeingsfirst.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/cair-report-islamophobia-rising-usa-calling-cair-to-account-for-its-omissions-by-zahir-ebrahim-2.pdf
The
author, an ordinary researcher and writer on contemporary
geopolitics, a minor justice activist, grew up in Pakistan, studied
EECS at MIT, engineered for a while in high-tech Silicon Valley (