All the Hate That's Fit to Print
SCHWARTZ, STEPHEN
All the Hate That’s Fit to Print America’s poison-pen Muslim press. BY STEPHEN SCHWARTZ WHEN THE SHOOTER who chose July 4 to start a gun battle at Los Angeles airport’s El Al ticket counter...
...The responses: Yes 95 percent, No 2 percent, Do not know 3 percent...
...The Jamaat-al-Islami movement, which perpetuates the same extremist mentality in Pakistan, appears to enjoy the sympathy of the Weekly Mirror International, based in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, New York, and other papers...
...Stephen Schwartz is the author of the forthcoming book The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa’ud from Tradition to Terror...
...Most of these media once defended the Taliban for refusing to surrender bin Laden, and most of them equivocated on his guilt last September...
...The same periodical quotes Larry Holmes —not the boxer, but an American Communist extremist and supporter of the regimes of Iraq and North Korea as well as Slobodan Milosevic...
...The page includes the pathetic claim, “Access DENIED . . . Muslim Americans Must Demand Inclusion in the Political Process,” which complains of insufficient support from George W. Bush after Muslims voted for him...
...No evidence of Hadayet’s mosque attendance has been reported...
...Its May 2002 issue features a tasteful headline: “Axis of Evil: The United States, Israel, and Arab governments,” adorned by a graphic of a rattlesnake...
...The Muslim Observer publishes anyone given to an exaggerated anti-U.S...
...Its last printed edition came out in September/ October 2001, but it has maintained the title on its website (www.isna.net/horizons...
...If this is not the language of incitement, what is...
...Comrade Holmes thunders against “an ongoing campaign of anti-Arab racism and anti-Muslim bigotry Bush has whipped up in the United States to complement his non-stop war policies in the Middle East...
...Some of the most strident voices, however, are here in the United States, directed not from the Middle East or South Asia, but from modern offices in Los Angeles, Chicago, and the Detroit suburbs...
...In it, editor Aslam Abdullah accuses Israel of pursuing “a policy adopted by Henry Kissinger in 1979 that called for a final solution of the Palestinian problem...
...BY STEPHEN SCHWARTZ WHEN THE SHOOTER who chose July 4 to start a gun battle at Los Angeles airport’s El Al ticket counter turned out to be Hesham Mohamed Hadayet— an Egyptian native with a “Read Koran” sticker on his apartment door—many people not unreasonably wondered if he had picked up his hostility to America and Israel at an extremist mosque...
...The current website of the Muslim Observer offers its readers the following poll: “Our question for this week was: Do you think our country [the United States] is being manipulated by Israel...
...Meanwhile, in the March 27 issue of the Weekly Mirror International (www.readmirror.com), author Khalil Osman declaims, “The Bush administration has demonstrated unprecedented zeal in instituting draconian measures aimed mainly at Arabs and Muslims...
...idiom, and its contributors have included Osama bin Laden...
...While the “mainstream” Islamic establishment—groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the American Muslim Council (AMC), and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA)—offers perfunctory support for the anti-terror war and hovers around President Bush for photo ops in mosques, the poison pens of its media produce an unceasing stream of insult and loathing directed against America...
...In the April 27-May 2 issue of the Michigan-based Muslim Observer (www.muslimobserver.com), we find an article titled “Eyewitness Account of Washington March,” in which a Pakistani- American proudly describes how one of his companions, a 16-yearold boy, “put on a Palestinian scarf and truly gave the tingles to the breakfast crowd, looking quite the epitome of the suicide bomber...
...His native country has long been steeped in an extremist and violent political culture...
...Islamic Horizons is the bimonthly organ of the Islamic Society of North America, which represents Wahhabi Islam in American mosques...
...One expects appeals to the extremist jihad to be heard in the streets of Karachi, in the canyons of Tora Bora, and from the government media of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq...
...Many pious Muslims have complained about the infiltration of American mosques by Larry Holmes and his Stalinist group, on the pretext of “defending” Iraq, since they know the ideology he defends has destroyed more mosques than the Crusaders could have imagined leveling in their wildest fantasies...
...That same culture has unfortunately taken root in the Islamic “community media” in this country...
...Findley writes, “Outsiders do not seem to recognize that bin Laden is one of the pre-eminent heroes of Afghans, occupying a role similar to the Marquis de Lafayette, a Frenchman who fought at the side of the Colonials during America’s Revolutionary War...
...The only mystery is how long it will be before our home-grown hatemongers come under closer scrutiny...
...As more details became known, a chilling picture of a fullblooded campaign against Muslims and Arabs began to emerge...
...The Minaret, also published in Los Angeles by the Islamic Center of Southern California, is infamous for its anti-Jewish cartoons...
...What’s gone unremarked is that he could just as easily have been incited by the steady diet of violent rhetoric served up by the American Muslim community media —periodicals with names like The Minaret, Islamic Horizons, the Weekly Mirror International, and the Muslim Observer, which toe the anti-American, anti-Israel line of Saudi Arabia’s Islamofascist Wahhabi sect...
...It’s hardly a mystery how an Egyptian limo service operator could end up as a gun-toting terrorist at LAX...
...Findley’s book came out in the summer of 2001, which did not prove a propitious moment for a work that gushes over Osama bin Laden...
...Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood—which preaches the classic neo-Wahhabi doctrine of the supremacy of Islam and condemnation of non-extremist Muslims as irreligious—receives support from at-Talib (The Student), published at UCLA by the Islamic Center of Southern California, and from Islamic Horizons, based in Plainfield, Indiana...
...These publications make no attempt to hide their attachments to international extremist groups...
...The site also promotes Silent No More: Confronting America’s False Images of Islam, a wretched book by professional Israel-basher Paul Findley, a former Republican congressman from Illinois...
Vol. 7 • July 2002 • No. 43
