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sonz
06-14-2006, 10:34 AM
For centuries, Islam has been at the receiving end of Western attacks. In order to justify these attacks, Islam has been portrayed as being inherently inferior, violent and abusive to women. Islam is packaged as a monolithic bloc and discussed in terms of prejudice and political interests.

As a result of the brutal European colonisation and the establishment of Israel in Palestine, Islam has been deliberately distorted and unfairly attacked by Europeans and Americans. The event of 9/11 put Muslim communities in the West under siege and subjected them to more racial attacks and discrimination. Islam is presented to European and American audiences as an enemy to be demonised and defeated.

The task is contracted to the inherently Islamophobic Western mass media and an army of native informers or “good” Muslims — as they are called in the West. They were recruited for the sole purpose of denigrating Islamic culture and Muslims. In reality, the native informers are fake Muslims using their distant backgrounds to serve their own interests and gain acceptance in their “adopted” countries. Since the U. S. launched its fraudulent “War on Terror”, a new generation of native informers – following in the footsteps of older ones – have surfaced in Western countries knowing for their hostilities to Muslims and Islamic cultures. Like their minders, native informers see Islam through a distorted and biased lens.

This year, one of Europe’s most celebrated anti-Muslim native informers was stripped naked. The Somalian-born Ayaan Hirsi Magan – better known as Hirsi Ali to make her sounds more Muslim – was found to have lied about her name, age and the way she obtained her refugee status and later became a rightwing MP in the Dutch Parliament. According to the Dutch current affairs programme or Zembla, which released the documentary De heilige Ayaan (The holy Ayaan); Hirsi not only lied but also fabricated her past'. It is clear that there was no evidence of “arranged marriage” and “domestic abuse” and Hirsi had a comfortable life before she arrived in West Europe.

In 1990, it was alleged that Hirsi Magan wrote the screenplay for a film entitled Submission in which she insulted the Holy Quran and denigrated Muslims. Hirsi become an advocate of Dutch “liberal” values and propagated that new migrants must be required to like Hashish, nudity (aka pornography) and rainy weather before they are allowed to settle in the Netherlands.

There was no doubt that the Dutch government did know that Hirsi Magan was not a genuine refugee before she was recruited for her role in the anti-Muslims propaganda. Despite living in Kenya for twelve years and Germany before she moved to the Netherlands, Hirsi Magan was granted refugee status. It is not the end of the story. Hirsi Magan would be moving to the U.S. to take up a job at the Zionist think-tank, American Enterprise Institute (AEI) to spread her lies further and enhance the already distorted Americans’ images of Islam and Muslims.

Irshad Manji is a new breed of the West’s army of recruits in the campaign of misrepresenting Islam and Muslims. A Ugandan-born of Indian origin living in Canada, Manji is the famous fabricator of The Trouble with Islam (Today), a distorted form of low journalism designed to denigrate Muslims, and provides U.S. warmongers and Zionists with fabricated lies for their imperialist war against Muslims and the Palestinian people in particular. The book main point, to borrow Edward Said phrase, “is about what is the trouble with Manji herself; an actual, rather than fabricated subject”. Sadly, despite her illiteracy and lack of scholarship in Islam, Manji has been appointed a visiting fellow at the International Security Studies program at Yale University. It is suggested that through these Western-created native informers American youth will learn about Islam and Muslims.

Another new name on the list of native informers is the Iranian-born Azar Nafisi. Nafisi is a former disciple of Paul Wolfowitz, the Zionist extremist and one of the architects of the criminal war against Iraq. Nafisi is the “author” of the bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran. The book was a fabrication of a “story” devoid of any critical thinking. The book cover shows two university teenage female students reading not “Lolita” as the book suggests, but the results of Iranian parliamentary elections in a progressive Iranian newspaper, Mosharekat. The plagiarism of the girls’ photo to serve a wicked purpose is evident that Reading Lolita in Tehran was a fabricated lie designed not to inform, but to mislead. “Lolita”, the dirtiest of all child paedophilia, was banned in Britain and the U.S. Its use in this context is designed to “strip [Iranian girls] of their moral intelligence and their participation in the democratic aspirations of their homeland, ushering them into a colonial harem”, wrote the literary critic and Iranian scholar Hamid Dabashi of Columbia University in New York. The book main theme is the denigration of Iranian culture in particular and Islamic cultures in general. It is playing in the hands of Iran’s enemies who since the rise of Salman Rushdie in 1988 have never stopped their hatred of Iran and Islam.

Salman Rushdie is the infamous Indian-born English salesman, who’s The Satanic Verses, made him an instant celebrity in the West and brought him “fame” and wealth has performed his function with distinction. Rushdie’s personal insults against the Prophet Mohammed were promoted in the West as “fierce criticism of radical Islam”. But calling the Prophet a con artist surrounded by prostitutes is not “criticism of Islam”; it is blasphemous. The Prophet is respected and revered by over a billion Muslims world-wide. Rushdie is incapable of serious criticism of Islam. Like the others, his aim is to denigrate Islam and gain acceptance among Western elites.

In Australia, with a shallow form of “multiculturalism”, we have a shortage on native informers. The latest creation was an American from Chicago of a Jordanian origin, but never lived there. Norma Khouri’s sensational book exploited the anti-Arabs and anti-Muslims prejudice to satisfy Australians that shared her distorted perceptions about Arabs and Muslims. In her fabricated Forbidden Love or Honor Lost in the U.S., Khouri foretold a story about “the liberation of Arab women” in which she presented herself as a persecuted refugee fleeing Jordan. Thanks to a Sydney Morning Herald reporter (Malcolm Knox) who found the book to be just another fraud. “It is a hoax”, said Knox. The book was removed from sale in bookshops after it (regrettably) sold more than 250,000 copies. However, this didn’t stop the Australian Government from granting Khouri a refugee status (‘Protection Visa’), while genuine women refugees (mostly Muslims) were detained together with their children in notorious detention camps and denied their basic human rights. Khouri has since disappeared and it is possible that her hoax was the work of somebody else to serve as anti-Arabs and anti-Muslims propaganda for the illegal U.S. war on Iraq.

From Hirsi Magan and Irshad Manji to Azar Nafisi and Salman Rushdie to Norma Khouri, native informers are not “fierce critic of Islam”. Western libraries and universities are full of criticism of Islam and Muslims. Native informers lack the ability to criticise Islam and showed complete ignorance of the richness of Islamic cultures and the diversity of life in different Muslim countries and societies.

As the late literary critic Edward Said has demonstrated, native informers tell stories Westerners, and Americans in particular, “carved to have it confirm for them that Islam deserves unrelieved opprobrium and revulsion”. The rich history, diverse cultures and the peaceful nature of Islam have to be removed and replaced by a dominant stereotype. Islam has to be presented as an enemy and a threat to the West. Native informers provide Westerners with justification to increase the divide between Muslims and non-Muslims, and encourage discrimination and Islamophobia, instead of mutual understanding and coexistence.

Misrepresenting Islam is not restricted to native informers; the West has its own pundits and bigoted con artists. The likes of Ernest Renan, Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington are familiar households. The war on Iraq created a lucrative opportunity for others eager to play the role of imperial Orientalists and advance their own interests. Fred Halliday, a rightwing pundit at the London School of Economics comes as a good example. According to Halliday; “In the Muslim world, the sense of hostility towards the west is associated with a cultural nationalism that denies liberal or modern Western concepts of women's equality and rights”, not the war on defenceless Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine that created hostility towards the West. The Occupation of Iraq demolishes Holliday’s flawed argument. The U.S. Occupation destroyed Iraqi women’s rights and deprived them of liberty and equality enjoyed under the previous regime. In addition, the new U.S.-drafted Iraqi Constitution is repressive to women. Women status in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan is another story.

While it is true that women are oppressed in some authoritarian Muslim countries, Islam is not to be blamed for women blight. To the contrary, Islam is a religion of equality, respect and tolerance. However, it is very common among liars to use the victims in order to advance their interests. Native informers and Westerners are misusing the blight of women not because of concern for women, but to spit their venom at Islam and Muslims. Muslim women are the most oppressed, marginalised and discriminated against minority in the West today. In most Western countries, Muslim women are denied their basic rights to employment and education simply because they dressed in a way Western men do not approve.

Finally, the recent protests by ordinary Muslims against the blasphemous cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed as a “terrorist” in Denmark's largest daily, Jyllands-Posten, have been used in the propaganda campaign to portray Islam as “violent”, “undemocratic” and “intolerant” of Western “freedom of speech”. But insulting the Prophet Mohammed and his followers has nothing to do with “freedom of speech” or criticism of Islam. There is no “freedom of speech” in the West”. The act was despicable and should have been condemned by all Western leaders and intellectuals. Instead, it was used to demonise Islam and justify violence and prejudice against Muslims. The same newspaper has refused to print cartoon depicting Jesus because the editor alleged they were “offensive”. It is evident of Western double standard and unwillingness to engage in constructive debate and serious criticism of Islam designed to serve political interests, rather than win the hearts and minds of Muslims.

By contrast, when Madonna recently appeared in Los Angeles on a six-metre high mirrored cross to sing the ballad Live to Tell. Because Madonna's use of Christian imagery considered as “abuse and it is dangerous”, she was condemned “downright offensive” by the same Western leaders who expressed solidarity with the Jyllands-Posten and the Danish Government who refused to condemn the blasphemous cartoons.

The rising of Islamophobia in the West today mirrors the rising of anti-Jewish hatred in Europe which paved the way to the mass murder of millions of innocent people from religious and ethnic minorities. The West, the U.S. in particular, can not continue committing crimes against innocent Muslims, and then punishing those Muslims for protesting and resisting Western crimes. It is not only Muslims who need to change; Western leaders need to change their policies and attitudes towards Muslims and Islam.

To confront the hostility of the West towards Muslims and Islam it is necessary to expose the lies and distortions of the mass media, native informers and Orientalists. We must stand up against their lies and stop them from polluting and infecting the minds of ordinary people.

Ghali Hassan lives in Perth, Western Australia.
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duskiness
06-14-2006, 10:56 AM
I find this article bias, onesided and agressive.
just my POV
n.
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KAding
06-14-2006, 12:44 PM
format_quote Originally Posted by sonz
For centuries, Islam has been at the receiving end of Western attacks.


You mean, after the centuries of 'Western' lands being attacked, conquered and annexed by Muslims? :) Sure sucks that Golden Age of Islam finally ended, eh :p.

In order to justify these attacks, Islam has been portrayed as being inherently inferior, violent and abusive to women. Islam is packaged as a monolithic bloc and discussed in terms of prejudice and political interests.
Islam is packaged as a monolithic block? You mean like the official policy of this forum? "There is only one Islam". I do not think it is Westerns that need to understand that Islam is not a monolithic block and has many different interpretations, it is mostly Muslims who must start understanding and accepting it.

As a result of the brutal European colonisation and the establishment of Israel in Palestine, Islam has been deliberately distorted and unfairly attacked by Europeans and Americans. The event of 9/11 put Muslim communities in the West under siege and subjected them to more racial attacks and discrimination. Islam is presented to European and American audiences as an enemy to be demonised and defeated.
War on Islam? No. There is a reason why one of the first things Bush did after 9/11 was go to a Mosque and proclaim Islam is a religion of peace. The same happened after the July 7th subway bombings in London. Some try to defuse the situation, some - like this author - hope to make this a civilizational struggle.

The task is contracted to the inherently Islamophobic Western mass media and an army of native informers or “good” Muslims — as they are called in the West. They were recruited for the sole purpose of denigrating Islamic culture and Muslims. In reality, the native informers are fake Muslims using their distant backgrounds to serve their own interests and gain acceptance in their “adopted” countries. Since the U. S. launched its fraudulent “War on Terror”, a new generation of native informers – following in the footsteps of older ones – have surfaced in Western countries knowing for their hostilities to Muslims and Islamic cultures. Like their minders, native informers see Islam through a distorted and biased lens.
You see? This is what I meant earlier. A complete lack of understanding among some Muslims that one may disagree about religious doctrine. Any Muslim that doesn't agree with the author is branded a 'fake Muslim'! And you people wonder why Muslims are blowing up so many other Muslims?

This year, one of Europe’s most celebrated anti-Muslim native informers was stripped naked. The Somalian-born Ayaan Hirsi Magan – better known as Hirsi Ali to make her sounds more Muslim – was found to have lied about her name, age and the way she obtained her refugee status and later became a rightwing MP in the Dutch Parliament. According to the Dutch current affairs programme or Zembla, which released the documentary De heilige Ayaan (The holy Ayaan); Hirsi not only lied but also fabricated her past'. It is clear that there was no evidence of “arranged marriage” and “domestic abuse” and Hirsi had a comfortable life before she arrived in West Europe.

In 1990, it was alleged that Hirsi Magan wrote the screenplay for a film entitled Submission in which she insulted the Holy Quran and denigrated Muslims. Hirsi become an advocate of Dutch “liberal” values and propagated that new migrants must be required to like Hashish, nudity (aka pornography) and rainy weather before they are allowed to settle in the Netherlands.
Lol. She believes that Muslims who are moving to the West need to be tolerant of Western values. Sounds sensible to me! In the long run it is best if they assimilate, since we can already see that the social tension is building up in many European cities with large Muslim minorities.

Luckily, it appears to me many Muslims are indeed adapting to Western life. In secular Holland for example for mosque attendance is dropping, especially among the younger generations and those with higher education.

There was no doubt that the Dutch government did know that Hirsi Magan was not a genuine refugee before she was recruited for her role in the anti-Muslims propaganda.
Simply not true.

Despite living in Kenya for twelve years and Germany before she moved to the Netherlands, Hirsi Magan was granted refugee status. It is not the end of the story. Hirsi Magan would be moving to the U.S. to take up a job at the Zionist think-tank, American Enterprise Institute (AEI) to spread her lies further and enhance the already distorted Americans’ images of Islam and Muslims.

Irshad Manji is a new breed of the West’s army of recruits in the campaign of misrepresenting Islam and Muslims. A Ugandan-born of Indian origin living in Canada, Manji is the famous fabricator of The Trouble with Islam (Today), a distorted form of low journalism designed to denigrate Muslims, and provides U.S. warmongers and Zionists with fabricated lies for their imperialist war against Muslims and the Palestinian people in particular. The book main point, to borrow Edward Said phrase, “is about what is the trouble with Manji herself; an actual, rather than fabricated subject”. Sadly, despite her illiteracy and lack of scholarship in Islam, Manji has been appointed a visiting fellow at the International Security Studies program at Yale University. It is suggested that through these Western-created native informers American youth will learn about Islam and Muslims.

Another new name on the list of native informers is the Iranian-born Azar Nafisi. Nafisi is a former disciple of Paul Wolfowitz, the Zionist extremist and one of the architects of the criminal war against Iraq. Nafisi is the “author” of the bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran. The book was a fabrication of a “story” devoid of any critical thinking. The book cover shows two university teenage female students reading not “Lolita” as the book suggests, but the results of Iranian parliamentary elections in a progressive Iranian newspaper, Mosharekat. The plagiarism of the girls’ photo to serve a wicked purpose is evident that Reading Lolita in Tehran was a fabricated lie designed not to inform, but to mislead. “Lolita”, the dirtiest of all child paedophilia, was banned in Britain and the U.S. Its use in this context is designed to “strip [Iranian girls] of their moral intelligence and their participation in the democratic aspirations of their homeland, ushering them into a colonial harem”, wrote the literary critic and Iranian scholar Hamid Dabashi of Columbia University in New York. The book main theme is the denigration of Iranian culture in particular and Islamic cultures in general. It is playing in the hands of Iran’s enemies who since the rise of Salman Rushdie in 1988 have never stopped their hatred of Iran and Islam.

Salman Rushdie is the infamous Indian-born English salesman, who’s The Satanic Verses, made him an instant celebrity in the West and brought him “fame” and wealth has performed his function with distinction. Rushdie’s personal insults against the Prophet Mohammed were promoted in the West as “fierce criticism of radical Islam”. But calling the Prophet a con artist surrounded by prostitutes is not “criticism of Islam”; it is blasphemous. The Prophet is respected and revered by over a billion Muslims world-wide. Rushdie is incapable of serious criticism of Islam. Like the others, his aim is to denigrate Islam and gain acceptance among Western elites.

In Australia, with a shallow form of “multiculturalism”, we have a shortage on native informers. The latest creation was an American from Chicago of a Jordanian origin, but never lived there. Norma Khouri’s sensational book exploited the anti-Arabs and anti-Muslims prejudice to satisfy Australians that shared her distorted perceptions about Arabs and Muslims. In her fabricated Forbidden Love or Honor Lost in the U.S., Khouri foretold a story about “the liberation of Arab women” in which she presented herself as a persecuted refugee fleeing Jordan. Thanks to a Sydney Morning Herald reporter (Malcolm Knox) who found the book to be just another fraud. “It is a hoax”, said Knox. The book was removed from sale in bookshops after it (regrettably) sold more than 250,000 copies. However, this didn’t stop the Australian Government from granting Khouri a refugee status (‘Protection Visa’), while genuine women refugees (mostly Muslims) were detained together with their children in notorious detention camps and denied their basic human rights. Khouri has since disappeared and it is possible that her hoax was the work of somebody else to serve as anti-Arabs and anti-Muslims propaganda for the illegal U.S. war on Iraq.

From Hirsi Magan and Irshad Manji to Azar Nafisi and Salman Rushdie to Norma Khouri, native informers are not “fierce critic of Islam”. Western libraries and universities are full of criticism of Islam and Muslims. Native informers lack the ability to criticise Islam and showed complete ignorance of the richness of Islamic cultures and the diversity of life in different Muslim countries and societies.
Yes, these people are a true enrichment for our societies. There are many many more like it in Western Europe. Many of them get frequent death threats from those who 'want to promote the unity of Islam'.

As the late literary critic Edward Said has demonstrated, native informers tell stories Westerners, and Americans in particular, “carved to have it confirm for them that Islam deserves unrelieved opprobrium and revulsion”. The rich history, diverse cultures and the peaceful nature of Islam have to be removed and replaced by a dominant stereotype. Islam has to be presented as an enemy and a threat to the West. Native informers provide Westerners with justification to increase the divide between Muslims and non-Muslims, and encourage discrimination and Islamophobia, instead of mutual understanding and coexistence.
I disagree. I think an author like the one who wrote this article is much more effective at 'encouraging discrimination and Islamophobia'. The people he quotes are not the source of anti-Islamist feelings, they are a product of them. Getting rid of them will not bring a solution any closer.

Misrepresenting Islam is not restricted to native informers; the West has its own pundits and bigoted con artists. The likes of Ernest Renan, Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington are familiar households. The war on Iraq created a lucrative opportunity for others eager to play the role of imperial Orientalists and advance their own interests.
Yes yes... Everyone that disagrees with me is a bigot :rolleyes:. It seems to me this guy is intollerant of any kind of critics of his version of Islam.

Fred Halliday, a rightwing pundit at the London School of Economics comes as a good example. According to Halliday; “In the Muslim world, the sense of hostility towards the west is associated with a cultural nationalism that denies liberal or modern Western concepts of women's equality and rights”, not the war on defenceless Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine that created hostility towards the West. The Occupation of Iraq demolishes Holliday’s flawed argument. The U.S. Occupation destroyed Iraqi women’s rights and deprived them of liberty and equality enjoyed under the previous regime. In addition, the new U.S.-drafted Iraqi Constitution is repressive to women. Women status in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan is another story.
The new Iraqi constitution was not drafted by the US, it is a product of an Iraqi political process. If he feels it is repressive to women he should look at where these documents are rooted.

While it is true that women are oppressed in some authoritarian Muslim countries, Islam is not to be blamed for women blight. To the contrary, Islam is a religion of equality, respect and tolerance. However, it is very common among liars to use the victims in order to advance their interests. Native informers and Westerners are misusing the blight of women not because of concern for women, but to spit their venom at Islam and Muslims. Muslim women are the most oppressed, marginalised and discriminated against minority in the West today. In most Western countries, Muslim women are denied their basic rights to employment and education simply because they dressed in a way Western men do not approve.
Plain nonsense. Western Muslim women are better educated than any Muslim women in the world and more of them have jobs!

Finally, the recent protests by ordinary Muslims against the blasphemous cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed as a “terrorist” in Denmark's largest daily, Jyllands-Posten, have been used in the propaganda campaign to portray Islam as “violent”, “undemocratic” and “intolerant” of Western “freedom of speech”.
Well yes. Because Muslims started torching embassies and the like. It provided excellent material for those who oppose Islam. I believe it was a true eye-opener for many Europeans. They are not used to such reactions to cartoons, especially if these reaction appear to be rooted in religious conviction.

But insulting the Prophet Mohammed and his followers has nothing to do with “freedom of speech” or criticism of Islam.
Yes it has everything to do with it. By publishing the cartoons the newspaper made use of its freedom of expression and some of the cartoons were clearly critical of Islam. How can it ever have 'nothing to do' with it?

There is no “freedom of speech” in the West”.
Not enough, I agree, especially in Europe. Luckily in the US it is better. Still compared to your average Muslim country there is a lot of freedom of speech! Heck most of them ban movies or books they dislike, something unheard of in most Western countries!

I also wonder how long I would last if I would go speech like this guy in a square in central Mecca! Oh wait, I can't even enter the city, being Kaffir and all that ;).

The act was despicable and should have been condemned by all Western leaders and intellectuals.
Absolutely not! I was disgusted by the attitude of many European politicians! After such a blatant attack on Denmark the EU should have showed what it is good for and rally behind the Danes.

Instead, it was used to demonise Islam and justify violence and prejudice against Muslims. The same newspaper has refused to print cartoon depicting Jesus because the editor alleged they were “offensive”. It is evident of Western double standard and unwillingness to engage in constructive debate and serious criticism of Islam designed to serve political interests, rather than win the hearts and minds of Muslims.
You have to be kidding me. We Europeans defame and attack Christians all the time! Life of Brian anyone? The Da Vinci Code? Exhibitions showing Christian crosses in a glass of urine! All part of freedom of speech :).

I'd link to some of it, but I'd probably get banned ;).

By contrast, when Madonna recently appeared in Los Angeles on a six-metre high mirrored cross to sing the ballad Live to Tell. Because Madonna's use of Christian imagery considered as “abuse and it is dangerous”, she was condemned “downright offensive” by the same Western leaders who expressed solidarity with the Jyllands-Posten and the Danish Government who refused to condemn the blasphemous cartoons.
Huh?

The rising of Islamophobia in the West today mirrors the rising of anti-Jewish hatred in Europe which paved the way to the mass murder of millions of innocent people from religious and ethnic minorities. The West, the U.S. in particular, can not continue committing crimes against innocent Muslims, and then punishing those Muslims for protesting and resisting Western crimes. It is not only Muslims who need to change; Western leaders need to change their policies and attitudes towards Muslims and Islam.

To confront the hostility of the West towards Muslims and Islam it is necessary to expose the lies and distortions of the mass media, native informers and Orientalists. We must stand up against their lies and stop them from polluting and infecting the minds of ordinary people.

Ghali Hassan lives in Perth, Western Australia.
LOL! "Lies" "Infecting their minds". So much for respectful dialog :p. Hate to say it, but this guy is unlikely to help very much in stopping 'Islamophobia'! He is highly unlikely to convince Westeners and liberal Muslims of the benefits of Islam :).
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