THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume XIV, Issue # 108, May 25, 2012
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
UC BERKELEY & THE "ISLAMOPHOBIA" LOBBY
By Cinnamon Stillwell
THE THIRD ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE ISLAMOPHOBIA RESEARCH & DOCUMENTATION PROJECT (IRDP): SPEAKER AFTER SPEAKER DECRYING AN
IMAGINARY RACIST, IMPERIALIST, ORIENTALIST WESTERN JUGGERNAUT, WHILE DISREGARDING THE VERY REAL PREDATIONS OF ISLAMISM -- A DAY OF
CONTRADICTIONS, AHISTORICAL COMPARISONS, NUMBING JARGON, &, MOST OF ALL, THE ELEVATION OF VICTIMHOOD TO A PRIVILEGED STATUS --
DISSEMINATION OF ISLAMIST PROPAGANDA
FULL STORY:
The Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project (IRDP) — a program of the University of California, Berkeley's Center for Race and Gender (CRG) — recently
held its third annual conference, "Critical Discourses on Islamophobia: Symbols, Images, & Representations." As in previous years, speaker after speaker decried an
imaginary racist, imperialist, Orientalist Western juggernaut, while disregarding the very real predations of Islamism.
The first day of the conference brought in approximately eighty people at its peak, including a number of women in hijab (head scarf), typing furiously on laptops.
Others sported keffiyehs and dreadlocks; a smattering of Arabic and French could be heard; and a scruffy, bearded fellow wandered around with what appeared to
be a journal under his arm, Historicizing Anti-Semitism, that one suspects is not exactly kosher. It was just another day in Berkeley.
Hatem Bazian, IRDP Director, Near Eastern Studies Senior Lecturer, and conference convener started out by apologizing for the forty-minute delay in kicking off the
event. He chalked it up to "Muslim Time" — a reference to the popular phrase among African-Americans, "Colored People's Time" — and joked that "Swiss watches
run forward, but Muslim watches run backward." He thanked the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — an Islamist organization posing as a defender of
civil rights — for its participation in the conference (Zahra Billoo, CAIR Northern California Executive Director, spoke the next day) and for partnering with CRG to
produce the 2011 report, Same Hate, New Target: Islamophobia and Its Impact in the United States — a report that falsely accuses a number of public figures
of perpetrating "Islamophobia." Bazian also thanked "individuals who send us hate mail" for demonstrating "the need for this conference," about which, he claimed,
there had been "considerable chatter," including "wild" and "threatening" statements. All this, "despite the fact that we have the first Muslim President," he added,
chuckling. This sarcastic reference to the American public's perception of Barack Obama's Muslim background would be repeated throughout the day as
incontrovertible evidence of "Islamophobia."
Tariq Ramadan, the controversial Oxford University Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies and grandson of Muslim Brotherhood Founder Hasan al-Banna,
demonstrated a capacity for what his critics have described as doublespeak with his keynote speech. Titled, "A Global Perspective on Constructing Muslim
Otherness," Ramadan's talk was rife with contradiction. At one point, he acknowledged that the "victim mentality" is counterproductive for Muslims and other
minorities:
"People are relying on fear, mistrust, [and] nurturing the victim mentality.
You can see this among Blacks, Latinos, [and] Muslims. Sometimes they
play the victims. Victims are talking to each other. We are the victims of
your colonization, legal colonization. It's the way you accept the role
given by the dominant: you become the victim."
Yet, pushing victimhood was the principal purpose of the conference. Moreover, Ramadan contributed to that narrative by implying that assimilation — the antidote
to the balkanization caused by nurturing a victim mentality — was impossible in the U.S.A.:
"At the end of the day, you might be a Muslim-American, Black, Latino,
but not really. Us versus them. . . . After four generations, you are
Muslim with an American background."
Ramadan admitted that something other than mere bigotry might be at the heart of what's been disingenuously dubbed "Islamophobia":
"[S]ome of them are very sincere when it comes to being scared of the
Muslim presence. . . . Try to understand the logic that is behind the
whole thing . . . there is a great deal of mistrust towards our intentions
as Muslims. We should go beyond the discussion of 'we are
discriminated' towards a more comprehensive approach. . . . People
can be genuinely scared; we have to face this."
He then added:
"We have to get rid of this idea that the world is divided between the
West and Islam. Instead of speaking about peace and living together,
we respond with a discourse that is exactly the same."
But he went on to do just that, accusing both Republicans and Democrats of collusion — although he allowed that "some are less Islamophobic than others" —
and claiming that "the people who are pushing it [are] the Tea Party and the Neocons." Given that the Tea Party has focused exclusively on economic issues and
that Neoconservatism is hardly a political force to be reckoned with of late, Ramadan's rhetoric was hopelessly out of touch.
Ramadan eventually revealed why so many find him so dangerous by hinting at a belief in conspiracy theories surrounding the 9/11 Islamist terror attacks and the
Mohamed Merah shootings in Toulouse, France, which resulted in the deaths of three soldiers, a rabbi, and three children at a Jewish school. Acknowledging
that "there is a new anti-Semitism in France, which is coming from Arabs and Muslims," he then accused "strong Zionist groups" of complicity for somehow
"nurturing this kind of racism." As he put it:
"I know about 9/11, but I still have some questions about behind
the scenes, the way it was used . . . I still have questions about what
happened in France [Toulouse]. We should try to understand the
alliances we find behind old enemies."
To imply that "Zionists" are benefiting from atrocities against Jews and others goes beyond the realm of conspiracy theory into classical anti-Semitism.
Keith Feldman, an assistant professor in UC Berkeley's Ethnic Studies Department, opened the first panel with a jargon-riddled talk titled, "Seeing Time: Visual
Culture in the Drone Wars." Against a backdrop of the now famous photo of President Obama and his national security team watching the strike on Osama bin
Laden from the situation room, Feldman noted that the name for the mission was "Geronimo" and, from this, claimed that killing the terrorist mastermind was a
"residue of late Nineteenth Century colonial settler violence." Later, he used a photo of a black lynching victim from the 1880s to make the same ahistorical
comparison, stating, "Take out the lynch victim, take out the body of Osama bin Laden, and see what the architecture of violence looks like."
Feldman spent the bulk of his lecture arguing against using drone strikes to kill terrorists, which he dubbed "racialization from above," and then asked, "What
happens when Islamophobia takes to the skies?" Undeterred by the marked increase in drone strikes under Obama, Feldman reserved his ire for former President
George W. Bush, whom he called "the illustrious geographer of the war on terror." From what he described as "the borders of U.S. imperialist cartography to the
everyday violence of homeland security," there was no method of combating terrorism that Feldman found acceptable.
Munir Jiwa, Founding Director of UC Berkeley's Center for Islamic Studies and Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at the Graduate Theological Union,
followed with a talk on, "the hegemonic frames through which Islam and Muslims come to be framed." These included the controversy surrounding Park 51,
otherwise known as the Ground Zero Mosque, about which he contradicted himself. First he criticized Park 51's opponents by stating, "The idea that a mosque
would contaminate the sacred ground of Ground Zero needs to be put into question." Then he railed against those who welcomed the project because organizer
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf was perceived, as a Sufi, to be a moderate, noting sarcastically, "Because they were Sufis, it was palatable. These are the good Muslims
building a community center open to all religions." In other words, neither the project's proponents nor its opponents can win.
Jiwa opposed Western intervention in the Muslim world in the interest of protecting women's rights, drawing an absurd moral equivalence between the
circumstances of Afghan and American women in the process:
"What if Afghan women were coming to the West to save
American women? What if Afghan women in burkas hearts'
bled for women in this part of the world?"
Furthering engaging in moral and cultural relativism, Jiwa added, "What's more insidious is the new discourse around gay rights that Massad talks about." Jiwa
was referring to Columbia University Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History Joseph Massad, whose controversial book,
Desiring Arabs, posits that homosexuality in the Muslim only exists as a product of Western cultural imperialism. The young men being hanged in Iran
for the "crime" of homosexuality would beg to differ.
Jiwa issued an apologia for Muslim violence in response to perceived blasphemy by asking of the Danish cartoon controversy, "Why it is that people need to
provoke?" He then blamed author Salmon Rushdie for not "understand[ing] why Muslims were hurt" when his book, The Satanic Verses, earned him a
death sentence from the late Ayatollah Khomeini.
Zaid Shakir, Co-Founder — with Hatem Bazian and Hamza Yusuf — of Zaytuna College, a self-described "Islamic university" in Berkeley, spoke towards the
end of the day. Insinuating that American Muslims' struggle for justice is analogous and therefore as righteous as that of black Americans, Shakir urged
"Muslims . . . to champion African-Americans' struggle because it's the same issues." He then made the hysterical claim that, "anti-Muslim fervor allows Latinos
to be put into concentration camps." Co-opting the language of the Holocaust to refer to detention centers for illegal immigrants was Shakir's odious way of
inflating his own cause.
Repeating Bazian's opening joke, he referred to "Obama, the first Muslim president" before launching into a conspiratorial tirade about the documentary,
Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, which he blamed for the alleged rise in "Islamophobia" around the 2008 election:
"The financiers of the Islamophobic media are the same people
financing OBSESSION. It was designed to defeat Obama so
that a more pro-war candidate, more Rightwing, could win —
someone more subservient to Zionist interests."
Of course, Obama won the election, and with a majority of the Jewish vote. No doubt, Shakir will chalk up either a win or a defeat for Obama this year to the
Islamophobic Zionists.
It was a day of contradictions, ahistorical comparisons, numbing jargon, and, most of all, the elevation of victimhood to a privileged status. If aliens from
another planet observed this conference, they would deduce that the streets of America were filled with murderous mobs and ranting rednecks out for Muslim
blood. Then they would wonder how that is so when the academics at this conference, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, exhibited the very opposite: comfortable,
professional lives buoyed by accolades and accommodation. If this is the product of "Islamophobia," then they have little to fear. Of the consequences of
Islamism, however, the same cannot be said.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
The Islamist Fifth Column -- America's Internal Enemies:
Disloyalty, Subversion, Sedition, & Treason
Islamism & Jihadism -- The Threat of Radical Islam
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
Middle East -- Arabs, Arab States,
& Their Middle Eastern Neighbors
American Foreign Policy -- The Middle East
International Politics & World Disorder:
War, Peace, & Geopolitics in the Real World:
Foreign Affairs & U.S. National Security
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
Counterterrorism & U.S. National Security
U.S. National Security Strategy
Cinnamon Stillwell is the West Coast Representative for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum. She can be reached at stillwell@meforum.org.
Contact information for the office of UC-Berkeley's Chancellor, Robert J. Birgeneau:
Phone (510) 642-7464
Fax (510) 643-5499
chancellor@berkeley.edu
The foregoing article by Cinnamon Stillwell was originally published in Front Page Magazine, May 25, 2012, and in Campus Watch, May 25, 2012.
(URLs: http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/12392
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/25/uc-berkeley-and-the-%E2%80%98islamophobia%E2%80%99-lobby/ )
Republished with Permission of Campus Watch
Reprinted from Campus Watch
May 25, 2012
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