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faithfulnews · 5 years ago

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List of Documented Dishonesty and Fake News From CNN

Following is a list of notable examples of abuse, extreme bias, misinformation, and outright lies from CNN. If anyone can compile a list from any other US mainstream news source that comes close to this level of abuse and dishonesty, please post a link in the comment section. The company that produces more fake news stories and lies more than any others also censors out any discussion of Jesus Christ. Coincidence? There's a lot of underlying hatred against Christian values in CNN news. The first example is the extremely rude cutoff of Christian NFL player Benjamin Watson. Lies and hate go hand in hand with MSM fake news. They both come from the same evil source (John 8:44). For entertainment value, there are a few epic CNN green-screen video failures with fake backgrounds, for example, when Andersen Cooper pretends to be at Sandy Hook and his nose disappears and when a CNN reporter pretends to be on a boat. "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." (John 8:32) CNN rudely cut off Benjamin Watson's mic in mid-sentence while he was discussing the gospel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4YQ6n9_y8E&feature=youtu.be CNN essentially lost the Nicholas Sandmann lawsuit by capitulating and likely paid heavily in their settlement for their lies about a young boy on a field trip to Washington D.C. to support a March for Life rally. CNN falsely portrayed Nick Sandmann as the agressor, when he was the one approached and taunted, and tried to destroy the life and character of Sandmann and his friends for the sake of CNN's agenda. Slate outlined Sandmann's legal case: "CNN led the broadcast media’s charge against Nicholas. Both recklessly spread lies about a minor to advance their own financial and political agendas." The decision to settle was made January 8, 2019 and, apparently, as part of the settlement was forced to publish Sandmann's true account of what happened on January 23, 2019. Project Veritas has been exposing the vendetta Jeff Zucker of CNN has against President Trump.

Jim Acosta on November 7, 2018, with “Anderson Cooper 360” said of his intern pushing incident, "I didn’t put my hands on her or touch her as they’re alleging." This is false. First, Sarah Sanders said "hand" (singular) and video angles show Acosta pushing down with the bottom of his hand in a 'karate chop' type motion pushing the intern's arm away. https://dailycaller.com/2018/11/07/acosta-white-house-credentials-revoked/

A video shows that Jim Acosta rudely heckled President Trump August 26, 2019, while he was in Europe. https://dailycaller.com/2019/08/26/cnn-jim-acosta-heckles-trump-climate-change/ A video shows that on June 29, 2018, Jim Acosta rudely heckled the president from accross the room at a press conference with a question based on a lie: “Will you stop calling the press the enemy of the people, sir?” President Trump never called "the press" the enemy of the people, only the lying Fake News Media, as shown later in this list of lies. https://www.aol.com/article/news/2018/06/30/cnns-jim-acosta-asks-trump-will-you-stop-calling-the-press-the-enemy-of-the-people-sir/23471704/ The abuse by CNN has become so extreme that a former CNN producer called out Jim Acosta for giving "all good journalists a bad name" after he heckled President Trump, who stated that fake news (and its lies) are the enemy of the people: “When you report fake news, which CNN does a lot, you are the enemy of the people.” However, fake news sources add lie upon lie and misrepresent what Trump stated, claiming, Trump said, "that journalists are the enemy of the people." (Jim Acosta)

On 7/27/19, CNN anchor from Baltimore, Victor Blackwell, tearfully said he was certain that Trump's comments about Elijah Cummings were racist, though Trump's criticism clearly centered on the factual garbage and rodent problems of Baltimore. Blackwell stated: "When he tweets about infestation, it's about black and brown people” The fact is, Cummings was a part of the IRS targeting scandal that illegally attacked conservatives, and he also viciously attacks others on border issues. Far from being a victim, it appears Trump is correct that Cummings is abusive and negligent.The Baltimore Sun published news on both the 'Perpetual trash problem' and the prevalent rodent infestation. On February 25, 2019, Chris Cuomo was caught selectively editing Trump's words about the Charlottesville rally in 2017 and lying that President Trump was referring to white supremacists as "very fine people" when the full transcript shows that he was referring to those that wished to not remove a civil war statue referring to the losing side, even after Trump had denounced white supremacists. The real Charlottesville bombshell news stories, that fake news ignores, are that Charlottesville Mayor Mike Signer was urging for violence, that the police stood down after opposing crowds mixed, and that the killer car was struck with a pole before it rammed people. These facts are all documented. Chris Cuomo's lies like this one cause increased racial division and provoke violence. Even the anti-conservative NY Times was more accurate on this story, quoting good people like Michelle Piercy as "very fine people" that are against Nazis but against removing the statue, in addition to wanting to protect constitutional rights such as free speech and the Second Amendment.

On October 31, 2018, Tucker Carlson exposed Chris Cuomo's misleading statement that the migrant caravans from 2018 were "more mothers than monsters" when border patrol documents 70% men in the caravans and the Mexican government labeled many as dangerous. And who can forget Jim Acosta accidentally proving that border walls work by standing next to one and confirming that he felt safe.

After over two years of pushing the false narrative that President Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election, as proved false by the Mueller Report, CNN's Brian Stelter stated on Twitter that CNN basically does not check facts before they recycle any gossip they might happen to hear from any source: CNN prez Jeff Zucker: "We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did." That admission helps to explain why CNN is last on the list of MSM news source ratings.

A blatant lie by CNN on July 14, 2019 by Devan Cole claims that Trump posted "racist" Tweets against progressive congresswomen: "Trump tweets racist attacks at progressive Democratic congresswomen" however, the CNN link to the Tweets shows nothing racist at all.

CNN's Don Lemon on 10/29/18 made a racist and false claim that white men are the biggest terror threat in the US: "So, we have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right." The fact is, there is no reason to discount the Islamic attacks of 9/11 killing approximately 3,000 because increasing radical Islamic terror is a part of a global trend, of which the US is a subset. Even if this is discounted, 106 people have been killed by far-right extremists while 119 have been killed by radical Muslims since 9/11/01. To double-down on a false claim after multiple sources show it is false is essentially to lie.

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/11/cnns-don-lemon-doubles-down-on-false-claim-that-white-men-are-biggest-terror-threat-in-this-country

CNN's Ana Cabrera on 10//14/18 added racism into the president's quote, telling CNN viewers that Trump had said: "President Trump and his son Don Jr. said this week white men have a lot to fear right now," -when they both spoke merely of concerns for men. https://www.dailywire.com/news/37112/watch-cnn-anchor-lies-about-remarks-made-trump-ryan-saavedra In the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, Anderson Cooper stood in a ditch that made the flooding appear more severe as the caption read "Extreme Weather" and he does not mention he is in a pit in the film clip. But then the effect was spoiled when a dog walked by during the live shoot.

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CNN’s Jim Sciutto on 8/24/18 had two big scoops debunked as very fake news in just one week. https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/08/24/nolte-cnns-jim-sciutto-busted-for-two-fake-news-scoops-in-one-week/ CNN’s own source, Lanny Davis, says Michael Cohen story is fake news, but network stands by it - documented 8/19/18 https://www.rt.com/usa/437101-cnn-michael-cohen-fake-news/ Jim Acosta on 6/29/18 yelled repeatedly at a press conference: "Mr. President, will you stop calling the press the enemy of the people?" This is a false and defamatory comment because Trump has always clarified that he was referring to "fake news" such as CNN, not the press in general. https://dailycaller.com/2018/11/07/acosta-white-house-credentials-revoked/ CNN's April Ryan falsely claimed that President Donald Trump was booed during the White House’s “Celebration for America” event 6/5/18: http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2018/06/05/april-ryan-spreads-fake-news-about-trump-being-booed-at-celebration-for-america/ CNN host Brian Stelter admits he let David Hogg tell lies during an interview. https://www.theblaze.com/news/2018/03/27/cnn-host-admits-he-let-david-hogg-tell-lies-during-interview-just-wait-until-you-hear-his-reason CNN denied school survivor and hero Colton Haab right to ask his own questions about school shooting incident and then lied about offering their scripted questions. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5422367/Shooting-survivor-claims-CNN-gave-scripted-question.html CNN's Don Lemon defended two false statements on guns: "I was able to go and buy an automatic weapon … Most people can go out and buy an automatic weapon." https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/don-lemon-automatic-guns CNN cuts feed when Wikileaks is mentioned as a possible check for Hillary Clinton's lies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbA5RE9eK08 CNN (falsely) claims that reading Wikileaks is illegal: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/787749893649600512?lang=en CNN contributor Donna Brazile gave Hillary Clinton debate questions in advance, which is plainly dishonest in a live debate: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/10/31/new-email-shows-dnc-boss-giving-clinton-camp-debate-question-in-advance.html CNN cuts live feed after focus group picks Trump. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alSd_iKFkKs CNN's Pamela Brown caught on a hot mic rehearsing “live” discussion group on answers to questions so as to praise Hillary Clinton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrdFD-SdpiM CNN audience member is seen with a piece of paper titled "your questions" http://imgur.com/dKfrMpt CNN turns off their cameras at a huge political rally as Trump calls out the dishonesty of their focus groups. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPjuk6VO_qs CNN misrepresented Trump's comments on gun control: https://www.dailywire.com/news/23258/cnns-john-berman-misrepresents-trumps-comments-james-barrett A CNN panel in December 2014 consisting of Margaret Hoover, Sally Kohn, Sunny Hostin, and Mel Robbins all put their hands up and supported the false Ferguson narrative that Michael Brown had his hands up before being shot. This lie helped to incite riots. Obama’s Justice Department investigated the shooting and concluded that Brown charged at Officer Darren Wilson before being shot. Sally Kohn repeated the lie on Twitter: "Mike Brown was unarmed and fleeing with hands up." https://truepundit.com/here-are-five-fake-stories-cnn-pushed/ CNN fakes reporter Charles Jaco being in the Middle East during Gulf War: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTWY14eyMFg CNN fakes Anderson Cooper being at Sandy Hook and his nose disappears in a green screen failure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcG5hnYQjPA CNN presents a fake story to make BLM look good, ignores the call to violence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SxHOLWiUnA CNN fakes satellite feed when two reporters are in the same parking lot: http://www.ebaumsworld.com/videos/the-daily-show-calls-out-cnn/83283367/ Hospital CEO wins major court victory after CNN fakes statistics http://lawnewz.com/uncategorized/hospital-ceo-wins-major-court-ruling-after-accusing-cnn-of-false-reporting/ CNN green screen fail, reporter pretends to be on a boat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn5pIkEHPf0 CNN fakes popularity numbers: http://www.businessinsider.com/cnn-fox-news-inauguration-ratings-2017-1 CNN fakes crowd sizes: http://i.magaimg.net/img/36l.png CNN lying about use of a Sinatra song. http://i.magaimg.net/img/48l.jpg CNN fakes interview and interviews own cameraman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdCk6gJqmoc CNN Claims missing airplane disappeared into a black hole: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpVd7k1Uw6A CNN blurs out "Donald Trump” T-shirt of man that saved a baby. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUAI9Ce9RL0 CNN says Illegal immigration isn't illegal: http://imgur.com/C03VH2m CNN ignores poison gas attack story in order to criticize how Trump eats fried chicken: http://i.imgur.com/LEtescq.jpg CNN misrepresented Trump's comments on the MS-13 gang as “animals” to imply racism. https://www.thewrap.com/cnn-took-trumps-animals-remark-immigrants-context-network-admits/ CNN race baiting article claims Trump election was based on race: “This is what 'whitelash' looks like”

http://archive.is/kh46i CNN describes race only when anti-white media manipulation is desired http://i.magaimg.net/img/48i.jpg CNN journalists Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Haris, resigned from CNN over a false story, later retracted, that connected Anthony Scaramucci to a $10 billion Russian investment fund: http://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-cnn-resignation-20170626-story.html CNN repeats unfounded story that “Russia's hack” determined election: http://imgur.com/trMDL87 CNN feeding into unfounded Russia conspiracies, claims Russia hacking without evidence: http://i.magaimg.net/img/2si.jpg CNN misleads about Trump campaign contact with “Russian officials” https://imgur.com/5eX6xgT CNN falsely claimed it tied Fox in election news ratings when, overall, Fox clearly won first place for the entire day: http://www.businessinsider.com/cnn-fox-news-inauguration-ratings-2017-1?dg CNN re-posts same protest photos as fake news: https://imgur.com/jl1cAKP CNN Cuts Bernie Sander's mic connection when he calls them fake news https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqrX8HxcWDE CNN's “Dr. Drew” was canceled eight days after Dr. Drew Pinsky asked valid questions on Hillary Clinton’s health: https://pagesix.com/2016/09/04/dr-drew-loses-show-after-discussing-hillarys-health/?_ga=1.33153086.1667858589.1472997909 CNN repeatedly lied and slandered Donald Trump with the claim he advocated racial profiling on Fox news when in fact he did not: http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/296753-cnn-falsely-adds-racial-to-trump-vetting-comments

I took a poll on Twitter and of about 100 people Don Lemon was voted the biggest liar on CNN for 2018. As shown at Wikipedia, "in September 2010, Lemon said that he was a victim of sexual abuse as a child". This helps to explain Lemon's behavior. I don't want to give the impression that other mainstream media sources are perfect. The fact is, Fox news has had its own notorious scandal. However, the level of deception does not seem to compare to CNN and in contrast to CNN cutting off Benjamin Watson for mentioning Jesus Christ, Fox news allowed Watson to elaborate on sin and the gospel live on their newscast. Regarding Fox, they fired two journalists that did not want to cover up the apparent health hazards of Monsanto's genetically modified milk products. In an astounding precedent verdict, a U.S. court held that Fox News had no obligation to report truthfully, and the First Amendment protects a "right" for news companies deceive the public, even on health issues. For this reason, I would tend to believe alternative news sources that are less likely to be bought off and manipulated by large corporations. Political theorist Hannah Arendt, the author of the book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, said in an interview: “A people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act, but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people, you can then do what you please." Note: Credit to the following link for the initial source of listed items that was edited and added to: https://www.taskade.com/v/ByzMWWQkql Tags: list of CNN lies, list of CNN fake news, CNN scandals, why CNN is considered fake, CNN false Ferguson narrative, News with most lies, CNN censors Jesus Christ, CNN anti-Christian, CNN controversies, CNN scandals, Chris Cuomo lies, the 'very fine people' lie

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sumukhcomedy · 7 years ago

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Lone Brown Wolf

Taxi Driver is my favorite movie and one of the greatest American films ever. The movie centers on Travis Bickle, a 26-year-old Vietnam veteran who drives a taxi because, from what we’re told, he “can’t sleep nights.” He is lonely and deeply depressed in New York City. He turns to gun violence as an answer whether it be in a failed assassination attempt on a presidential candidate or a successful shootout that saves the life of a young prostitute and labels him a hero by the media. Travis blames the city and everyone else for his issues. He is a racist. He is what would be considered today a “nice guy” by women who are hounded by “nice guys.” I have seen many men who could be considered Travis Bickles at comedy open mics over the years. I would never hang out with Travis. And, yet, Travis helped save the trajectory of my life when I was 18.

I was 14 years old when Columbine happened which, in retrospect, seems proper timing because 14 was the age I began to understand that I was a depressed person. It’s a depression that sits with me today, one that I have battled with regularly, and one that I am still not fully comfortable talking about in great detail. But the fact is that since Columbine and the proliferation of mass shootings and media attention in America towards them, the intersection of mental illness, male violence, and race hasn’t been handled in the national eye with any real and caring understanding of those topics.

Three years later, I went to college. I thought that college would be the great escape from everything. I thought my depression would go away because now I was on my own and could be everything that college was depicted as via pop culture. But college doesn’t necessarily work that way and depression certainly doesn’t. The college I selected didn’t fit what I expected. It didn’t fit my personality. I didn’t feel like I belonged there. I was lonelier than ever my freshman year and I plunged into the most severe depression of my life. Few people, if anyone, knew that but that’s how fascinating depression is. It allows you to believe that no one else cares and that you shouldn’t burden anyone with your problems. It also can allow you to somehow lead your daily life in public without anyone knowing.

I had now become no better than Travis Bickle. I loathed the campus that I was on. I loathed the upper middle class white students in popped collars who typified it. I was vulnerable because I was depressed and getting worse because I felt as if no one else was like me and that the world was against me even if I had narrowed down the world to one college campus. It’s very easy to turn one’s self-loathing into being everyone else’s problem rather than examining one’s own issues. I was lucky, though, because somehow I realized that Travis Bickle was wrong. I wasn’t so far off in my depression. I wasn’t pushed to an edge that could lead to violence. I saw in Bickle an anti-hero but I also saw a character I never wanted to become.

I covered up being very depressed pretty well.

I consider myself lucky but many others are not. The mind can so easily turn to hatred and something, no matter what it may be, is a driving force that pushes the illness too far. It knows no race or religion or economic class or sexual orientation because it is a sickness of humanity. Yet we have our labels of varying degrees of appropriateness from a white supremacist (Dylann Roof) to an Islamic fundamentalist (Omar Mateen) to an Asian nerd (Seung-hui Cho) to a black duo (John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo) to a lone wolf (Stephen Paddock and every other white male) who all share at least one horrible thing in common.

When you are alone, you have a lot of time on your hands, and what you do with that time shapes your focus. If the mind turns to hate and turns to a belief that everyone is against you then it has the opportunity to turn to violence. When it turns to violence, it then has time to concoct the worst forms of violence. When those concoctions become attainable then suddenly a sick idea developed out of loneliness and depression becomes a reality. We saw it in a movie with Travis Bickle. We see it in every act of violence that draws the national media’s attention.

Our society doesn’t wish to speak about this, and if we do, we aren’t really doing it in an appropriate way. We are better off on the topic of mental health than we ever have been and yet we still aren’t communicating. In my case, my depression admittedly was rooted with some racial and cultural issues. In the South Asian culture, depression isn’t spoken of. You’re not supposed to have these issues and you definitely don’t feel comfortable enough talking to your family or your community about them. And, yet, because of that lack of communication, the rate of depression among Indians only gets compounded. It’s not as if we’re immune to such violence either given the Case Western Reserve shooting in 2003 which hit close to home for me given it was an Indian man in Cleveland responsible for it.

When I was 18, what I came to realize was that creativity helped me with my depression. During that terrible period of time in my life, I wrote a screenplay, a number of plays, and a number of short stories. Now, 14 years later, I can tell you that all of those things I wrote are shitty and will never see the light of day again. But they helped me. My persistence and stubbornness also helped. I was going to get through this experience in college and I did. Things got better or at least manageable enough that I could ward off the depression a bit. I had a girlfriend and a number of friends some of whom I lost touch with but they ultimately helped me to survive even if it didn’t feel that way at that time. They, at the least, allowed me to not be alone. A few years later, of course, comedy began to help but it created a whole series of other issues with my depression and others’ depression which I’ve written about before.

The conversation is now repetitive and people as a whole who don’t even have depression seem like they are being pushed to the limits. We keep asking ourselves why and the why seems very obvious. We have allowed accessibility to some of the worst weapons to the most fragile men. Travis Bickle had this accessibility and was considered a hero. But, had he shot Senator Palantine in the movie, he would have been a cold-blooded killer no different than the ones we see plastered on our TV screens every few months. This is the fine line between such accessibility and such fragile men.

As this is a heavy and complicated issue, the only thing I feel I can do in my mind is to write what is personal. The conversation we are having right now is unhelpful to those who are lonely and depressed and it’s unhelpful even more so to people of color in those positions. When you are brown skinned and lonely and the national media and landscape of this country is labeling those like you as a “terrorist,” it only creates more alienation. Yet, the general perspective of the nation and the media sees you as that. Worse, a white person in the same position is labeled a “lone wolf” or a “madman.” Just as fragile as these men are, it’s alarming to me how fragile our news sources are. They don’t have enough balls to call it whatever they want on an equal level and label “terror” as “terror” or to actually form any real education on mental health. Rather than obsess over motive, we should obsess over what happens to what was once an innocent man’s mind that leads him to such hatred and violence. It’s not simply Islam or white supremacy or gambling or bullying or Marilyn Manson but it’s a lot more convenient to blame it on those things just as the perpetrators likely blame some group as a villain for their violent actions.

We have a lot of differences as human beings but we’re a lot closer to each other than we think. It’s why Paul Schrader in writing a fictional character who is a racist “nice guy” could help me. It’s why maybe someone who reads this could be helped. Human beings are susceptible to anything and our emotions can make us do some really kind acts and some really awful ones.

This is a problem of depression, a problem of masculinity, and a problem of violence and the ease of which all of the worst examples of these topics can persist is because they are not being properly addressed. Some of it is not being properly addressed because no one is even communicating about some of these issues which is the sole reason I wrote this. To then add race, religion, and economic class to these problems only further complicates it and only further pushes people to the brink.

I am a man with brown skin who has depression. Not a lot of us even say that to begin with. At its most severe, when I was a teenager, it led me to hate myself and the world around me even if I genuinely didn’t want to feel that way. Then, within such loneliness and depression, if the country as a whole via mass media or even government makes me feel like less than human and unequal to others how could I not potentially spiral further? I had no interests in being violent because I felt I had a good heart deep down that had to defeat these extremely negative feelings. I didn’t allow myself the accessibility to such violence. For others, that’s not the case.

The man responsible for the Las Vegas shooting loved gambling, country music, and sent cookies to his mother according to articles now removed by major media outlets. Such odd knowledge provided to us by the media allows us to know that he was human and his behavior seemingly unthinkable because of that. But all of us are humans and so are all of the perpetrators of these kinds of national tragedies regardless of what their motives may be. Something went grossly wrong along the way for these killers as opposed to the experience I or anyone else had in their lives that could have led us down that path.

We have to take action to actually address humanity otherwise we will keep losing humans in these tragic ways. For now, we are no better than Taxi Driver’s most important scene to me when Wizard speaks to Travis. We talk but we come to no conclusion except to say “You’re going to be all right.”

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#lone wolf #gun control #mental health #taxi driver #nra #las vegas #terrorism

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kerahlekung · 5 years ago

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Peguam UMNO cabar kewujudan Sekolah Vernakular..

Peguam UMNO cabar kewujudan Sekolah Vernakular...

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Inilah Peguam yg sama membela budak pencuri di Lowyat dulu..Depa ni angkat isu Sekolah Vernakular tu bukan lah lah sebab apapun..melainkan nak berpolitik.. panaskan sentimen kaum dan agama.. Yang Peguam UMNO sorang ni kononnya nak hapuskankan Sekolah Vernakular, Yang MCA hantar peguam nak mencelah mempertahankan Sekolah Vernakular.. Ini mainan UMNO dan MCA nak tunjukkan masing masing mahu jadi Juara Melayu..dan Sorang Jaguh Cina, Inilah game perkauman dan Kelompok Ashabiyah dalam BN.. Sama mcm Kes Jawi..MCA mula mainkan sentime menolak Jawi, Dan DAP terperangkap. UMNO dan PAS pulak berlakon mempertahankan Jawi, depa menyerang DAP.. masing masing berlakon jadi juara kaum masing2..inilah Politik Ashabiyah..depa guna sentimen kaum untuk Politik..

Isu Sekolah Vernakular ni bukan baru..Dah 60 Tahun.. UMNO BN dulu tak buat apa pun.. Masa tu depa menang 2/3 Parlimen, Depa nak pinda Perlembagaan pun boleh..Jadi tak payah beretorik... Dulu Menteri, hatta anak Ketua Pemuda UMNO,Asyraf Wajdi pun hantar anak sekolah Cina..tak payah pura pura berlakon jadi Jaguh Melayu.. Nak ubah sistem pendidikan bukan kerja mudah..bukan kerja Politik.. ia satu proses yang panjang.. Yang geng PH pun ramai yg terperangkap dgn Puak Ashabiyah UMNO dan MCA.. cerita budak boleh cakap Melayu atau tidak..bukan bergantung pada sistem persekolah Vernakular..tapi peranan Ibu Bapa.. pergaulan pelajar tu.. Ramainya jer orang Cina, hatta keputusan SPM dan PT3, yang ramai dapat keputusan yg baik dalam BM tetap anak Cina.. jadi berhentilah beretorik.. anak Melayu pun ramai yg fail BM kalau nak cari sebab..

Kalau orang tanya, Kenapa perlu hantar anak sekolah Cina, dah ada sekolah Kebangsaan.. Sepatutnya soalan itu kita kena tanya pada diri sendiri.. Kenapa ada Ibu bapa hantar Sekolah Pondok ? Sekolah Tahfiz ? Sekolah Agama sedangkan ada Sekolah kebangsaan.. Setiap ibu bapa ada kehendak dan sebab mereka sendiri..tak payah retorik sangatlah.. Sama lah game depa dalam isu RUU 355 dulu.. Yang UMNO dan PAS berlakon perjuangkan Islam.. Yang MCA dan MIC berlakon mempertahankan Hak bukan Islam.. Yg PAS dan UMNO berlakon nak bentang pindaan RUU355.. yg MCA hantar 100 peguam nak lawan RUU355..

Jadi hargailah sistem dan peliharalah sebaiknya kepelbagaian dalam Negara kita.. ada bermacam jenis Sekolah, Sekolah Agama, Sekolah Tahfiz, Sekolah Cina, Sekolah Swasta..Sekolah International.. Tugas Kerajaan hari ini, Perkasakan Sekolah Kebangsaan.. Jadi kan Sekolah Kebangsaan sekolah terbaik.. Lahirkan dari Sekolah Kebangsaan mereka yg berjaya menguasai pelbagai bahasa termasuk Mandarin.. sepertimana dulu kerajaan memperkenalkan JQAF.. akhirnya esok, masyarakat sendiri akan berubah.. - Ipohmali

The many victims of

Najib’s ‘reign of terror’...

Iskandar Puteri MP Lim Kit Siang called it the “night of the long knives”. It may not have been the most appropriate description but to many Malaysians, it was a “reign of terror”. It started with the unceremonious removal of attorney-general Abdul Gani Patail on July 27, 2015 and ended on May 9, 2018. Over this period, it was “law of the jungle” as almost all state agencies discarded their standard operating procedures (SOPs). What started as a fortnight-long exercise of destroying systems, establishments, procedures and even law and order, extended for almost three years. It ended only when the BN regime under Abdul Najib Razak was booted out of office. During that period, families were ruined and many lives destroyed. For others, their careers were wrecked and their lives changed forever. As we sit back and learn bits and pieces that have emerged in court hearings and other official domains, we have to look back and thank ourselves. Had we not brought a change at the hustings last year, our destiny and our lives would have gotten worse. In a Malaysiakini commentary on June 11, 2017, I paid tribute to the unsung heroes of the 1MDB scandal. More than two years later, while things may have changed, there has been no closure to one of the darkest moments in our history. While we know the reasons for the sacking of then deputy prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin and rural and regional development minister Shafie Apdal, the details of other events remain murky.

Abdul Gani Patail

While there are many versions (most of them are hearsay) of what transpired, the other chief protagonists in this series of episodes have maintained silence except for the occasional outbursts from which Malaysians are left to draw their own conclusions. Besides Abdul Gani, there was former Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission chief Abu Kassim Mohamed, former Bank Negara governor Zeti Akhtar Aziz and a host of other personalities who suffered in the hands of a few who used the apparatuses of the state to prevent the dissemination of the truth.

When the Najib administration launched this multi-faceted operation, the basic democratic principles of the rule of law and separation of powers were thrown out of the window. There was no room too for good governance, accountability and integrity. These resulted in key institutions being destabilised. It was obvious that all these were done for one purpose only – to cover the shenanigans in 1MDB, and to a larger extent, protect Najib. A systematic attack was launched on the independence, impartiality and professionalism of key institutions including the Attorney-General’s Chambers, Royal Malaysian Police (PDRM), Bank Negara, the MACC and the auditor-general. We knew something was amiss in the MACC when two members of its advisory panel, Lim Chee Wee and Tunku Abdul Aziz Tunku Ibrahim, traded barbs over the latter’s decision to publicly exonerate Najib.

Zeti Akhtar Aziz

When the arrest of MACC deputy public prosecutor Ahmad Sazilee Abdul Khairi who had been handling the 1MDB probe, took place, the setting for a “rule by fear” was already in place. The unwarranted and immediate transfer of two of his colleagues – director of special operations Bahri Mohamad Zin and communications chief Rohaizad Yaakob – reinforced the belief that the state won’t box to Queensbury rules. Upon his appointment as the “new” MACC chief in May last year, Mohd Shukri Abdull threw some light on the witch-hunt, claiming he was bullied and threatened during the course of his investigation the 1MDB and the SRC International scandals. “My fellow investigators were under immense pressure, including having their witnesses spirited away. Abu Kassim and I were accused of being traitors out to overthrow the government. We were doing our best to save the country and recover money from abroad,” he was quoted as saying. What was the role of Ali Hamsa , the then chief secretary to the government? Wasn’t he present when Abdul Gani was marched out of his office? Didn’t he issue the transfer order for the MACC officers? In retirement, he may be happy playing with his grandchildren and tending the garden, but doesn’t he owe it to the people of Malaysia to tell the truth? Abdul Gani, the biggest victim in this whole malodorous affair, is in private practice and has yet to speak publicly on the issue. Perhaps bound by his conscience more than secrecy laws, he maintains a low profile and out of public view. Abu Kassim now heads the National Centre for Governance, Integrity and Anti-Corruption (GIACC) but in October last year, he publicly proclaimed that the MACC had found Najib’s claim that he received a donation from a Saudi royalty was false.

Ali Hamsa

Asked to clarify a MACC statement made in 2015 that the money that was deposited in Najib’s personal account was a donation, he said: “At that particular time, in that statement, we said it was a donation. But after we had some engagement (with other authorities), we discovered the truth.” But he has yet to comment on his “transfer” from MACC to Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM) to be a lecturer. Neither has he said anything about other events, including the closing of many files by his successor and the arrest and transfer of his officers. Other players, too, seem to have accepted it as ‘takdir’ or fate, but some have left it to the Almighty for divine retribution. Maybe it is a Malaysian malaise or it’s the culture. The reluctance to be open – however nasty or unpalatable – is not a trait that we can be proud of. That said, we need a closure to those dark days when even printing the word ‘1MDB’ was taboo in newspapers. Are we going to continue to read, savour and be entertained by fake news or do we want the truth? The answer is obvious and perhaps a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (like the one in South Africa) will bring about the closure to the atrocity and injustice perpetrated on the people of this country in the bid by a few to save one man. - R.Nadeswaran,mk

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opedguy · 6 years ago

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Intel Chief Contradicts Everything Trump

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), Jan. 29, 2019.--Demanding more military deployment abroad, 75-year-old Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats urged the U.S. military to continue its present levels of deployment, despite announcements by 72-year-old President Donald Trump to begin reducing deployments in Syria and Afghanistan. Coats’ intel assessment directly contradicts the president, taking the Military Industrial Complex [MIC] position that more military deployments overseas helps U.S. national security. When Trump announced Dec. 19, 2018 a withdrawal of 2,000 U.S. advisers, the MIC went wild, calling Trump reckless and irresponsible. But with the Afghan War 18-years-old and the U.S. funneling arms-and-cash in a losing cause of Syrian rebels seeking to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, it’s no wonder Trump had reason to pause. Coats’ report today contradicts Trump’s withdrawal plans.

Coats’ intel report cites the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS] and al-Qaeda, the terror group formed by Osama bin Laden, as an ongoing threat to U.S. national security. Speculating about a resurgence from both groups contradicts Trump’s message that ISIS is all but defeated in Iraq and Syria. While Coats admits that ISIS and al-Qaeda are reduced to a few villages in Iraq and Syria, he also mentions the unknown prospects of resurgence. “ISIS still commands thousands of fighters in Iraq and Syria, and it maintains eight branches, more than a dozen networks and thousands of dispersed supporters around the world, despite significant leadership and territorial losses,” Coats’ said. Coats at least calls the terror group ISIS, not ISIL, as former President Barack Obama liked to call it. But Coats offers zero proof of ISIS reconstituting itself despite occasional violence in the Mideast.

Trump’s Dec. 19, 2018 plan to start a slow but methodical withdrawal rocked the Pentagon, prompting former Defense Secretary James Mattis to retire two months early. Media reports said Mattis resigned out of protest to Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. advisers in Syria. Mattis and Special State Department Syrian Envoy Brett McGurk were slated to retire, only moving up the date by a few months. Yet if you listen to media, they’d have you believe Trump’s decision prompted their early retirements. Saying ISIS has been degraded to “a couple of little villages left,” in Iraq and Syria, Coats admits that there’s far less urgency for U.S. advisers in Iraq and Syria. Trump wanted to do what’s right for U.S. service personnel in ordering a methodical withdrawal. Trump expressed no desire to abandon the Kurds or increase the chances that ISIS or al-Qaeda would reconstitute itself in Iraq and Syria.

Coats’ intel report makes no mention of the substantial progress on reducing the threat from ISIS and al-Qaeda, consistent with a methodical U.S. draw down, something wanted by the commander-in-chef. Anti-Trump media promptly sided with Coats, suggesting that Trump’s actions to begin methodically withdrawing U.S. forces endangered U.S. allies and return to terrorism. Exaggerating the threat from ISIS and al-Qaeda, Coats hoped to stir the pot with pro-Pentagon hawks looking for new military adventures around the globe. Coasts’ report was music to the ears of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and other war hawks looking to flex American muscle. Coats disputed Trump’s assessment of Iran that it was still working on a nuclear weapon. Criticizing Trump’s May 8, 2018 withdrawal of Obama’s Iranian Nuke Deal, citing evidence that Iran was out of compliance.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose intel the U.S. relies upon, begged Obama not to give Iran billions of dollars to engage in a unenforceable nuke deal. Once Obama inked the deal July 14, 2015, Iran took the $15 billion in cash and $150 billion in sanctions relief to fund proxy wars in Yemen and Syria. Trump cancelled Obama’s Iranian Nuke Deal citing Iran’s overly aggressive behavior, not to mention the deal could not be verified. Coats insists U.S. intel agencies see Iran in compliance with the Nuke Deal, requiring Iran to suspend all weapons grade uranium enrichment activities. “At the moment technically they are in compliance,” with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [JCPA],” Coats report insisted. Yet Iran has never allowed the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] inspectors to enter sensitive military nuke sites.

When it comes to North Korea, Coats’ report insists that North Korea won’t give up all its nukes, disparaging Trump’s summitry with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Coats Before Trump’s first North Korean summit June 12, 2018, Kim threatened the U.S. with nuclear war. After the summit, the U.S., South and North Korea have worked on improving relations. Yet Coats’ only comment in his so-called neutral intel assessment is that Kim will never give up his nuclear weapons. Coats warned of more interference in future U.S. elections. “Foreign actors will view the 2020 election as an opportunity to advance their interests,” Coats said. There’s hasn’t been a recent U.S. election where foreign “actors” didn’t try to advance their agenda. When you weigh the totality of Coats’ intel report, it essentially contradicts Trump on Russian meddling, Syria, North Korea, Iran and everything else.

About the Author

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.

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micdotcom · 8 years ago

Photo

Trump's plan to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terror group is about going after American Muslims

Trump is expected to sign an executive order that could clamp down on mosques, Islamic charities and Muslim civil rights groups.

The anticipated order (CNN) would designate the Muslim Brotherhood — a transnational political Islamist group — as a foreign terrorist organization, a former senior Obama official, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of harassment by the far right, told Mic.

State Department officials and DHS are objecting to the designation, the New York Times reported.

However, several Muslim-American organizations were told the order is imminent and is expected to be signed some time next week.

The Muslim Brotherhood, established in 1928 in Egypt, is an Islamist organization — it sees Islam as a political system — with a number of independent branches, political parties and related social initiatives.

The Brotherhood, as an ideological movement, has repeatedly denounced violence and encouraged civil engagement, but at times various factions have been accused of engaging in violence.

Robert McCaw, director of government affairs for the Council of American-Islamic Relations, said in an email that designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization is the Trump administration's strategy to carry out McCarthyesque witch hunts on Muslim leaders and organizations within the United States. Read more (2/12/17 1:47 PM)

#Muslim Brotherhood #Muslim #Islam #Trump #politics #news #identities

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chun-chunnah · 7 years ago

Text

Hey, nice knowing you..i am a TERRORIST,

For I know love is cruel and change is radical and all dire

And this is my redemption my desire

I point this gun ad the Egyptian Godess, an umpire

I say I'm fighting a revolution but in real sense it's all just in my mind and capitalized with confusion, a squire

My enemies paid me but now they're playing me, ohh how I'm set afire!

And all this is because I chose to exchange my faith for politics, I didn't make humanity to become my prior.

I'm the wind that blows through the curtains of the media, but my aim misfired

You fumed my wrath,

You made me famous,

You helped me spread this message,

You became my conveyor,

So feed me....

Feed me as I thrive up my empire

I'm to claim my purpose in this life and be recognized

For I, ...for i am a faceless corpse under my hooded looks, my burka, yet so angelicize

My vision is disfigured like the false coming god the antichrist with his false atire and full of lies

My iris bleeds smokeless fire, as I inhale the voice of the lier, and am yet to pay my price.

I point this gun,

I shell shot bodies

Mirroring the manipulation I've endured for centuries,

I'm the soldier of the past indebted to the future

I'll make sure that everyone pays for the destruction of my roots

The destruction of my identity.

I've seen Zion through the eyes of the children of Jerusalem

Bodies scattered

Warm blood gushing

Last breaths taken

I've lead terror raids on man-made thrones

There was once our Isis which I've now turned it to cold as ice is

I've walked on the graves of those I commanded their end.

For all this has forced me to pay for your sins,

But am not Jesus, but just Munirah, a progeny of Adam ....

So allow me to reintroduce myself, please

Assalaam - aleikum, may peace be upon you

My name is Islam

And I am not a terrorist

For the only gun I've ever fired are the ones with the bullets called poetry

And the only minefield I've created are the ones that explode with kindness and compassion

Instead of dropping bombs, I drop mics 😁

So am sorry for the bombing and the massacre

The attacks and the bloodshed...

Am sorry for the suffering, but don't you know am hurting too ?

It hurts to stand and be sorry for something I never did

Am sorry that I have to defend myself and I too am a victim

Am sorry

Terrorism is terrorism no matter who is behind the trigger

The world had become a tyrant I hand to write a new meaning to free myself!❤❤❤❤❤

@tamapinchez

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nothingman · 8 years ago

Link

Canadians are fond of imagining ourselves as progressive. We've been patting ourselves on the back since the 2015 election for voting in a government that promised to open the doors to refugees and take action on indigenous rights.

But now that the time has come to take action on those promises, that bright image is hard to hold onto. The start of 2017 was marred by the revival of the Keystone XL pipeline, tightening restrictions on refugees and the horrific Quebec City mosque shooting by a Canadian white nationalist.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with Trump, people were quick to paint them as polar opposites. It's a familiar story. Every selfie Trudeau takes adds to his public image as the progressive answer to a conservative political climate, even though his policy track record is nothing to get excited about.

Don't let the popularity of Justin Trudeau's telegenic liberal mug distract you — nationalism is on the rise in Canada, and conservative politicians seem to be jumping onboard.

Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump

Source: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Canada has seen a remarkable recent expansion of far right nationalism. Rebel Media, an ultra-nationalist news source led by right-wing pundit Ezra Levant, runs stories that harp on "liberal elites" and "beta male snowflake[s]." The outlet drew attention for its incredibly punchable video interview with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, where he applauded them for "pushing things in the right direction" in Canada.

In the wake of the Quebec City mosque shooting, the site falsely suggested the shooter was Muslim, claiming the attack was due to a "bitter rivalry" between local mosques even after the actual suspect was identified. On Feb. 15, Rebel Media hosted a nationalist "freedom rally" condemning a Canadian anti-Islamophobia motion.

And Canada's Conservative Party is paying attention — leaving progressive Canadians fearful the right wing party is creating Canadian versions of Donald Trump. Their anxieties aren't the stuff of typical liberal fretting, either: Four of the party's leadership candidates spoke at Rebel Media's anti-Islam rally.

Last year, politician Kellie Leitch made headlines by proposing an undefined, unclear and potentially costly "Canadian values test" on all refugees and immigrants. In a recent interview, Leitch described it as a "common sense policy: having face-to-face interviews with each individual entering Canada, about Canadian values." She's also been officially endorsed by two separate white supremacist groups; she officially rebuffed at least one of them, but stood by her statements.

The Canadian nationalist shares the race for party leader with Kevin O'Leary, the pro-oil star of Shark Tank who's promised to repeal essentially everything done since the last Conservative government was in power.

Kevin O'Leary

Source: Richard Drew/AP

Not even the beloved Canadian prime minister is free from blame. In an international climate dominated by right-wing attacks on immigrants and refugees, Trudeau tweeted the following feel-good message:

To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada

It was welcoming, but it was also highly misleading. As kind as Trudeau's words were, the actual policies of the Liberal government tell a different story.

Just before the beginning of 2017, the government capped private sponsorship applications for Syrian and Iraqi refugees for this year at just 1,000. That number that was reached within the month. In Quebec — where the mosque shooting took place — the provincial government has suspended private refugee sponsorship indefinitely. In early February, Xtra magazine discovered that when the Liberals promised to accept more Syrian refugees, they simultaneously ended their LGBTQ Iranian refugee program.

And while the government was quick to applaud itself for accepting thousands of refugees in 2016, significantly less attention has been devoted to settlement and integration services. As of June 2016, only around 10% of the budget allotted to those services was actually spent.

That means that in some cases, refugees spend over a year with heavily restricted health care coverage, on waiting lists for language classes and with limited economic opportunities. There are no plans to change things any time soon — but the prime minister seems set on winning over the media rather than creating meaningful policy responses.

Justin Trudeau at the United Nations

Source: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Trudeau has also spoken strongly in favor of Trump's executive order to resume work on the Keystone XL pipeline. The project will span from the territories of the Cree and Dene nations in Alberta to lands belonging to the Oceti Sakowin peoples in North Dakota. The latter group is also opposing the Dakota Access pipeline, another pipeline Trump revived.

As for Trudeau's feel-good media messages, indigenous Canadians are far from impressed. The "disconnect" First Nations people see between the Canadian government's middle-of-the-road, camera-friendly messaging and the actual content of its policies is hard to ignore. Trudeau mocking protestors and dodging questions on his broken promises to indigenous communities at a Saskatoon town hall forum on Jan. 25 was a collection of extraordinarily painful moments.

In particular, protesters called out the prime minister on his pro-pipeline policies, including Keystone XL. Several First Nations communities have expressed fears over the threats these pipelines pose to the health, territory and status of indigenous rights. But Trudeau seems to be more concerned with shoring up the popular notion of Canadian multiculturalism at the expense of creating and empowering policies to protect minorities in Canada.

Protesters in Nevada demonstrating against the Keystone XL pipeline

Source: Nati Harnik/AP

This strategy is telling. The Liberal government seems set on reaching a middle ground with its nationalist opposition, even as it plays progressive for the sake of its public image.

Trudeau's media-friendly liberalism isn't working out exactly as planned. In late January, the Conservatives narrowed their public opinion gap with the Liberal Party to just six points — two points closer than the previous month.

The Conservatives were openly nationalist even before their recent alt-right turn; recall their 2015 election platform, featuring niqab bans and a tip line for reporting "barbaric cultural practices" to the government. Trump-style politicians and everyday nationalism are not as far away as we'd like to think.

Trudeau won in 2015 by looking like the only progressive choice to beat the Conservatives. Now that the Liberals have a majority in Parliament and have thrown away their promise to introduce more proportional representation, Trudeau seems to think he has the left in the bag — and that he can afford to backtrack and sideline them in favor of gaining votes on the right. He's abandoning those same promises that made progressives love him, like taking action on indigenous and environmental issues and accepting more refugees.

Canadians who watched the 2016 United States election should take notes. Trudeau's Liberals are following the same strategy as Clinton's Democrats. And there's a real danger of falling into the same trap.

As Trudeau breaks more and more of his election promises and alienates whatever progressive support he still has, it's getting harder to reconcile his sunny exterior with the stony face he gives to Canadians who have been let down by lukewarm policy. This pattern of dodging action on progressive policy issues is clearly not helping to weaken the rise of right-wing Canadian nationalists. Instead, the Donald Trumps of Canada seem to be getting stronger.

via Mic

#IFTTT #Feedly #Nothingman uses feedly

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alexandrasmith28 · 5 years ago

Text

Media and The Deep Effects of Muslim/Islamic Stereotypes

In Home Fire, the role of media, social and news, is used in a negative injust light, depicting Parvaiz as terrorist. Once Parvaiz is shot, his death is displayed on the news as attempt terrorist attack as he was approaching the consulate as a way to get home and leave the State behind him (p.192). Media manipulates Parvaiz’s image because of his racial background, making him out to be a terrorist and intending to harm. Because Shamsie writes in many different perspectives and tones, we the reader know that Parvaiz character isn't a ill-willed person and is just “the boy who helps his local library and never seen without his headphones and mic”. “A terror attack has not been identified…but security analysist suggests he could have belonged to a rival jihadi group”(192). Just like in The Hate U Give, media uses injustice to minimize the minority group in a community even more.

Mainstream media uses the stereotypical views of terrorists as young, death-obsessed men with a nature made for engineering. Even though, Shamsie’s Parvaiz is a Muslim who becomes depicted as a extremist due to his personal and societal problems. Western media depicts negative images of Muslims across the world by presenting their involvement in many different incidents from skyscraper terrorism to suicide bombers, to airplane hijacking as well as with derogatory videos.

The purpose of this western media is to blur the image of Islam with force and aggression. Distorting Islamic actions worldwide, showing the practices of individuals and radical Muslim groups with Islam. Media continue to describe Islamic people as a social threat to western society. They try to justify the aggression against Muslims. They continue to present Islam as the leading negative force and causing violence and oppression.

Muslim and Islamic individuals have experience discrimination in their everyday lives. Harassment and attacks from strangers on the street, Mosques and Islamic centers across the country frequently report vandalism. “Government officials in some areas of the country have yielded to this religious bigotry, treating mosques and Islamic centers differently than other proposed houses of worship and/or denying zoning permits without the compelling interest that is required by the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000.” (American Civil Liberties Union). This act is a federal civil rights law that affords heightened legal protection to the use of property for religious purposes, stated by the ACLU. Even with our country allowing religious freedom, without the support of local governments and areas, these individuals are suppressed their rights and live in fear of their practices.

Muslim and Islamic women are seen as traditional, religious, submissive and ignorant. These characteristics have become common for Muslims and Islamic women in America. Because of these stereotypes, many westerners approach a woman of an unfamiliar culture as an assignment of rescue. They depict them as someone who is incapable of understanding how “poorly” she is being treated and people feel the need to “save” them from their life style and help her see how she should be treated. For Muslim women, wearing a veil or head covering acts as a show of obedience to the Qur’an and to Allah, as well as being a symbol of modesty and womanhood. Doing this is a way to show an expression of their religious conviction and devotion to God. God declared in the Qur'an that women have souls and that they have the same spiritual capacity as men. The media portrays a Muslim woman fully covered as being overruled by their husbands. It is true that some extremist Muslims have taken advantage and hindered the education of girls but Islam actually encourage that education for men and women is of equal importance. The Holy Prophet Muhammad said, “It is the duty of every Muslim man and every Muslim woman to acquire knowledge.” There are many Muslim women across world who have higher educations and careers in fields of law, engineering, and medicine. Just like Isma in Home Fire, who is in a PhD program in sociology.

Muslim and Islamic women have become a part of a group who receive a majority of only negative media coverage. The prejudices against them represents a common view of Americans. Media holds too much power over the information that is fed to the public. Women are the easiest target for the western media to exploit. So when the media utilizes the reaction it generates, they draw in more consumers. By depicting stories of these women in submissive and unjust situations, the media is able to paint a picture that is far from their reality. The ability to frame released news and information allows media to determine how this information is perceived.

Islam is feasibly the most discussed religion in the west today, in both society and media, and probably the most controversial topic of debate. Overall, Muslim and Islamic stereotypes have a deep effect by giving other groups of Americans a commonality view that Muslims are untrustworthy, violent men. And submissive, mistreated and uneducated women.

https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/discriminatory-profiling/nationwide-anti-mosque-activity

#muslim #islamic #sterotypes #home fire #muslim women #muslim men #religion

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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

Text

Trump stages his greatest show yet

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/trump-stages-his-greatest-show-yet/

Trump stages his greatest show yet

poster=”http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201906/1265/1155968404_6049771389001_6049782794001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404″

true

2020 elections

The president’s elaborate reelection rally in Florida featured thousands of adoring supporters.

ORLANDO, Fla. — It was everything Donald Trump wanted, and so much more.

The optics-obsessed president was greeted by thousands of adoring supporters when he arrived here on Tuesday to kick off his bid for a second term. In lieu of a red carpet, a sea of red, white and camouflage hats provided the backdrop for his first official campaign rally of the 2020 cycle.

Story Continued Below

As soon as Trump took the stage in his signature red tie, the crowd seemed pleased to have waited. They greeted him with “USA” chants as he recalled the “movement” he started four years ago.

“It turned out to be more than just a great political campaign. It turned out to be a great political movement because of you,” the president said, echoing the same nationalist message that became a staple of his first presidential run. “It’s a movement made up of people … who believe that a nation must care for its own citizens first.”

Fans camped out since dusk on Monday to secure a spot inside the 20,000-seat Amway Center. They began chanting familiar slogans as anticipation built for the evening’s main act and familiar characters took the stage. Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr., riled up the crowd with a series of attacks against Joe Biden, a telling sign that his father views the former vice president as his likeliest opponent. Vice President Mike Pence promised the crowd that four more years “means more jobs, more judges … and at least four more years to drain the swamp.”

Trump picked up where his vice president left off as he took the mic, ticking through the items he can accomplish if granted another term and highlighting what he’s done so far. He talked about passing a criminal justice bill and healthcare reforms for veterans, doubling the child tax credit for American families and confronting the opioid crisis.

“Together we’re breaking the most sacred rule of Washington politics: We are keeping our promises to the American people,” he said.

But the president couldn’t help but focus on the trials of his first White House bid, too — time he might have otherwise spent targeting his current Democratic opponents.

In one particular riff about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, his 2016 rival, the president said she received favorable treatment during the course of an investigation into her private email server.

“If I deleted one email, like a love note to Melania, it’s the electric chair for Trump,” he said. Trump later added that the 2020 Democratic field, like Clinton, wants to “splinter us into factions and tribes,” reminding the audience that she once labeled his supporters “deplorables.”

Trump cited many of the same political enemies Tuesday night that he ran against last time, grumbling about “Washington insiders” and “career politicians.” But he identified new foils, as well: Democratic congressional investigators, special counsel Robert Mueller, and the “radical socialism” he claims his political opponents have enthusiastically embraced.

“They’ve been afflicted with an ideological sickness,” Trump said of Democrats, attracting deafening applause as he affirmed that “America is not a socialist country.”

“Republicans do not believe in socialism. We believe in freedom,” he added.

Trump’s re-election launch — with an all-day tailgate party beforehand and a festival-like feel — borrowed a key ingredient from the unorthodox announcement speech he delivered four years ago: Nothing about it was normal, but it was a captivating show.

Frank Giannazzo, 57, a Marine Corps veteran from Davenport, Fla., compared the president’s re-election launch to a rock ‘n’ roll concert even before its star took the stage.

“Look at this. When is the last time you saw any candidate do something like this?” he said, gesturing at the crowd as “Eye of the Tiger” played overhead in the lead-up to Trump’s appearance.

The president leaned into the trappings of incumbency as soon as he arrived in Orlando on Tuesday. A presidential motorcade zig-zagged through downtown as he made his way to the arena, where Pence and the Trump family entertained the crowd. And when the president finally took the stage, he underscored a series of accomplishments that aides and allies believe are enough to win him another four years in the White House next November.

“The days of stealing American jobs and American companies, American ideas and wealth —those days are over,” Trump boldly declared.

He argued that the economy was booming thanks to his administration’s deregulatory agenda and the GOP-led tax cuts; that undocumented immigration was finally being confronted thanks to his forceful approach and negotiations with Mexico; and that America was respected again by its allies and adversaries because of his no-nonsense attitude toward foreign leaders.

“We’ve made America great again, but how do you give up the number one theme, logo, statement in politics? There’s a new one that really works, and that’s called ‘Keep America Great,’” Trump said, encouraging his supporters to embrace the new slogan.

But the president’s 2020 launch happens to come at another chaotic point in his administration.

In a week, the White House will be without a press secretary who can help steer his message — one of several vacancies that will leave the administration handicapped as the president heads into a grueling election cycle. Trump bid the outgoing press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a special farewell at Tuesday’s rally, teasing her from the stage about her own political ambitions. (Sanders is rumored to be considering a gubernatorial run in her home state of Arkansas in 2022).

Just hours before jetting off to Orlando, Trump also announced that his nominee for defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, had decided to forgo the position after news broke that the FBI was examining a domestic violence episode that he and his ex-wife were said to have been involved in. At least five cabinet agencies are currently being led by acting officials, an issue that has dogged the Trump administration since its earliest days.

Beyond the problems faced by his administration, there are signs that Trump is underperforming in the states he will need to win in 2020 — a reality that his aides seem to realize but that the president has yet to recognize himself. Internal polls conducted in March that leaked out of the Trump campaign last week found him trailing his potential Democratic opponents in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida — a trifecta of states he can hardly afford to lose. Trump dismissed the polls as “fake” and parted ways with the companies that produced them.

“The country is too complex to call 100 people and ask them what they think,” Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign manager, told CBS News ahead of Tuesday’s rally.

Though campaign officials insist the president’s numbers have improved in battleground states since March — one official claimed that Trump was now leading Biden in each state — the political landscape that Trump is facing has not.

The president repeated his “no collusion” refrain Tuesday night, claiming that the Mueller report on Russian election interference was a “win” for him, even as House Democrats tighten their grip on multiple congressional investigations into his actions before and after becoming president.

On Wednesday, for instance, former White House communications director Hope Hicks, one of the first members of Trump’s inner circle, will testify behind closed doors before the House Judiciary Committee about her time in the White House. Democrats on the panel aresaidto be looking closely at other ex-Trump aides and advisers whom they could bring in as witnesses without facing claims of executive privilege by the White House.

Campaign officials went into Tuesday viewing it as an opportunity to press the reset button and refocus the attention of Trump’s supporters on all the items he can check off his to-do list if given a chance to remain in Washington. It was an event tailor-made for the president’s base, but one that they hoped would grab the attention of other suburban and swing voters, too.

Trump won 46 percent of the national vote in 2016 and has struggled to broaden his base since. At the same time, opposition to him has steadily increased in recent months. A recent NPR/Marist poll found that a combined 52 percent of Americans want Congress to begin impeachment proceedings against the president, continue investigating him and his administration, or officially censure him on Capitol Hill.

Democratic presidential hopefuls, meanwhile, are likely to focus most of their criticisms on Trump when they begin their primary debates next week, and Tuesday provided exactly the kind of material they were hoping for: dubious facts and figures from the incumbent president about everything from Obamacare and immigration to abortion and unemployment, and repeated promises to further advance his agenda.

Entering the 2016 race, Trump told a crowd of paid spectators, Trump Tower residents and curious reporters that, if elected president, he would end radical Islamic terrorism, hold China accountable for unfair trade practices, bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., restore bipartisanship to Washington, protect the Second Amendment, end Common Core, rebuild the country’s infrastructure and replace Obamacare.

On Tuesday night, he assured his supporters that he had already fulfilled many of those promises and could do even more if they delivered him four more years. He gave them a show they’ll talk about for weeks and one that he will try to replicate again and again over the next 17 months — a ride that many expect to be every bit as unpredictable as 2016, but the same in so many other ways.

“We are one movement, one people, one family and one glorious nation under God. And together we will make America wealthy again, we will make America strong again, we will make America safe again and we will make America great again,” Trump said, exiting the stage to the same Rolling Stones tune that has closed so many of his rallies since 2016.

“You can’t always get what you want,” the lyrics boomed. It was a reminder to the crowd that Trump got exactly what he wanted four years ago — the most powerful job in the world — and now he’s after it again.

#Foreign #greatest #Politics #stages

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shirlleycoyle · 6 years ago

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Why Won’t Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Banning Some Republican Politicians Too.

At a Twitter all-hands meeting on March 22, an employee asked a blunt question: Twitter has largely eradicated Islamic State propaganda off its platform. Why can’t it do the same for white supremacist content?

An executive responded by explaining that Twitter follows the law, and a technical employee who works on machine learning and artificial intelligence issues went up to the mic to add some context. (As Motherboard has previously reported, algorithms are the next great hope for platforms trying to moderate the posts of their hundreds of millions, or billions, of users.)

With every sort of content filter, there is a tradeoff, he explained. When a platform aggressively enforces against ISIS content, for instance, it can also flag innocent accounts as well, such as Arabic language broadcasters. Society, in general, accepts the benefit of banning ISIS for inconveniencing some others, he said.

In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.

The employee argued that, on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda, he argued.

There is no indication that this position is an official policy of Twitter, and the company told Motherboard that this “is not [an] accurate characterization of our policies or enforcement—on any level.” But the Twitter employee’s comments highlight the sometimes overlooked debate within the moderation of tech platforms: are moderation issues purely technical and algorithmic, or do societal norms play a greater role than some may acknowledge?

Though Twitter has rules against “abuse and hateful conduct,” civil rights experts, government organizations, and Twitter users say the platform hasn’t done enough to curb white supremacy and neo-Nazis on the platform, and its competitor Facebook recently explicitly banned white nationalism. Wednesday, during a parliamentary committee hearing on social media content moderation, UK MP Yvette Cooper asked Twitter why it hasn’t yet banned former KKK leader David Duke, and “Jack, ban the Nazis” has become a common reply to many of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s tweets. During a recent interview with TED that allowed the public to tweet in questions, the feed was overtaken by people asking Dorsey why the platform hadn’t banned Nazis. Dorsey said “we have policies around violent extremist groups,” but did not give a straightforward answer to the question. Dorsey did not respond to two requests for comment sent via Twitter DM.

Do you work at Twitter? We would love to hear from you. Using a non-work computer or phone, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, OTR chat on [email protected], or email [email protected].

Twitter has not publicly explained why it has been able to so successfully eradicate ISIS while it continues to struggle with white nationalism. As a company, Twitter won’t say that it can’t treat white supremacy in the same way as it treated ISIS. But external experts Motherboard spoke to said that the measures taken against ISIS were so extreme that, if applied to white supremacy, there would certainly be backlash, because algorithms would obviously flag content that has been tweeted by prominent Republicans—or, at the very least, their supporters. So it’s no surprise, then, that employees at the company have realized that as well.

This is because the proactive measures taken against ISIS are more akin to the removal of spam or child porn than the more nuanced way that social media platforms traditionally police content, which can involve using algorithms to surface content but ultimately relies on humans to actually review and remove it (or leave it up.) A Twitter spokesperson told Motherboard that 91 percent of the company’s terrorism-related suspensions in a 6 month period in 2018 were thanks to internal, automated tools.

The argument that external experts made to Motherboard aligns with what the Twitter employee aired: Society as a whole uncontroversially and unequivocally demanded that Twitter take action against ISIS in the wake of beheading videos spreading far and wide on the platform. The automated approach that Twitter took to eradicating ISIS was successful: “I haven’t seen a legit ISIS supporter on Twitter who lasts longer than 15 seconds for two-and-a-half years,” Amarnath Amarasingam, an extremism researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told Motherboard in a phone call. Society and politicians were willing to accept that some accounts were mistakenly suspended by Twitter during that process (for example, accounts belonging to the hacktivist group Anonymous that were reporting ISIS accounts to Twitter as part of an operation called #OpISIS were themselves banned).

That same eradicate-everything approach, applied to white supremacy, is much more controversial.

“Most people can agree a beheading video or some kind of ISIS content should be proactively removed, but when we try to talk about the alt-right or white nationalism, we get into dangerous territory, where we’re talking about [Iowa Rep.] Steve King or maybe even some of Trump’s tweets, so it becomes hard for social media companies to say all of this ‘this content should be removed,’” Amarasingam said.

“There’s going to be controversy here that we didn’t see with ISIS, because there are more white nationalists than there are ISIS supporters, and white nationalists are closer to the levers of political power in the US and Europe than ISIS ever was.”

In March, King promoted an open white nationalist on Twitter for the third time. King quote tweeted Faith Goldy, a Canadian white nationalist. Earlier this month, Facebook banned Goldy under the site’s new policy banning white nationalism; Goldy has 122,000 followers on Twitter and has not been banned at the time of writing. Last year, Twitter banned Republican politician and white nationalist Paul Nehlen for a racist tweet he sent about actress and princess Meghan Markle, but prior to the ban, Nehlen gained a wide following on the platform while tweeting openly white nationalist content about, for example, the “Jewish media.”

Any move that could be perceived as being anti-Republican is likely to stir backlash against the company, which has been criticized by President Trump and other prominent Republicans for having an “anti-conservative bias.” Tuesday, on the same day Trump met with Twitter’s Dorsey, the President tweeted that Twitter “[doesn’t] treat me well as a Republican. Very discriminatory,” Trump tweeted. “No wonder Congress wants to get involved—and they should.”

JM Berger, author of Extremism and a number of reports on ISIS and far-right extremists on Twitter, told Motherboard that in his own research, he has found that “a very large number of white nationalists identify themselves as avid Trump supporters.”

“Cracking down on white nationalists will therefore involve removing a lot of people who identify to a greater or lesser extent as Trump supporters, and some people in Trump circles and pro-Trump media will certainly seize on this to complain they are being persecuted,” Berger said. “There’s going to be controversy here that we didn’t see with ISIS, because there are more white nationalists than there are ISIS supporters, and white nationalists are closer to the levers of political power in the US and Europe than ISIS ever was.”

Twitter currently has no good way of suspending specific white supremacists without human intervention, and so it continues to use human moderators to evaluate tweets. In an email, a company spokesperson told Motherboard that “different content and behaviors require different approaches.”

“For terrorist-related content we’ve a lot of success with proprietary technology but for other types of content that violate our policies—which can often [be] much more contextual—we see the best benefits by using technology and human review in tandem,” the company said.

Twitter hasn’t done a particularly good job of removing white supremacist content and has shown a reluctance to take any action of any kind against “world leaders” even when their tweets violate Twitter’s rules. But Berger agrees with Twitter in that the problem the company is facing with white supremacy is fundamentally different than the one it faced with ISIS on a practical level.

“With ISIS, the group’s obsessive branding, tight social networks and small numbers made it easier to avoid collateral damage when the companies cracked down (although there was some),” he said. “White nationalists, in contrast, have inconsistent branding, diffuse social networks and a large body of sympathetic people in the population, so the risk of collateral damage might be perceived as being higher, but it really depends on where the company draws its lines around content.”

But just because eradicating white supremacy on Twitter is a hard problem doesn’t mean the company should get a pass. After Facebook explicitly banned white supremacy and white nationalism, Motherboard asked YouTube and Twitter whether they would make similar changes. Neither company would commit to making that explicit change, and referred us to their existing rules.

“Twitter has a responsibility to stomp out all voices of hate on its platform,” Brandi Collins-Dexter, senior campaign director at activist group Color Of Change told, Motherboard in a statement. “Instead, the company is giving a free ride to conservative politicians whose dangerous rhetoric enables the growth of the white supremacist movement into the mainstream and the rise of hate, online and off.”

Why Won’t Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Banning Some Republican Politicians Too. syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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hangingsunshine · 6 years ago

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Islam dan wanita: memilih untuk jilbab dan paradoks.

NEAR THE VERY heart of a question Americans have been asking themselves since September 11, 2001--"Why do they hate ush"--lies the question of how different societies treat their women. Americans by now seem bored and faintly embarrassed when feminist stories make the headlines. Who wants to hear about chauvinism at a stodgy American golf course when most of the meaningful barriers to female achievement in the United States have already been scaledh Yet as routine as the self-assertion of women is here, in other parts of the world it may be the most contentious issue of all. In Middle Eastern and other Muslim countries--where adherents of extreme variants of Islam try to intimidate peaceful Muslim majorities--antipathy toward the West revolves around sex and gender every bit as much as it revolves around "globalization" or the exploitation of poor countries by rich ones or infidel soldiers quartered on sacred lands. The dogma purveyed by the Taliban of Afghanistan, Jemaa Islamiya in Southeast Asia, and Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza, among others, would encourage polygamy; lower the age of marriage for girls (the mullahs who have ruled Iran since 1979 made girls legally marriageable beginning at age nine); require women to cover themselves in public; deny women marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance rights equal to those of men; punish females accused of adultery or prostitution with death by stoning; and, most fundamentally, unite church and state (a theocracy being the Islamists' preferred way to impose the aforementioned rules on a society). We must understand radical Islamism if we are ever to counter its malign force. By the term radical Islamism I mean the varieties of political Islam that take their inspiration from the early writings of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, from Sunni Wahhabism emanating from Saudi Arabia, or from the Shiite theocracy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. All three are radical because they define Islam in opposition to all that is non-Islamic. In other words, these violent strains share in being reactionary. And one of the things about our way of life against which they have reacted most strongly, going back to at least the 1920s, is feminism. This article will examine the radical Islamist reaction to feminism, along with other related matters: the participation of women themselves in radical Islamist thought and political acts; how attempts by governments to secularize their populations actually fed Islamism in the universities; the "Islamic revival" in Egypt; the less than healthy view of sex evinced by Islamists; the treatment of women in Afghanistan and American feminists' role in bringing that treatment to light; and, finally, an emerging "Islamic feminism" (as opposed to Islamist feminism) that I believe deserves support and encouragement. Coeducation and its discontents MEDIA COMMENTATORS have explained to Americans over and over again since the attacks on New York and Washington what scholars have been documenting for decades: Radical Islamism is steeped in resentment. Iranian writer Daryush Shayegan tells us the Islamists' "consciousness is wounded" by Western achievements. They use religion as a political weapon, he says, and their program is twofold: to wound the West in return while at the same time coercing mainstream Muslims into practicing a strange, stripped down version of Islam that will bring back the glorious age of the Prophet Muhammad. Bernard Lewis, the dean of Middle East historians, places this resentment in the widest possible context: Islam's fortunes and misfortunes since its advent in the seventh century. Its unimpeded rise, from the time of the victorious and prosperous Prophet Muhammad, lasted a thousand years. The defeat of the Ottoman Turks outside of Vienna in 1683 began a decline that has been just as steady, lasting to our own day. Lewis contrasts this up-down trajectory with the early struggles and checkered history of the Jews and Christians. How galling for Muslim radicals, he says, that the once persecuted Jews and Christians have come to define the world we live in. And, he adds, where Judeo-Christian and Muslim societies contrast most notably is on the woman question. Herein lies the West's greatest vulnerability, or so the adherents of political Islam--the Islamists--believe. In a recent interview, Lewis noted that, unlike Christianity in all its forms, Islam and most of the rest of the world allow and practice polygamy and concubinage. Western visitors to Muslim lands have talk[ed] with horror of the subordination and ill-treatment of Muslim women (and, I might add, with ill-concealed envy of what they imagine to be the privileges of Muslim men). Muslim visitors to the Christian world are shocked and horrified by the loose and promiscuous ways of the West and also the absurd deference, as they see it, given to Western women. (1) One such visitor, Sayyid Qutb of Egypt, a founder of modern Islamic fundamentalism, spent time in the United States from 1948 to 1950. He observed with disgust that, in the very churches of the Christians, there were dances at which the sexes mingled and touched. Such a sight convinced Qutb that Christianity had lost its way, leaving a society and a way of life that were debauched and ready to be defeated. The Islamist project to attack the West and "purify" the faith began to take root in Egypt in the 1920s. In 1924, a reformist government opened a modern university that permitted women to attend. At the same time Egypt's first feminist, Huda Shaarawi, set aside her veil in public, and photos of her uncovered face made the front pages of Egyptian newspapers. It was also when Sayyid Qutb and others were establishing the first Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood. But Islamism didn't come to full fruition until the 1970s, starting to win large numbers of adherents at the precise moment that feminism was at the height of its political power in America and Europe and gaining a foothold in the urban centers of the less developed countries. The Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi draws the connection very directly in Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (Indiana University Press, revised edition 1987). Mernissi's book, first published in 1975, addresses the vast changes in Muslim societies as the European powers were relinquishing their colonies. Not only were rural populations migrating to the cities, but the universities in those cities--for centuries the exclusive preserve of local male aristocracies--were being democratized. Those whom Mernissi calls "traditionally marginalized and deprived male rural migrants" were for the first time permitted to seek higher education in Rabat, Lahore, Beirut, Amman, and other centers. So, too, were women. The introduction of ideas of liberty and equality into these societies had effects that were complicated and in many cases subtle. Clearly discernible to Mernissi, however, was an antagonism that arose between nonveiling college women and the males who arrived in the universities along with them. The male parvenus, in the millions, glommed onto violently anti-Western strains of Islam out of a sense of pique. "What dismays the fundamentalists," Mernissi writes, "is that the era of [postcolonial] independence did not create an all-male new class. Women are taking part in the public feast." Newly urbanized and newly educated young men singled out modern women with diplomas and careers as the worst traitors to Islam. These zealots saw offenses against "real" Islam everywhere, but the uncovered women in their own midst were the ultimate heretics. That generation now constitutes the senior echelon of radical clerics issuing interpretations of Islamic law, or sharia, and the top level of terror networks such as al Qaeda and Jemaa Islamiya. Yet the rigidly puritanical and misogynistic character of Islamism has not kept it from attracting female followers. In an interview for Vogue magazine last year, a Saudi extremist in London told journalist Deborah Scroggins that he and his cohorts "have turned the strict sex segregation that keeps even many wealthy, educated Saudi women confined to the home, and the traditions that prevent outsiders from so much as asking their names, into political assets." He said women give his jihad organization money and serve on the review board of its publications. These nonworking women, he added, have a lot of time to devote to the cause, so they make good administrators of the group's websites. In January of 2004, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the recently assassinated head of Hamas, called jihad "an obligation of all Muslims, men and women," and women suicide bombers have been obliging, in Chechnya and elsewhere. In April 2003, a woman who had lived in Boston for several years was detained in her native Pakistan after the FBI put out a global alert saying she may have ties to al Qaeda. It was not in a theocracy like Saudi Arabia, however, that the "feminist wing" of Islamism first developed. It arose in places where government was secular--Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Iran under the shah--and secularism was imposed on the French model, which is to say, harshly. Their admiration of the French Revolution led these governments to attempt a wholesale removal of faith from the public realm. To stand up against authoritarian secularism, then, many younger women, beginning in the late 1970s and 1980s, and particularly in the universities, turned to religion. Especially after the 1979 revolution in Iran succeeded and Islamism gained even greater force, campus activists railed against secular political establishments for slavishly imitating Western ways. The most militant act of rebellion for urban, educated women became wearing the traditional Muslim head coverings banned by their governments. In her portrait of Turkish women, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (University of Michigan Press, 1996), Nilufer Gole notes that "as Islam politicized itself, it moved women toward the political scene; and the black veil, the symbol of the return to premodern Islamic traditions, acted as an expression of the active participation of women in political demonstrations." Ineffectual attempts by the governments in Ankara and Cairo to stop the rebirth of the veil among their educated elites only fed this protest sentiment. The rising Islamist movements, writes Gole, called for the female to return to her "traditional settings and positions. On the other hand, they replace the traditional portrait of a Muslim woman with ... that of an active, demanding, and, even, militant Muslim woman who is no longer confined to her home." Indeed, Turkey's prohibition against the wearing of headscarves in public offices and universities has been enforced sporadically since the early 1980s, with a tightening of enforcement after 1997 when the secularist army ousted from office the country's first Islamist prime minister. The Egyptian government tried in the mid-1990s to ban the veil, though the matter got tied up in the courts and came to no definitive resolution. And so the irony reappears: Widening access to education strengthened the hand of fundamentalist Islam. A modern university woman asserting her "seclusion rights" is a woman forswearing her rights in the eyes of non-Muslims and of many Muslims as well. Women intellectuals of middle age today, exiled from various Muslim lands, look back nostalgically to a time before Islamism was widespread. Two decades or more ago, in Kabul, Teheran, or Baghdad, they could dress as they pleased and move about as they pleased. These are by and large secularist women whose adoption of Western notions of individual freedom puts them at odds with the "feminist" wing within Islamism. The Islamists' often severe, scarf-plus-robe covering contrasts with the use, especially among older women and women in rural areas, of headscarves that leave the neck and some of the hair uncovered, or the discarding of the veil altogether. Gole's interviews with Islamist women at Turkish universities record their preference for almost total coverage of the body and their disdain for the less strict reading of the Koran and the more modern dress habits of older Muslim women, whether traditionally Muslim or secular. The older women "do not practice true veiling because they are ignorant about Islam," said one of Gole's interviewees. It is a matter of dispute, however, whether the Koran demands that Muslim women cover themselves. One frequently encounters a textual interpretation that is liberal: Modesty is required of Muslims of both sexes, and Koranic references to veiling apply (or, applied) literally only to the wives of the Prophet Muhammad. Islamists, on the other hand, and some non-Islamist traditional Muslims as well, argue that the female obligation to cover is clear in the text. We will not settle that question here; the point is that Islamists have taken the practice and elevated it, as Gole says, to be "the symbol of Islamization," the visible assertion of their fundamentalism. The new Humbert Humberts ISLAMISM HAS, according to its practitioners and some of its academic and journalistic promoters, yielded a feminism that is far superior to ours, because Western licentiousness has been removed. "My niqab [body covering] is my freedom, because it lets me choose who does and who doesn't see me," a daughter of Cairo's political elite told the London Guardian's Geneive Abdo. A former fashion model interviewed by Abdo added: "When I put on the veil, I put on my brain as well." Abdo, researching her pre-September 11 book, No God But God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam (Oxford University Press, 2000), donned long garments to penetrate the sexually segregated salons of Cairo's high society. Her subjects had gone against their secularist, cosmopolitan upbringing to embrace the teachings of Egyptian clerics such as Sheikh Omar Abd al-Kafi, who preached Muslim distrust of Christians and endorsed the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against the life of Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie. Newly pious Egyptian men and women "spread their own, unorthodox brand of Islam to friends and followers within their elevated social circles," Abdo writes. The Mubarak government's crackdowns on al-Kafi and other Islamist Pied Pipers of the Egyptian leisure class merely enhanced their mystique. Abdo's labeling Islamism an "unorthodox brand" of Islam is telling. The main purpose of her book was to show English-speaking readers a benign or mainstream Islamism that was supplanting the murderous rage of Osama bin Laden (a Saudi of Yemeni extraction), Ayman al-Zawahiri (an Egyptian), and their like. This was wishful thinking, no doubt born of a belief that non- and anti-Western customs and ideas automatically deserve respect, and supported by the fact that they were catching on like wildfire among influential Egyptians at the time. In fairness, one cannot fault her too much for underestimating the relative strength of the terrorists. That she did not foretell September 11 makes her a lot like the rest of us. Then, too, Abdo's glowing depiction of "the Islamic revival" among Egypt's intelligentsia dimmed considerably when she confronted certain aspects of it, such as clitoridectomy (which, she asserted, apparently on the authority of the Egyptian government, is performed on 97 percent of Egyptian girls). Abdo tried in vain to dissuade one of her Egyptian acquaintances from having his six-year-old daughter undergo the operation. The secularist government banned clitoridectomy in Egypt in 1997, but, as with veiling, the ban is rarely heeded. Clitoridectomy has no precedent in the Koran, Abdo pointed out; it is a pre-Islamic African practice. The objections she raised with an Islamist leader, Sheik Mohammad al-Berri, prompted this explanation: A woman can be aroused at any moment. Even if a woman is riding in a car, if she hits a few bumps, she can become sexually aroused. Once this happens, a man loses control. So you see, this practice certainly is not meant to punish women. But it is necessary. Islamist regulation of women's morality--which is seen as the key to regulating male morality--apparently makes considerable use of the imagination. In fact one senses beneath their primness an unhealthy obsession with sex. This is nowhere more evident than in accounts of life in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Azar Nafisi, a U.S. literary scholar born and raised in Iran, taught comparative literature at universities there during and after the overthrow of the shah. Her autobiograhical Reading Lolita in Teheran (Random House, 2003) describes an Islamist regime that "went so far as to outlaw certain gestures and expressions of emotion, including love" and that levied upon women who did not totally cover their heads, hair, and bodies monetary fines, up to 76 lashes, and jail terms. While love was being ejected from the public sphere (as were other emotions--it was verboten to grieve publicly for relatives killed by Saddam Hussein's bombs in the Iran-Iraq war, for example), in private things were, by government fiat, supposed to get considerably steamier: The mullahs brought back a practice long banned in the Muslim world, "temporary marriage" (concubinage), so that Iranian men "could have four official wives and as many temporary wives as they wished." It was the habit of the bachelor leaders of the Muslim Students' Association on campus to declare that their only beloved was God. The rules imposed on women to aid male chastity could never be strict enough: Nafisi recounts that one of these young men got a female student expelled from the university "because he said the white patch of skin just barely visible under her scarf sexually provoked him." Equally telling in this regard was the professor who became agitated when one of his students chose to write on the novel Lolita. The professor's reaction was not disapproval of a Western novel about pedophilia--his sympathy was entirely with the pedophile. Indeed, if he sympathized more with Humbert Humbert than even Vladimir Nabokov meant readers to do, this was because he "had a thing about young girls spoiling the lives of intellectual men," writes Nafisi. Notwithstanding the professor's censure of "Nabokov's flighty young vixen," when he sought a new wife he insisted she be no older than 23. He found one at least 20 years his junior (and, as Nafisi points out, a child bride exactly Lolita Haze's age would have been acceptable under the regime's revision of marriage law). When the mullahs suddenly revived concubinage in Iran, Wahhabi religious authorities in Saudi Arabia raised objections, saying that it contravened the Koran. But in general, Saudi fundamentalists, no less than Iranian, put the 1950s hall monitors in the shade when it comes to being moralists with sex on the brain. According to Soraya Altorki, a sociologist who has studied women, marriage, and the family in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, the Arabic word fitnah denotes the disorderly behavior of men who have been sexually tempted by women; the word also means "femme fatale, a woman who can drive men to distraction and destruction." This linguistic conflation of cause and effect is one more reason to conclude that Islamism does not remove licentiousness from society but simply wraps it in layers of misogyny. What is peculiar about radical Islamist women--who, perhaps understandably, dislike being leered at or accosted by disorderly men--is their prescription for coping with the problem. Rather than expecting men to exert control over themselves, or asking mothers, as moral guardians, to take charge of their sons early fahruni on and raise them to respect women, they speak of this as if it lies exclusively with the female. Nilufer Gole quotes a passage from a 1987 article in Mektup magazine that spells it out: We can never go into the streets with our house dresses; if we do so, we will expose ourselves to lustful gazes and will become a source of disorder for the Muslim community.... To increase our attraction to our husbands inside the house and to decrease it outside are our fundamental principles. That is to say, we will be appealing in the house and repulsive outside. Of course, what numbers of educated and professional Muslim women chose to do became compulsory for every girl and woman in Afghanistan. One wonders how soi-disant "repulsive" Islamist women think it worked out when female "repulsiveness" was adopted as the law of the land. Before the Islamist takeover in the 1980s, Afghanistan had been working in fits and starts to join the modern world. Over the years its monarchic governments had been rather progressive, including on the treatment of women. Between 1996 and 2001, under Taliban rule (as the world is now well aware), women and girls were not allowed to get medical treatment if there was no female doctor available to administer it; nor could they be educated, hold jobs, walk about unaccompanied by male relatives, or (a late ruling) enter public parks. Here was a subjugation so total that Iranians could adduce it to argue that their Islamic Republic wasn't all that bad for women. As one female government functionary told Azar Nafisi before Nafisi's 1997 exile from Iran: "These [Iranian] young girls are a little spoiled--they expect too much. Look at Somalia or Afghanistan. Compared to them, we live like queens." Afghan women and their allies IN THE 1990s, after human rights monitors publicized the Serbs' mass rapes of Bosnian women in the Balkans, the international community began to view the treatment of women as a prominent aspect of war and conflict. It became less difficult than it otherwise might have been for human rights groups and feminist groups to draw the world's attention to the cruelty of the Taliban. The plight of Afghan women spurred American feminists--specifically, those from the "equal rights" branch of feminism that we associate with the National Organization for Women or Eleanor Smeal's Feminist Majority--to do good deeds. Feminist Majority led the way, beginning in 1997, in condemning "gender apartheid" in the largely overlooked country of Afghanistan. Equality Now, an international research unit based in New York, also documented the Taliban's practices many years before the United States took action against the regime. Lobbying by American feminists reportedly helped stop the Clinton administration from formally recognizing the Taliban government, which was, at least for a time, attracting positive attention from a U.S. administration keen to foster an Afghan pipeline deal proposed by the oil company Unocal. Some Afghan activists say, on the other hand, that the Americans did not have much of a feel for local conditions or culture. These activists did not consider it helpful, for example, when Feminist Majority sponsored a back-to-school program exclusively for Afghan girls. Afghan girls have suffered terribly, but assisting Afghan boys--who will otherwise be sent to radical Islamist madrassas to become the next generation of terrorists--is also a necessity. Ignoring the boys and men of a deeply patriarchal society does not make sense, Fahima Vorgetts of the Women for Afghan Women's Advisory Committee told me, "because the brothers and the fathers and the husbands, they are the ones who control the families. They are the ones that, if you alienate them, you won't have any success in bringing women to the table." The reflexive hostility to religion exhibited by the "equal rights" feminists also rubs some of their non-American colleagues the wrong way. Riffat Hassan, a Pakistan-born Muslim feminist theologian writing in the collection Women for Afghan Women (Palgrave MacMillan, 2002) edited by Sunita Mehta, said the support of the U.S. women's movement is laudable but it "must be given without the expectation or the demand that Afghan women will follow a donor-driven agenda ... rooted in aversion to Islam and Afghan culture." Afghans and Afghan Americans trying to help rebuild the war-torn country often speak of U.S. feminists with a mixture of awe for their grassroots political skills, gratitude for what they have done for Afghanistan, and unwillingness to adopt their quirks. The Afghans, like people all around the world, embrace the American polity's appeal to inherent rights but resist defining those rights precisely the way Eleanor Smeal or Betty Friedan would. Another essayist in Women for Afghan Women, Zohra Yusuf Daoud, the first (and last) woman to hold the title of Miss Afghanistan, wrote: "Some aspects associated with Western feminism, such as bra-burning, revealing clothing, and sexual promiscuity are not appropriate at this stage for Afghan feminists, if they ever will be." A spokeswoman for the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a dissident group that has been active against every Afghan government going back to 1977 when the country was a Soviet satellite, told me that RAWA considers the Americans too wrapped up in issues like abortion and women's salaries compared to men's. She called these "luxury items" for women struggling for the right to move about freely, to educate and support themselves, and to have political representation. Most Americans, if they are older than 35, think of bra-burning as the political symbol of a bygone era; if they are younger, it's a safe bet they have never heard of it. It is important to realize nonetheless that this is the image of us that lives on around the world. To a degree perhaps surprising to us, 1970s feminism's shock to traditional societies--which Fatima Mernissi had singled out as key to Islamism's rise--reverberates today. It isn't only jihadists and Islamists who are capable of comparing the mores of their societies to our liberal and feminist-influenced mores and declining to hold theirs inferior. Many women's advocates in the Muslim world take veiling--politically exploited though it is by their enemies, the radical Islamists--in stride and believe that we should, too. Leila Ahmed, the Egyptian feminist scholar, has noted with chagrin that Westerners who don't know much about Islam seem obsessed by the veiling issue. RAWA, whose members have risked their lives to protest the Taliban's physically beating any Afghan woman seen in public without the all-enveloping burqa, takes no official position on that garment, saying every woman ought to be allowed to decide for herself whether to wear it. As Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights activist and lawyer, told the Irish Times (December 13, 1997): "When my husband can marry three other women, when my husband can take my children, when my husband can kill me, I have more important problems. When I find a solution for these problems, then I will worry about hijab [veiling]." According to many politically active Afghan women, their fundamental rights have not been vindicated despite the dislodging of the Taliban from power. They have a point. The anarchy and insecurity of postwar Afghanistan, particularly outside of Kabul, have made many women keep wearing the burqa to protect themselves. While millions of Afghan girls are now able to go to school, millions more remain confined to their homes because they fear retribution by Taliban or al Qaeda remnants or intimidation by the regional mujahideen, the heavily armed, religiously conservative warlords of the Northern Alliance that helped the U.S.-led coalition topple the Taliban. Several girls' schools in the provinces have been shelled or set afire. Islamist elements within President Hamid Karzai's postwar government have put in place (or in some cases continued) legal restrictions on travel by women and on the education of married women. The U.S. military announced in late 2003 that it was beefing up its security presence in southern Afghanistan, a tacit acknowledgement of the coalition's postwar failure to secure the country and the Bush administration's policy drift on Afghanistan. Female delegates to Afghanistan's postwar constitutional convention (at least those quoted in the press) have sharply criticized their fellow delegates and the final draft of the constitution, which was announced on the last day of 2003. The women numbered 100 or so of 502 delegates. A young, outspoken delegate named Malalai Joya, in a widely reported exchange that nearly got her expelled, rose to condemn the presence and the influence of several delegates, Northern Alliance warlords with blood on their hands and retrograde views of women. She and other members of an emerging female leadership in the country say they resent the compromises President Karzai made with the warlords to produce the final draft. It is true that the constitution (judging from the unofficial English translation that has been made public) declares "the sacred religion of Islam" as the state religion and invokes that phrase constantly. However, the degree to which the document affirms the substance of Islamic law is not clear. It promises a government "based on people's will and democracy" and one that "ensur[es] fundamental rights and freedoms" of "every citizen of Afghanistan." The latter phrase got amended, no doubt in response to the outcry of the women, to read, "every citizen of Afghanistan, woman and man." Two of its articles grant women a quota of political representation in the upper and lower houses of the legislature. (The constitutional scholar Noah Feldman has made the point that the 16.5 percent of the upper house slated to be female tops the 14-member female contingent in today's United States Senate.) Another article requires the promotion of education for women and calls for illiteracy to be eliminated. Whether the pluralistic and democratic aspects of the constitution are honored may depend on the makeup of the new Afghan supreme court vested with the authority to interpret it, as Feldman has noted. The process (the loya jirga) from which the document issued was messy; enforcing it will be no less difficult, particularly in a country struggling to emerge from decades of war, chaos, and tyranny. The achievement of formally bringing women back into politics for the first time in a generation should not be minimized, however. If women successfully go to the polls--and I venture to say any interpretation of the new constitution would support their exercise of their suffrage--sharia and related social regulations unfavorable to women are not likely to fare well in the long run. There is reason to believe the majority of women in Afghanistan--and in Iraq, where an interim constitution has been devised for the postwar transition--will, if they are able to vote, choose candidates and policies promising to modernize the country in ways that improve their position in society. As Fahima Vorgetts of the women's advisory committee, who returns periodically to her native Afghanistan, recently told me: "This war changed a lot of women. People are talking about politics now." Women in rural and highly traditionalist areas of the country have told her, "We may be blind, but I don't want my daughter to be blind. Meaning, I don't have an education but I want my daughter to have an education. That tells me a lot, for [women] to push for a better life." Defenders of tolerance and monogamy A SOBERING REMINDER, however, that elections don't automatically strengthen liberal democracy can be found in the recent history of Iran. Iranian women were granted the right to vote by the shah in 1963. They have been voting ever since, but the mullahs who took power in 1979 are still in power, doing their best to rein in an ever more rebellious populace. Sitting over the country's political institutions is a theocratic judicial panel that stifles the reforms and the reform candidates approved by the Iranian electorate. (Because a too-powerful judiciary in Afghanistan poses just such a danger to that country's fledgling democracy, President Karzai and the United States government pushed for a strong executive in the Afghan constitution.) When the revolution was gathering steam, the Ayatollah Khomeini, in an eclectic and pragmatic move--and recall that the entire movement was eclectic, a coalition of Shiites and Marxists out to rid Iran of imperialism, capitalism, monarchy, and the decadent influence of the "Great Satan"--exhorted women to go out in the streets and demonstrate against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. After Pahlavi was forced into exile, the Islamic Republic repealed important laws that protected women's rights. Yet it also expected women (properly veiled, of course) to help the revolution advance and prosper by entering higher education and the work force. Hence the birth of what Azar Nafisi called "the myth of Islamic feminism.... It enabled the rulers to have their cake and eat it too; they could claim to be progressive and Islamic" at one and the same time, even as they indulged in the inveterate Islamist habit of denouncing Nafisi and other "modern women as Westernized, decadent and disloyal. They needed us modern men and women to show them the way, but they also had to keep us in our place." That female reformers are bursting out of their allotted place in Iran became obvious to the world when Shirin Ebadi won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize. The human rights activist and lawyer believes regime change can come to her country through constitutional processes. She told the Weekly Standard (November 3, 2003): "The situation in Iran is different from Iraq and Afghanistan. There were no mechanisms for internal change in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iran, there are." Ebadi said traditional Shiism--unlike the Islamist variant of Shiism that is wielded as a political weapon by the Teheran government--countenances enough of a separation of religion and state to enable people of different faiths to form a polity together. It is not surprising that the Bush administration's search for Muslim allies in the wake of September 11 has concentrated heavily on Shia believers like Ebadi. (Shiism is branded as heretical by the Wahhabis, the Islamist Sunnis of Saudi Arabia.) Perhaps the two most important matters about which Americans and Shirin Ebadi agree are her championing of religious tolerance and her disapproval of polygamy. She is not alone in holding these particular views, leading one to suspect that Islamic feminism may not be as mythical as Azar Nafisi said. These views are, it seems to me, the markers of an Islamic feminism that the United States should wholeheartedly support as a direct challenge to the "feminist" wing of Islamism. Women authors and political activists of many Muslim and Western nations hold that, while the Koran permits polygamy, it seeks to limit a practice that was widespread at the time of its promulgation in the seventh century. The relevant verse, they point out, is both conditional and stated in the negative: If a man fears he cannot support more than one wife, he should have only one. Nevertheless, there are Muslim men who defend polygamy--strictly speaking, the term is polygyny since the verse refers to men taking multiple wives, not vice versa--as religiously compulsory and a way to fulfill their sexual desires without resorting to adultery. The clash of interests that polygyny touches off has long been evident. The feminist pioneer Huda Shaarawi recounts in her memoirs that, as a 12-year-old bride in Egypt at the turn of the twentieth century, she was told by her mother shop that her family tried in vain to get the groom (her cousin, with a wife and children all older than Shaarawi) to agree in the marriage contract to give up sexual relations with his first wife. (2) Today one hears of advocacy on behalf of first wives to enhance their legal power to obtain a divorce should they oppose a husband's intention to marry again. Women or their families have, from either vantage point, tried to enforce monogamy. In Iran, a husband's multiple marriage option is sometimes brandished as a threat--a way to assert power over one's wife, according to women interviewed in Haleh Esfandiari's book Reconstructed Lives (Johns Hopkins Press, 1997). There are reports out of Indonesia that, to evade the Indonesian law allowing polygyny only with a first wife's consent, some men take another wife and keep it a secret from their first wife and children. Polygyny was hemmed about with legal restrictions during the dictator Suharto's 32 years of secular rule. In the time since he was forced to step down in 1998, public disapproval of polygyny has eroded and the practice has flourished in Indonesia, which has the world's largest Muslim population. It flourishes also in Malaysia, where current law demands that a husband prove that starting and providing for a new family won't lower the standard of living of the wife and children he already has. Powerful Malaysian clerics are challenging these restrictions. When a regional mufti nullified the requirement of wifely consent, a Malaysian women's group, Sisters in Islam, responded with a controversial public information campaign called "Monogamy Is My Choice." Its aims are strengthening wives' legal options and creation of a national marriage and divorce registry for Muslims so women can find out the status of their husbands or husbands-to-be. (The country's current database lists only the marriages and divorces of non-Muslims.) Polygyny has been banned in the Muslim world only by secularist Turkey and Tunisia. Sisters in Islam cannot afford to be perceived as seeking a ban, given the strong backlash against the group by Malaysia's religious establishment and growing Islamist movement. Sisters in Islam Executive Director Zainah Anwar insists that the goal is not a ban but simply allowing women to choose whether to participate in a polygynous marriage or not. (In comments to the New Straits Times [March 19, 2003], she made clear her belief that few women would choose it.) When Anwar spoke in Washington, D.C. on the status of women under sharia in May of 2003, in the midst of the antipolygyny campaign, her prepared remarks did not touch on polygyny at all. She walks a fine line in confronting the social and legal practices that set men above women in Malaysia. Her reform-from-within approach--she is a believing Sunni Muslim--is comparable to Ebadi's in Iran. Intrepid as lion tamers, these women have a prudence that tells them when and where to confront, when and where to desist. Their work does not receive any backing at all from certain feminists: namely, the multicultural and postmodern ones considered to be at the cutting edge of academic thought in the West. "Polygamy can be liberating and empowering," said one such cutting-edge feminist, Miriam Cooke, head of Middle East Women's Studies at Duke University. If we could just shed our Western predilection for monogamy, Cooke told Kay S. Hymowitz of City Journal (Winter 2003), "we might imagine polygamy working." She speculated to Hymowitz that some wives may be relieved not to have to service a husband so often, while other wives may use the opportunity to take on new sexual partners, too. When Cooke was asked how likely wives would be, in strict Muslim settings, to go on sexual adventures, her reply was the post-modern equivalent of a shrug: "I don't know. I'm interested in discourse." A male social anthropologist at the University of Oslo was described as positively "fundamentalist-friendly" by the literary critic Bruce Bawer, writing in Partisan Review (July 22, 2002): One reason for the high number of rapes by Muslims [in Norway], explained the professor, was that in their native countries "rape is scarcely punished," since Muslims "believe that it is women who are responsible for rape." The professor's conclusion was not that Muslim men living in the West needed to adjust to Western norms, but the exact opposite: "Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it." Shirin Ebadi's and Zainah Anwar's efforts to defend women ground under the heel of sharia, Afghan women seeking to vote under a new constitution--none of these causes would make even the smallest amount of headway if such ostentatious relativism were the norm in the wider world beyond the elite campuses of the United States and Europe. At least the "equal rights" feminists are animated by a conviction that there are rights everyone shares; having taken leave of that conviction, the academic left is capable of excusing the worst cruelties of our time--as long as the perpetrators are members of "the Other." As Azar Nafisi has said: "In the strange world of Middle Eastern Studies, any attempt to condemn gender apartheid is branded an imposition of Western values." Feminism(s) and freedom HOW DO WESTERN women stack up against the above-outlined standard of Islamic feminism--a feminism that is respectful of religious faith, committed to pluralism, and protective of monogamyh The truth is that Western feminists and liberals of various stripes fall short in different ways and to different degrees. Two liberal journalists, Sasha Polakow-Suransky and Giuliana Chamedes, wrote an article entitled "Europe's New Crusade" in the American Prospect (August 26, 2002). While it dealt with the ill-treatment of Muslim immigrants in Europe in the wake of September 11, the piece was most notable for its critique of European multiculturalists, gays, and feminists for their unhelpful political stances. The authors rightly faulted the multiculturalists for being silent about the threat posed by Islamist sects in Europe that advocate violence. They were far unhappier, though, with the 1970s-vintage feminist Oriana Fallaci, and the late homosexual politician Pim Fortuyn of the Netherlands for criticizing Islamic intolerance. After witnessing the Twin Towers' collapse, Fallaci wrote a broadside for the Italian daily Corriere della Sera in which she heaped scorn on "the sons of Allah," and the daughters, too, for submitting to polygyny and wearing the veil. Fortuyn, before being assassinated by a left-wing extremist, was gaining a following among Dutch voters in 2002 with his insistence that Muslim immigrants assimilate or be kept out of the Netherlands. According to the authors, Fallaci's and Fortuyn's confrontational defense of Western freedoms was harmful--it would only incite the white, Christian, heterosexual majority in Europe to greater heights of prejudice toward Muslim immigrants. Polakow-Suransky and Chamedes clearly preferred that both the anti-religious bent of "equal rights" feminism and militant homosexuality's anger stay trained on the Christian majority as the real problem (it being the locus, in their view, of most Continental religious, ethnic, and sexual bigotry). Thus, despite their chastisement of the see-no-evil multiculturalists, their article's overriding message was to let Islamism largely off the hook in the name of political correctness. In making their plea for the continued alliance of feminists and gays with multiculturalists under the umbrella of a broad left coalition, they seem to have lost sight of what it is about the West that is most worth defending. Several American feminists have put forward a feminist reading of the Koran, which in itself seems a very healthy development. One of the more prominent efforts in this line is Qu'ran and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective (Oxford University Press, 1999) by Amina Wadud, an African-American convert to Islam. Inasmuch as it is a linguist's highly detailed study of the Arabic text of the Koran, I am not able to judge whether sound reasoning has been used to reach the conclusion that the words of the Prophet Muhammad offer justice to women as well as to men. Certainly Wadud is at one with the Islamic feminists I have been discussing in saying that domineering male interpreters of the text, not the text itself, are responsible for misogynistic practices under the aegis of Islam. Nor do readers of Wadud find a breezy multicultural endorsement of polygyny; she roundly condemns it. The trouble comes when she announces that two of the three "commentators whose exegetical works were consulted" for Qu'ran and Woman were Sayyid Qutb and Syed Abdul Ala Maulana Maudoodi, the two principal Sunni theoreticians of Islamism. The political project of Qutb--inciter of the destruction of infidels and the coercion of nonfundamentalist Muslims--was to cure the Muslim world of the "hideous schizophrenia" caused by separating church and state. Yet to hear Wadud tell it, Qutb, in his writings on the Koran, "discusses the shared benefits and responsibility between men and women in the Islamic social system of justice" and is generally something of a feminist. This is not easy to reconcile with his rabid reaction against the social mixing of the sexes, mentioned above. True, one could argue that Qutb stood for a sexual politics of "separate (very separate) but equal." But Wadud does not so argue. Neither Qutb nor Maudoodi (the foremost jihadi ideologue of the Indian subcontinent) is presented in political context. Filling in that context would have meant defending Qutb's and Maudoodi's fundamentalism or else trying to deny it. In any case, exercises in mainstreaming these ideologists of holy war do not serve the cause of women. The feminist reading of the Koran advanced by Asma Gull Hasan is not that of a scholar but that of a young American giving the illiberal elders in her family a hard time. Apparently building upon schoolwork she did at Wellesley College, Hasan put together American Muslims: The New Generation (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001), a book combining the relativism of the multicultural feminists, the policy diktats of the "equal rights" feminists, and hefty doses of complaint about her fellow Americans' stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs as terrorists. It is also, in some respects, a rather charming work. The cheeriness with which the author scolds her uncle for his "chauvinist beliefs," or the way she doesn't let up on her traditionalist grandfather until he admits that, on Judgment Day, men and women will stand equally before God, are pure American jeune fille. Hasan is a pro-assimilation American Muslim who appreciates the opportunities that the United States has afforded her family, originally from Pakistan. She criticizes her fellow Muslims who display anti-Semitism. Yet the relativism of her outlook--and it, too, is very American--makes a muddle of her thinking. Most disappointingly, the book treats terrorist acts such as the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center not as an evil to be stopped, but strictly as a painful public relations problem for "Muslims like me, who would never think of hijacking planes." American Muslims was written before September 11; a year after al Qaeda struck, a Hasan op-ed in the New York Times ("Learning a Lesson for Ramadan," November 6, 2002) might have shown an improved understanding. No such luck, though. The op-ed, concerning her newfound reluctance to practice her faith openly during Ramadan for fear of discrimination, amplified the most vapid and bellyaching aspects of the book. Airport security was now a nightmare for her. Giving to charity risked government scrutiny. There was no allusion whatsoever to the event that changed not only her life but the skyline of Manhattan: the attack the year before that killed over 3,000 people. Such stubbornness places Asma Gull Hasan, to this day, in the mushy middle on terrorism--not a good place to be. Betty Friedan published a memoir a few years ago in which she recounted hearing, at international women's conferences, about things that women in faraway countries had to contend with, such as clitoridectomy. Sounding like somebody from Peoria, Illinois--which she is--Friedan wrote in Life So Far (Diane Publishing, 2000): "I thought there were certain absolute things that under no culture would you respect. Would you respect slaveryh Certain things in women's lives have to be absolute and under no culture should you respect the mutilation of young girls." When a woman points a blameful finger--and that has been women's job since time immemorial--her words gain force insofar as they draw upon eternal verities. To be sure, in her newspaper cri de coeur (which she later expanded into a book), Oriana Fallaci went overboard in calling the veil "stupid" and belittling wives willing to participate in polygynous marriages. Likewise, the secularism of feminist thinkers like Friedan can be rigid in a way that recalls not American history, tradition, or constitutional principles, but the Jacobins' extirpation of faith from the public square. Yet for all that, American women would do well to negotiate the tensions now being felt between the Judeo-Christian West and the Muslim East with a moral compass aligned more closely with Fallaci and Friedan than with the multiculturalist or the grievance specialist. September 11 has clarified matters for many. Left-liberal intellectuals are--or at least some of them are--groping their way toward a defense of the West that puts them alongside, if not fervently with, the Bush administration. This is happening even as conservatives make the case that the fight against terrorism is a fight against people who would mistreat women and stone homosexuals. The women writing in the American Prospect, Polakow-Suransky and Chamedes, registered the conservatives' arguments and were not amused. It bothered them when "male politicians ... suddenly began invoking women's emancipation" as if they cared about it. The warning they issued to feminists and homosexual activists was that "their causes have been effectively adopted and appropriated by those who have claimed the mantle of defending [European] tolerance in the face of intolerant Islam." It's a rather petty warning to issue. Why not let anyone who is willing--Westerners and those struggling in the Muslim world to emulate the pluralism and democracy we enjoy--converge on the need to bring about a decent life for women (and men), who deserve to have their fundamental rights respectedh This is, in fact, what the woman question brings out especially well: the rights of human beings that are manifest not in any penumbra of any constitution but in the full light of day. As one of the supporters of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a woman from Denmark, put it: "Once in a while you can have your doubts about whether you are a feminist or not. But you cannot, even for a second, doubt that you are an Afghan feminist." (1) Interview with Ken Myers, Mars Hill Audio Journal (November/December 2002). (2) See the chapter devoted to Shaarawi in Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, eds., Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (Indiana University Press, 1990). Lauren Weiner has written about women in politics, history, and

literature for publications including the Wall Street Journal, the Baltimore Sun, the Weekly Standard and the New Criterion.

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