Thursday - January 18, 2007
A letter from the National Association of Muslim American Women
Or This is What Tolerance Must have Looked Like in 9th Century Christendom
Dr. Anisa Abd el Fattah sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice on January 12, 2007. You can download it here. You really need to read this letter. To do so will give you an insight into how members of mainstream Muslim groups really think.
To give you a flavor of her mindset and her fundamental lack of the concept of free speech in the United States, here are the first few paragraphs:
This letter and its supporting documentation is a complaint to the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, Criminal Division, and also the Executive Office for United States Attorneys. This complaint alleges that various organizations and individuals have provided misleading and highly politicized information, and testimonies to US law enforcement agencies, and also the US Congress that was, and is aimed at creating a political, legal, social, and financial environment that is hostile to Muslims and Arab Americans, and that causes Muslim and Arab-Americans to suffer discrimination, persecution, and the deprivation and denial of Constitutional rights, and equal protection under the law. Among these organizations and individuals are the American-Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC), better known as the “Jewish lobby”, American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Congress B’Nai B’rith, and also the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, along with such individuals as Steven Emerson, Daniel Pipes, Rita Katz, Steven Schwartz, Evan Kohlman, and others who have made public statements that have contributed to the creation of an environment in the United States that is hostile to Arab Americans and Muslims, leading to numerous acts of deprivation and violation of civil liberties and also civil rights.
This complaint is based upon statements made that may reach the level of hate speech in some instances, and in other instances, such statements may reach the level of perjury, carried out to mislead the US Congress and US law enforcement into carrying out overly
aggressive legislative and law enforcement campaigns that result in legislation, raids and arrests that deprive Muslims and Arab Americans of equal protection under the law, and deprivation and denial of civil liberties and rights guaranteed to all American equally in the US Constitution, among these being the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
This complaint especially alleges the following:
1. Jewish organizations and activists have created an “enemies” list that includes Muslims, Arabs and white nationalists’ organizations here in the US. This list is compromised of individuals and groups that are deemed threats or enemies of the State of Israel.
2. These organizations have used their financial resources and also their formidable political influence to purposefully poison public opinion against Muslims, Arabs, and Islam in an attempt to demonize and vilify the same for political purposes, and to
create an environment conducive to the deprivation of and denial of Muslim and Arab constitutional rights and repression of religious freedoms in respect to Islam.
Allow me to summarize her letter and mindset. We don't like Jews. These Jews said some things about Muslims I didn't like. The Jews hurt my feelings. Therefore, I want the United States government to use its powers to suppress the speech of the Jews because I consider what they say hateful.
Did I miss anything?
Dear Dr. Anisa Abd el Fattah, you suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding of the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of free speech. This is not Canada, nor Britain, nor Italy, or any nation of the Middle East which place severe limits on the free exchange of ideas. While these nations do limit speech rights, we do not restrict speech because it is hateful, or because it offends. The United States takes its right to free speech very seriously.
To start with, the First Amendment to the Constitution states: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...." Next, in the Supreme Court case, New York Times v. Sullivan, 1964, the court found that speech, when it dealt with public figures and their actions was nearly "absolute." Justice Brennan quoted John Stuart Mill, who said, "even a false statement may be deemed to make a valuable contribution to public debate." In otherwords, speech as applied to political figures is protected. Even false facts are protected speech.
In 1967, these free speech rights were enlarged, not only to protect debate applied to political figures, but also to "public" figures. For instance, members of CAIR are fair game. In Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts, public figures were now subject to the same new rules which made proving libel or slander against a critic almost impossible.
In short, Dr. Anisa Abd el Fattah, you can't use government to repress the free speech rights of groups or individuals. To do so, is simply un-American.
Here are some interesting background details about Dr. Anisa Abs el Fattah that are freely and easily available on the web:
Dr. Anisa Abd el Fattah is the President of the National Association of Muslim American Women, and is associated with the International Association for Muslim Women and Children, a UN accredited NGO with the UN Habitat conference, and the Division on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinians. She is the past President of the United Association for Studies and Research, a northern Va. research institute and think tank. She is the Assistant Director of the Islamic Political Action Council of America, and a member of the Board of Directors for ( CAIR), Council on American Islamic Relations. She co-authored with Dr. Ahmed Yousef, "The Agent: Truth Behind the Anti-Muslim Campaign in America", and "Islam and America: A New Reading." She is also the Editor of the Middle East Affairs Journal (MEAJ) house of organ of UASR. She is a regular contributor to the American Muslim, published by the Muslim American Society. Sister Anisa also authored, "Justice and Normative Law: Common Ground Underlying Christian-Muslim Cooperation," and "Revolution, The People, Basic Rights, and Social Order; The Institutionalization of the Islamic Revolution in Iran."
Of course, her anti-Semitism and anti-American stance (though to be honest, her anti-American stance sounds much like that of the American left, liberal Democrats like Jimmy Carter, or 95% of American college professors) can be found in numerous articles across the net, including this one which blames Jews and Christians for Palestinian oppression, unheard of slaughter in Iraq and the defamation and repression of Muslims in America itself. Once again, read the whole polemic, but this will give you a flavor:
"What can we do about those people, who claim to be US patriots who knowingly sought to use Muslims, and especially Muslim Americans as scapegoats and decoys while they secretly carried out the very crimes, and harbored in their hearts the very obvious hatred for the US, our way of life and our Constitution, that they had so passionately blamed on Muslims?"
The Jack Abramoff scandal is more than a scandal; it is a cause for international shame. It is also the story of how religious zealots, terrorists and fanatics took over the United States government, undermined our foreign interests, ruined our credibility, and cost us our prestige as a trustworthy world leader, while leading more than 2000 US soldiers and Marines to their deaths along with thousands of innocent Muslims and others, in pursuit of a fantasy that they call Zion. We all assumed that their Zionist dreamland was Israel; we now know that it also obviously included the United States. The immense shame that our Congress should be experiencing as a result of its failure to protect our country and our children from these zealots is not yet apparent, since our so-called “elected representatives” in Washington, the best Congress that money could buy, is busy discarding the evidence of their role in undermining world peace, while destroying the United States internationally, and their possibly criminal culpability in the untimely deaths of American soldiers and Marines, and more than 30 thousand innocent civilians in Iraq, and hundreds of thousands more in Palestine and Lebanon, in the process. No doubt at some point, the international courts will take up these issues.
Looking back, it seems now that 1994 was a special year in US history. It is the year that Jack Abramoff is said to have begun his Congressional shopping spree, looking for US Congress people for sale. It is also the year that Benjamin Netanyahu, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and other Zionist notables crafted the now infamous “Clean Break” strategy that led the United States into Iraq under the false pretense that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, a lie that was crafted by Judith Miller, a Zionist ideologue and possible Israeli intelligence operative who posed as a New York Times journalist, and who also played a still unknown role in the outing of Valerie Plame, the CIA officer whose husband was one of the first people to challenge the lie that Hussein had attempted to purchase chemicals needed for a nuclear weapons program in Africa. Abramoff seems to have arrived in Washington around the same time that the Oklahoma City bombing took place, which led to the first major legislative attack on Muslim Americans, and US civil liberties through the Omnibus Anti-Terrorism Act, which has now been followed by two additional bombings, and two additional bodies of anti-terrorism legislation including the so-called Patriot Act. It was the year that PBS aired the now discredited “shockumentary” Jihad in America, written and produced by Judith Miller’s Zionist colleague Steven Emerson, a so-called journalist, and the father of secret evidence in US courts, that the Nation magazine reported had close ties to Israeli military intelligence, and the Israeli Likud party. It was the year of the first media and public “backlash” against Muslims in the United States, which left in its wake a number of burned mosques, deaths, and defamation. Muslims and Islam were these Zionist terrorists’ targets, scapegoats and decoys in a Zionist war against the world, which they have lost.
As we await the results of the numerous FBI investigations of those who took Abramoff money for favors, seeking to ascertain how exactly that money was spent, we can perhaps begin to connect the dots, hoping to see the big picture that will probably never grace our television news shows or newspapers, no matter what the results of those investigations might be. Just as the AIPAC (American/Israeli Political Action Committee) spy scandal went unreported, don’t expect to hear the real, and very serious consequences of what Abramoff and his network have done to our country, our Constitution and Muslims, here and abroad. The price in loss of lives, US prestige, credibility, and pride is uncountable. While the taxpayer money is countable, we can never get it back. The good news is that God has spared us the worst of it, if you can imagine that we were in store for much worse, and much more, including perhaps military attacks on Syria and Iran that would without doubt lead us into another world war, and perhaps the Armageddon of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic teachings, that they seem to long for.
It goes without saying that Abramoff’s money was spent for Congressional favors, and media access. Such favors seem to have included making Muslims the most hated people in the United States, and Islam the most hated religion in the world. Who can forget how the so-called Christian “right” went wrong, when its leaders used the media in our country to launch an unprecedented attack to defame Muslim citizens and our religion, and to deny us our civil rights. Such attacks, if they had been launched against Jews, African Americans, Native Americans or women would have caused a country-wide uproar, yet after Emerson’s fraudulent claim that all Muslims were involved in an international plot to take over, or to destroy the US, it was open target day on Islam and Muslims, and the Christian right took every shot they could get, and the media saw to it that they got plenty of them.
Wow, if this is what passes for moderation, tolerance, and love of country in mainstream Muslim organizations, the Republic has a problem on its hand.
The Volokh Conspiracy, Public Secrets, Classical Values (a really good read on the subject), and Atlas Shrugs coverage of this story encouraged me to dig a little more.