Islam-Muslims

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Are you kidding me!? Some Muslims actually support Donald Trump for president

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Hey, remember that time Donald Trump called for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the U.S.?"

It's kind of hard to forget (but if you need refreshment, click here, here, here, here and here).

To read most news reports, Trump is the King of Islamophobia. So it's obvious that no serious, clear-thinking follower of Islam would deign to support Trump for president. Right?

Well, actually ...

There are some interesting stories in the mainstream press this week that quote Muslim supporters of Trump. Reuters, for example, has a story on a campaign to register a million Muslim voters against Trump. But near the end of that piece, the wire service quotes the Muslim who offered a brief benediction Tuesday night at the Republican National Convention:

U.S. Muslim backers of Trump said they were trying to build their own coalitions in swing states.
Baltimore businessman Sajid Tarar said he launched American Muslims for Trump because he favored Trump's stance on combating radical Islam.
"ISIS (an acronym for the Islamic State), al Qaeda, Taliban, they have killed more Muslims than anything else, and that's a message Muslims need to hear and understand," he said, referring to various militant groups.


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Awards ahead? Top guns roll out quality work on Saudi life, female Arab Muslims in Olympics

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Awards ahead? Top guns roll out quality work on Saudi life, female Arab Muslims in Olympics

Two of the remaining big guys in news have run some excellent long-form newspaper journalism recently looking at the social impact of conservative Islam in Saudi Arabia and across the Arab world, including its hobbling of would-be female Arab Olympic athletes.

The big guys are The Washington Post and The New York Times, two of the few remaining mainstream newspapers still able and willing to invest heavily in time-consuming, difficult to produce, international stories with global religious/cultural/political consequences.

If you haven't already, take the time to read these pieces in full. They're great reads and informative. (C'mon,  put away Pokemon Go for 20-30 minutes). The requisite links are below.

Let's look first at the Times offering.

Times veteran Middle East correspondent Ben Hubbard -- his Facebook page says he "spent weeks and weeks" in Saudi Arabia exploring Wahhabi Islam's hold on Saudi society -- opens his piece with the plight of a former muckety-muck in the kingdom's so-called religious police.)

Ahmed Qassim al-Ghamdi's world turned upside down when he began questioning what he was doing, and went public with his doubts.

Here's a chunk of Hubbard's piece that explains what happened to Ghamdi.

So he spoke out. In articles and television appearances, he argued that much of what Saudis practiced as religion was in fact Arabian cultural practices that had been mixed up with their faith.


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Muslims and the GOP: Charlotte Observer shuns real questions for public relations

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Good hustle, Charlotte Observer. You knew Rose Hamid staged a one-woman protest at Donald Trump's rally in South Carolina. So when she showed up in a hijab in Cleveland during the Republican National Convention, you  pounced with a profile and indepth on Muslim-American relations. 

But why the lame, propagandistic headline -- "Charlotte Muslim leader brings message of love to Republican convention"? You could have written "Triteness Alert!" in fewer words.

And the top of the story ain't no model of fresh reporting either:

Red flower pen in hand, Charlotte’s Rose Hamid spoke in Cleveland’s Public Square Monday, delivering the message she hopes to bring to a larger audience at this week’s Republican National Convention: that Islam is not a violent religion to be feared.
"It doesn’t have to be us versus them," she told a few dozen listeners. "These terrorist groups are not following the Islamic doctrine."

Hamid may be telegenic and articulate, as when she talked to the BBC after being tossed out of the rally in Rock Hill, S.C. But that doesn't make it a good idea to recycle clichés that could have been written by, say, Nihad Awad.

Especially because in this story, we heard directly from Awad, head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. He was in Cleveland the same day, saying, "We all have the same love for and commitment to America." Triteness by association, I guess.

Only in paragraph four does the Observer spell out its thesis: the contrast between loving, patriotic American Muslims and a political party that is turning against them:


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Women, rape, Germany and immigrants: What's missing in the news coverage?

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Only once in my life have I been surrounded by a mob of men.

I had just celebrated my 30th birthday in Jerusalem with friends and was heading for the southern Israeli city of Beersheva. To get there, I had to head through the Old City, out of the Damascus Gate, then somehow find the Egged bus terminal for the two-hour trip. I had just embarked on this route on a Friday afternoon just when crowds of Muslim men began leaving the Temple Mount after prayer. I was dressed modestly in a long skirt and long sleeves, but my head was not covered.

The street went from empty to packed in a few minutes. So many men –- I could see no women -- were pressed against me, I could have picked up my feet and been carried along. Then I felt someone reach under my skirt and make his way up my leg. Terrified, I whirled around and ordered him in English to back off. All the men around me laughed. Knowing things could get out of control fast and that I’d be on the losing end, I pushed my way through the crowd until I got through the gate.

A few years later when I was back in town with a different tour, I insisted that at least one of the men in our group accompany me at all times in the Old City to cut back on the harassment. Which is why I have a lot of sympathy for the 1,000-plus German women who have reported that they were sexually assaulted in Cologne and other cities on New Year’s Eve. You cannot imagine what it's like when it’s you against a crowd.

Earlier this month, the news came out that 2,000 men were involved in the attacks. That’s a small army, folks. But when the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle described the incidents, a key detail was missing: 

A Federal Criminal Police Agency (BKA) inquiry into the wide-spread New Year's Eve sexual assaults uncovered 900 cases of sexual crimes with over 1,200 victims, German media reported on Sunday.


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Who was behind the 'honor killing' of that Pakistani model? Conservatives!

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"Honor killings": It's hard to think of a more ironic phrase. In some lands, like Pakistan, it means to kill a relative -- most often a girl or woman -- because of anxieties over actual or perceived immorality.

It happened again with the weekend murder of Qandeel Baloch, who has been called the Pakistani Kim Kardashian for her many tweeted cheesecake photos, Facebook posts and appearances in videos. Baloch, 26, was strangled by a brother for "honorable" reasons.

At GetReligion, we've complained for years about the reticence of many media professionals to link the killings with some versions of Islam. And here we go again, with USA Today  blaming nebulously described "conservatives":

Baloch, whose real name was Fauzia Azeem, shot to fame and notoriety with a series of social media postings that would be tame by Western standards but were deeply scandalous by conservative Pakistani societal norms. She cultivated an outrageous public persona, recently promising to perform a public striptease if the Pakistani cricket team won a major tournament.
Baloch had a large following of more than 700,000 people on her official Facebook page. She posted recently she was “trying to change the typical orthodox mindset of people who don’t wanna come out of their shells of false beliefs and old practices.”

You know conservatives. Those are the guys who oppress women and hold back progress and cut welfare and keep out immigrants. The heavy implication is that in Pakistan and in the U.S., conservatives are pretty much alike.


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What happened in Turkey? Look for two words -- 'secular' and 'Ataturk' -- in news reports

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So what was the attempted coup in Turkey all about? It seems pretty clear at this point that no one really knows (or they are not saying). Were experts at the White House and the U.S. state department really flying blind on this one, as appeared to have been the case?

I'm no expert on Turkish history in the 20th century, but I have been to Istanbul twice and heard the local experts explain that nation's unique standing as a "secular" Muslim state. In recent years, Turkey has been swinging in the direction of some form of Islamist regime, under the leadership of President (some would say "strongman") Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

During the modern era, the Turkish military -- with strong ties to the West -- have acted as defenders of the secular state, using blunt power to crush attempts to move toward any form of Islamist rule. Is that what happened this time? Or did some rebel group within the military actually try to take Turkey in a more radically religious direction? That would be a stunning development in a nation under pressure -- in the form of terrorism, at the very least -- from the Islamic State and its supporters.

Read the coverage. Do the experts not know the answer to this question or they are not saying?

As you read, look for two words -- "secular" and "Ataturk." How far did you have to read to hit those crucial terms?

We are, of course, talking about Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, not the airport named in his honor. Here is the opening of a History Channel biography on this giant in modern Turkish history.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938) was an army officer who founded an independent Republic of Turkey out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. He then served as Turkey’s first president from 1923 until his death in 1938, implementing reforms that rapidly secularized and westernized the country. Under his leadership, the role of Islam in public life shrank drastically, European-style law codes came into being, the office of the sultan was abolished and new language and dress requirements were mandated. But although the country was nominally democratic, Atatürk at times stifled opposition with an authoritarian hand.

That opposition Ataturk and then his followers kept crushing?


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Massacre in France: RNS promises debate on Islam and terrorism, but doesn't deliver

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"Bastille Day attack reignites terrorism and religion debate," trumpets a headline at Religion News Service. Big over-promise there. The article has less debating than intoning -- with one leader after another denouncing terrorism in the name of Islam.

Details are still emerging about the murderous drive of a 19-ton truck that killed at least 84 and injured 202 in Nice, France. Tunisian-born Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the driver, left no note or video, as do many suicidal terrorists. 

Still, supporters of ISIS/ISIL/the Islamic State have been “celebrating the massacre,” as the Washington Post reports. It notes also that five years ago, Al-Qaida's online magazine recommended using vehicles to “mow down” victims.

The possibility that Bouhlel was a jihadi prompted a range of religious leaders -- from Pope Francis to Shawqi Allam, the Grand Mufti of Egypt -- to condemn the attack. Here's a sample from the RNS piece:


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Mosque and state: Cut 'n' paste approach mars stories on polling controversy

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What would happen if mainstream media did their own reporting? They just might avoid the kinds of gaps and gaffes marring the coverage of a controversy over a South Florida mosque.

The Islamic Center of Boca Raton has been used as a polling site for some years by the Palm Beach County supervisor of elections, but this year she changed her mind. Why? Because she says she got a lot of complaints, including threats. 

It's a more than worthwhile story acting as a kind of microcosm for national questions of tolerance, terrorism, religious freedom and church (or mosque) and state. And it's worth more than the cut 'n' paste jobs that have been passing for, you know, showing up and/or phoning.

The story came out last Friday in the South Florida Sun Sentinel, but it wasn't till midweek that it caught on in national media. 

Then the gaffes began.

The New York Daily News ran a photo supposedly showing the Islamic Center. But it's really the Assalam Center, a different mosque a little more than a mile south. And the Washington Post today led with, "Since at least the year 2010, citizens have cast their votes within the pastel green walls of the mosque. No, they haven't. The light green mosque opened in 2012. Before then, the members rented space at a shopping plaza.

And those are just the easiest soft spots to spot.

Aside from its error on the ICBR building, the WaPo article may not contain a single original word. It's assembled from eight sources -- including the Sun Sentinel, the Palm Beach Post and West Palm Beach-based WPTV. The newspaper also added canned statements from two Congress members, the Florida Family Association and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. WaPo's only redeeming feature is admitting its sources.

The Associated Press doesn't even wait for you to read its lede. "People Vote in Churches and Synagogues. Why Not a Mosque?," says its headline, which was used by ABC News and elsewhere.


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Terror with Tunisian DNA: Wait, how does Brexit figure into this hellish equation?

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While watching various news channels last night as details of the horrors in Nice, France, emerged, I heard a commentator make an interesting statement. I think this was on CNN, but I am not sure, because -- as is often the case on live television -- I have not been able to find a reference online to confirm this.

So let's just talk about the world of TV commentary, in general. I heard the same formula several times on different channels.

While talking about the impact of the truck attack on Europe and the future, someone offered this equation: First there was Brexit and now this. It's hard to know where things are headed.

I don't think this was a statement of moral equivalency. I think the point was that Brexit was an attack on Europe and now there is other new attack, etc., etc.

No one ever stated the question the other way around: Might Brexit have been, in part, a reaction to the rising surge of terror in an increasingly tense and divided Europe? Continue with that logic and you end up with another question: Is the post-9/11 United States -- which often follows Europe, on a slow delay -- a few terrorist attacks away from a more blunt, dare I say "populist" discussion of terror and political, cultural and, yes, religious issues linked to it?

I am not, by the way, talking about Donald Trump. I'm talking about the mainstream press.

Let's look at the top of two newspaper reporters about the truck attack in Nice. Which is from an elite American source and which is from a populist source on the other side of the Atlantic?

First there is this:


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