Negative media portrayl of Muslims drives Islamophobia

The western media is reporting that a poor image of Pakistan may be behind the lacklustre response to fund-raising appeals to support rescue efforts. The widespread coverage of violent protests against western countries on the streets of Pakistan has indeed, helped generate a negative stereotype of Pakistan.

While we may not be able to quantify how the rest of the world views Pakistan, we may still be able to see how the rest of the world views Muslims in general.

The Pew Global Attitudes Project conducts opinion polls about matters of global interest. The opinion poll conducted in spring 2009 carried a question about what opinion people had of Muslims. The question was put to 20,000-plus respondents in 25 countries, including some Muslim majority countries. I got hold of the raw data set, which I analysed to determine whether people held a favourable or unfavourable opinion of Muslims.

As expected, Muslims living in Muslim majority countries indeed had a very high opinion of themselves. However, a very large segment of respondents from Muslim minority countries reported having somewhat of an unfavourable view of Muslims. No fewer than 42 per cent of the respondents hailing from Muslim minority countries reported unfavourable opinion of Muslims. On the other hand, only 10 per cent respondents from Muslim majority countries reported an unfavourable opinion of Muslims.

The graph below indicates that Egyptians, Indonesians, Lebanese and Pakistanis have the most favourable opinion of Muslims, as is indicated by the green colour bars. Over 90 per cent of the respondents in these countries reported a favourable opinion of Muslims. Not much surprise there.

The western media is reporting that a poor image of Pakistan may be behind the lacklustre response to fund-raising appeals to support rescue efforts. The widespread coverage of violent protests against western countries on the streets of Pakistan has indeed, helped generate a negative stereotype of Pakistan.

While we may not be able to quantify how the rest of the world views Pakistan, we may still be able to see how the rest of the world views Muslims in general.

The Pew Global Attitudes Project conducts opinion polls about matters of global interest. The opinion poll conducted in spring 2009 carried a question about what opinion people had of Muslims. The question was put to 20,000-plus respondents in 25 countries, including some Muslim majority countries. I got hold of the raw data set, which I analysed to determine whether people held a favourable or unfavourable opinion of Muslims.

As expected, Muslims living in Muslim majority countries indeed had a very high opinion of themselves. However, a very large segment of respondents from Muslim minority countries reported having somewhat of an unfavourable view of Muslims. No fewer than 42 per cent of the respondents hailing from Muslim minority countries reported unfavourable opinion of Muslims. On the other hand, only 10 per cent respondents from Muslim majority countries reported an unfavourable opinion of Muslims.

The graph below indicates that Egyptians, Indonesians, Lebanese and Pakistanis have the most favourable opinion of Muslims, as is indicated by the green colour bars. Over 90 per cent of the respondents in these countries reported a favourable opinion of Muslims. Not much surprise there.

Daily Update

Somalis pay price of U.S idiocy

The US decision in 2006 to send Ethiopian troops into Somalia in 2006 was one of the stupidest moves in a very stupid decade. This week, some of the chickens spawned by that decision came home to roost.

On Monday the Al-Shabaab militia launched a “massive war” against the 6,000 African Union peacekeepers, most of them Ugandan, who are protecting the so-called government of Somalia. In reality, however, all it actually governs is a few dozen blocks in Mogadishu, and its members are just a group of Somali warlords and clan leaders who proclaimed themselves to be the “Transitional Federal Government” (TFG) in 2004.

Six “members of Parliament” were among the 40 people killed when an Al-Shabaab suicide squad stormed the Al-Muna hotel in Mogadishu on Tuesday, but there will be no by-elections to replace them. They were never elected in the first place. The TFG made no progress in reuniting the country, and now its surviving members sit surrounded by Al-Shabaab fighters who control most of the sprawling capital.

Southern Somalia has been trapped in an unending civil war since the last real government collapsed in 1991, but the current round of killing was triggered when the United States invited Ethiopia to invade the country in 2006. This was a bit high-handed, especially since Ethiopia was Somalia’s traditional enemy, but Washington’s aim was to destroy the “Islamic Courts “ in Somalia.

The TFG failed utterly to impose its authority and restore order in Somalia, but the Islamic Courts Union took a different approach. Its roots were in the merchant class in Mogadishu, who simply wanted a safer environment to do business in, and they understood that Islam was the only common ground on which all of the country’s fissiparous clans and militias might be brought together again.

The Islamic courts, applying Shariah law, were the instrument by which the society would gradually be brought back under the rule of law — and for about six months, it worked amazingly well. The zones of peace and order spread throughout southern Somalia, the epicenter of the fighting, and trade and employment revived. A made-in-Somalia solution had spontaneously emerged from the chaos.

Inevitably, some of the younger supporters of the Islamic Courts movement enjoyed ranting in public about the virtues of Al-Qaeda, the wickedness of Americans, and other matters of which they knew little. Almost every popular movement has a radical youth wing that specializes in saying stupid and provocative things. It is the job of the adults, inside and outside the organization, to contain their excesses and NOT TO PANIC.

Alas, the United States panicked, or at least its intelligence agencies did. The mere word “Islamic” set off alarm bells in the Bush administration, which had the lamentable habit of shooting first and thinking later.

Washington, therefore, concluded that the Islamic Courts Union, Somalia’s best hope of escaping from perpetual civil war, was an enemy that must be removed. Since the TFG was clearly not up to that task, Washington asked Ethiopia, Somalia’s old enemy, to provide the necessary troops.

Ethiopia agreed because it does NOT want stability in its old enemy, Somalia. The Ethiopians understood perfectly well (even if Washington did not) that the presence of their troops in Somalia would drive out the moderate leaders of the Islamic Courts Union and leave the country at the mercy of the crazies in the youth wing. A prostrate and divided Somalia was clearly in Ethiopia’s long-term strategic interest, so why not? Especially since the United States financed the whole operation.

The Ethiopian troops invaded in late 2006 and the Islamic Courts Union was destroyed, leaving the field clear for the movement’s radical youth wing, Al-Shabaab (The Youth). Attacks on both the TFG and the Ethiopians multiplied, and civil war and chaos returned to Mogadishu. After two years the Ethiopians, having thoroughly wrecked any prospect of peace in Somalia, pulled their troops out and went home.

Since late 2008, only the 8,000 African Union troops in the country have kept alive the fiction of a Somali government friendly to the United States, but Al-Shabaab has now gone on the offensive. The two suicide bombs that killed 74 people in Kampala last month were a warning to Ugandans to bring their troops home from Somalia, and Al-Shabaab is now trying to overrun the last small patch of Somali territory still held by the TFG.

The northern half of former Somalia, ruled by the breakaway states of Puntland and Somaliland, is already at peace and will remain so. Southern Somalia will probably have to endure more years of violence and despair because Washington never understood that the Islamic Courts Union could be its tacit ally in stabilizing Somalia.

But nothing particularly bad will happen to anybody except Somalis, so that’s all right.
by Gwynne Dyer
Source: Arab News

Daily Update

Discrimination against Aboriginals, Muslims embedded in Australia:UN

The United Nations human rights panel has rebuked the Australian government over its treatment of Aboriginals.

At the release of a report from the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in Geneva, one of the authors said discrimination has become “embedded” in the Australian way of life.

Committee member Patrick Thornberry lamented the fact that the Australian constitution lacks any entrenched protection against racial discrimination.

He said that that had led to a kind of structurally embedded discrimination in the way the Aboriginal intervention was being handled in the Northern Territory.

“That may be a certain disappointment, if I may say so, that this issue particularly to do with Aboriginal communities – it could have been handled in a more sensitive and culturally sensitive way,” he said.

The committee criticised what it called the “unacceptably high level of disadvantage and social dislocation” for Indigenous people in the Northern Territory.

It welcomed the Labor government’s national apology to Indigenous Australians, but said that concrete steps to increase life expectancy or improve the rate of deaths in custody had not yet been demonstrated.

The committee’s recommendations were issued in a report following a regular review of Australia’s compliance with an international treaty of 1969 prohibiting racism.

The report also raised concerns about the handling of refugees and asylum seekers, as well as anti-terrorism measures; discrimination against newer, mainly Muslim, ethnic communities; and assaults on foreign students.

Refugees

CERD voiced concerns that the policy of processing refugees outside Australia meant that people seeking shelter in Australia were not being treated properly.

The treatment of refugees, especially those arriving from Afghanistan and Sri Lanka by boat, was a contentious issue during the federal election campaign.

On processing refugees, the committee recommended that the government:

•Review its mandatory detention regime for asylum seekers so that detention is a measure of last resort;

•End the suspension of processing visa applications from Afghanistan and standardise asylum processes regardless of the country of origin or form of entry;

•Develop proper reception arrangements, especially for children, some of whom are kept in detention-like conditions away from their parents;

•Ensure that asylum seekers are not forced back to their countries of origin when they are being returned.

Companies targeted

The panel also said Australia must tighten rules governing the behaviour of its companies, especially mining firms, towards indigenous people at home and abroad.

“The committee notes with concern the absence of a legal framework regulating the obligation of Australian corporations at home and overseas whose activities, notably in the extractive sector, when carried out on the traditional territories of indigenous peoples, have had a negative impact on indigenous peoples’ rights to land, health, living environment and livelihoods,” it said.

The 18-member committee of independent experts on racism also told Australia to do more to integrate recent immigrants from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and other Muslim countries and tackle racism against Indigenous people in Australia.

Suggestions included negotiating a treaty with Indigenous Australians, giving them better access to legal aid and tackling laws in the Northern Territory that discriminate on the basis of race.

The committee bemoaned the fact that Australia had not complied with all its previous recommendations and asked the government to report back on what it was doing about the latest concerns and recommendations at the end of October, 2012.
by Emma Alberici
Source: ABC News / Reuters

Daily Update

Ground Zero Mosque - STRAWMAN

Today as I was fiddling around fixing things in the garage, it suddenly struck me...

"Why is the left suddenly all excited and supportive of the "right to exercise your religious faith"?

"Why are people who regularly attacking people of faith suddenly supporting the right of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf to practice his faith wherever he wants, whenever he wants, however he wants?"

I know that they don't really support the right to exercise your faith. Examples abound where they attack people of Christian or Jewish faith for practicing their religion in public. Their hatred for Jews and Christians is well established.

And I know that religious faith can be exercised, but not without limits. You cannot build anything, anywhere and simply avoid restrictions by claiming that such restrictions violate your freedom of religion.

I think back to when I was a member of a church that was attempting to expand its sanctuary and the local government would not allow it. It was not a question of "freedom of religion" but rather the local neighbors complained about the plan. They did not like the style of the building, the height, the number of people it would draw in.

Then it occurred to me. "The pastor should have started screaming "1st amendment!!!" The fact that he was subject to the community approving his design was irrelevant if he simply screamed "1st amendment!!!" every time someone challenged his right to do what he wanted, when he wanted, how he wanted. After all...who is against the 1st amendment?

This is the strawman.

They claim its about freedom of religion but its not.

Its about the people of the community deciding who and what they want in that location. If the community does not want a Rauf, or a mosque in that location, then the people should speak out.

Rauf was recorded blaming the United States for the murder of Islamic people. "We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al-Qaida has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims,"

If the people of New York do not want this guy to build in their town, they have the right to speak out against him. And the government of that town has the right to listen to their people and refuse him.

This is not about 1st amendment rights. Its about the right of a community to decide whether or not they want a hate-monger to build his building in their town.

The strawman argument is exposed.

Daily Update