Monday, April 16, 2007

Pushing Back There, Capitulating Here

Two stories on a single subject. First from Pakistan: Karachi protest at Sharia mosque


Tens of thousands of people have protested in the Pakistani city of Karachi against a radical mosque and its religious schools in Islamabad.

The chief cleric of the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque), Abdul Aziz, had announced a Taleban-style Islamic court would be set up to curb "vulgar" activities.

He also gave the government a month to close video shops and brothels.

The protest organisers, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), branded the mosque "religious terrorists".

The MQM is largely supportive of the policies of President Pervez Musharraf.

MQM leader Altaf Hussain told Sunday's rally by telephone from London via loudspeakers: "Islam is a religion of peace and there is no place in it for using force or terrorism.

"The people of Islamabad are insecure and under threat due to the activities of these religious terrorists."

Abdul Aziz is a vocal critic of the Pakistan government's support for the US-led "war on terrorism".

Last week he announced a court based on Islamic Sharia law and began an anti-vice campaign.

The court passed a fatwa on Tourism Minister Nilofar Bakhtiar after she was pictured hugging a man following a paragliding flight.

It is nice to see so many good folks in Pakistan resisting this "bridge to the 11th century." It is a little sad that even the BBC feels the need to portray the choice involved as being "religion or brothels." At least the protesters get it, even if the BBC is a little fuzzy on the subject.

Whenwhile in Minnesota the Balkanization of the US continues: Ritual-washing area for Muslims at MCTC may be only the beginning


Last week, I wrote about Minneapolis Community and Technical College, which is planning to install facilities to help Muslim students perform ritual washing before daily prayers. It's a simple matter of extending "hospitality" to newcomers, says President Phil Davis -- no different than providing a fish option in the college cafeteria for Christian students during Lent.
MCTC is apparently the first public institution in Minnesota to enter this unfamiliar territory. Where is it looking for guidance?

Dianna Cusick, MCTC's director of legal affairs, is overseeing the project. She referred me to the Muslim Accommodations Task Force, whose website she is using as a primary resource (www.startribune.com/2617). "They've done all the research," she said.

On the site, I found information about the handful of public colleges that have "wudu," or ritual bathing, facilities.

But I also discovered something more important for colleges seeking guidance on "accommodations": Projects like MCTC's are likely to be the first step in a long process.

...

At Georgetown University, Muslim women can live apart in housing that enables them to "sleep in an Islamic setting," as the website puts it. According to a student at the time the policy was adopted, the university housing office initially opposed the idea, on grounds that all freshman should have the experience of "living in dorms and dealing with different kinds of people." That might sound appealing, Muslim students told a reporter in an article featured on the website. But in their view, the reporter wrote, "learning to live with 'different kinds of people' " actually "causes more harm than good" for Muslims, because it requires them to live in an environment that "distracts them from their desire to become better Muslims, and even draw[s] weaker Muslims away from Islam."

The task force isn't operated by overly enthusiastic college students. Its professional staff, based in the Washington, D.C., area, includes coordinators who provide legal advice, teach students to lobby, write letters on their behalf, and help them overcome "obstacles" such as college administrators' concerns about violating the separation of church and state.

The Muslim Accommodations Task Force is a project of the Muslim Student Association of the U.S. and Canada. MSA's mission is to enable Muslims here "to practice Islam as a complete way of life," and its "main goal" is "spreading Islam," according to its website. The association calls itself the "landmark Muslim organization in North America," and says it has chapters on 600 campuses.

On MSA's website (www.msa-national.org), the sort of inclusive language used by the Muslim Accommodations Task Force gives way to hard-hitting advice for insiders. One downloadable publication --"Your Chapter's Guide to Campus Activism" -- describes how activists can advance political positions such as "restoring justice within the Palestinian territories," and opposition to the Patriot Act and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The cover features a student with a megaphone, and the slogan "Speak Out! Stand Up! Say It Loud!"

MSA views itself as America's moral and political vanguard. "As Muslims, we are a nation elected by God to lead humanity,"

Isn't this exactly the sort of statement that would get liberals everywhere hopping mad if Pat Robertson said it?

Just wondering.

Over at CQ they ahd the following to say about this:


These Muslim activists want to create a separate society within the United States for Muslims, and they want the US to provide them the facilities with which to create it. Separate dorms, separate cafeterias, Muslim-only physical-education classes -- they want a separate Muslim college at MCTC and everywhere else. It's self-initiated apartheid.

Forty years ago and more, we had segregationists insisting that different peoples could not live within the same area without dividing lines. They used the same excuses as multiculturalists do today, too; each culture feels more secure when they can exclude others. We heard it from white supremacists and from black separatists -- and we proved them wrong. We made sure that people knew America stood for peaceful integration and not for Balkanization, even for what seemed to be good reasons to some.

Now we have Muslims who want to reopen the argument in order to create a closed society for themselves within the US. We have no problem with Muslims who integrate into our society and become Americans in deed as well as in name. If Muslims want to open their own universities to ensure the proper exercise of their religion, well, that works too. But if Muslims want us to recreate the French banlieus and an homage to Jim Crow so they can get even more insular than they already are here in the US, then we need to put our foot down -- washed or unwashed -- and say, "Enough!"

We do not need religious apartheid at MCTC or any other public university or facility. If devout Muslims do not want to integrate into American society, then they need to find another place to live. Period.


This is exactly right. The situation we have here is not the same as the efforts of previous immigrant groups to hold on to some aspects of their ethnic heritage through social clubs or "old world" language newspapers and the like. Here you have groups bent upon the eventual destruction of the liberties we all enjoy as Americans because it is inherently "harmful to Islam" to their mind. This is intolerable in the United States. Now, if they wanted to segregate themselves out of mainstream society, such as folks like the Amish do, that is one thing, but to demand that they should be allowed to create a separate United States is not acceptable.

If that is what they want they need to find somewhere else to live.

It is sad to see so many in higher education willing to sell out the principles of this nation at the drop of a hat.

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