New Yorkers Against Religion-Based Bigotry

NYARBB's position against both Islamism and anti-Muslim bigotry

NYARBB will need to tread a very delicate balance between (1) opposing Islamism (the political doctrine that governments should be subject to Islamic law) and (2) opposing bigotry against Muslims.

Islamism is an exceedingly repressive and retrograde ideology. Its most extreme form can be found in Saudi Arabia, where there is zero freedom to practice any religion other than the most puritannical form of Sunni Islam. We need to take a strong stand against Islamist persecution of "apostates," persecution of gays, restrictions against women, etc., just as we also oppose the Christian religious right wing. We are stauch supporters of modern secular society, with separation of church (mosque) and state.

On the other hand, Muslims here in the U.S.A., including Muslim moderates and modernizing reformers, have themselves been targets of quite a bit of bigotry and harassment here in the U.S.A., especially after 9/11/2001. We need to oppose that, too. We also oppose the egregious human rights violations, e.g. torture, that have been justified in the name of opposing Islamist terrorism. We will be active in political movements against torture and in favor of indicting Bush and Cheney for war crimes and for starting a war based on lies.

Bigotry against Muslims harms other people besides just Muslims. For example, Sikhism is a religion distinct from Islam; it is the world's fifth largest religion, born in India. Because male Sikhs traditionally wear turbans, they are often harassed, here in the U.S.A., by ignorant folks who assume that anyone wearing a turban is not only a Muslim, but another Osama bin Laden. On similarly silly grounds, anti-Muslim bigotry also spills over into racist attitudes against Arabs (not all of whom are Muslim) and against other Middle Easterners, and against all South Asians.

We do not consider criticism of the more intolerant traditions of Muslim societies to be anti-Muslim bigotry. However: (1) Not all Muslims are Islamists. There are plenty of Muslims who appreciate a modern secular state. (2) Here in the West, even Islamists are entitled to the same rights as everyone else, including the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Although Islamist and Islamist-friendly Muslim organizations should be scrutinized carefully, they should not be assumed a priori to be terrorists and stripped of all their rights accordingly.

Bigotry against Muslims in general is often justified on the alleged grounds that moderate and reformist Muslims don't really exist, that all Muslims are really terrorism-supporting, apostate-killing extremists, some of whom just don't admit it.

In fact, Muslim moderates and modernizing reformers do exist. Furthermore, to oppose Islamism effectively, it behooves us to encourage all opponents of Islamism to support the efforts of Muslim reformers, e.g. by giving them publicity. We encourage an alliance between Muslim reformers and non-Muslim secularists to defend everyone's freedom. We will aim especially to help publicize those Muslim reformers who support the rights of GLBT people and polytheists.

We are also concerned about the rights and safety of ex-Muslim "apostates," who, according to the most retrograde forms of Islamism, are to be killed for leaving Islam.

Unfortunately, Islamism and the more sexist, puritanical, and religiously bigoted forms of Islam are, in today’s world, far more prevalent than they would otherwise be, thanks to Saudi oil money plus U.S. government support for Islamist regimes and Islamist terrorist groups overseas. Examples of U.S. support for Islamism include:

In the 1980's, the U.S. supported Islamist terrorists fighting against a Soviet-allied government in Afghanistan. Not only did the U.S. give them military aid, but the CIA, with help from USAID and the University of Nebraska, spent millions of dollars on violently militant textbooks for Afghan schoolchildren. That war became the Soviet Union’s “Vietnam” and spurred the collapse of the Soviet Union. Zbigniew Brzezinski later admitted that the U.S. helped “the worst crazies ... we can find,” and that these extreme Islamists also killed off many of the more moderate Muslim leaders.

In the early 1980's, there was the Iran/Contra affair, in which the U.S. government secretly sent arms to the radical Shi’ite government in Iran. Incredibly, this occurred soon after the embassy hostage crisis, which ended with the U.S. government sending billions of dollars in ransom money to Iran.

In Yugoslavia in the 1990's, the U.S. and NATO helped Islamist Bosnian leader Alija Izetbegovic, at the expense of the more moderate and more popular Bosnian Muslim leader Fikret Abdic. Islamist terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, were active in the Balkan wars, with support from Western countries, helping to provoke the anti-Muslim panics and massacres that were the stated justification for U.S. bombing of Yugoslavia.

Even after 9/11/2001, U.S. foreign policy has still tended to favor Islamist regimes over more secular Muslim regimes. And the so-called “war on terror” has had the net effect of strengthening - not weakening - both Islamist terrorism and lawful Islamism overseas. For example:

In Afghanistan, the new, U.S.-installed government was another Islamist government, though not quite as extreme as the Taliban. Osama bin Laden and much of Al Qaeda escaped into Pakistan and were not even pursued there (until recently), let alone caught.

And then the U.S. invaded Iraq. Saddam Hussein, though a tyrant, was not an Islamist; he was a moderate Muslim who ran a relatively secular government. But now, thanks to the war, Iraq has become a stronghold of both Islamism and Islamist terrorism. There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq before the war, but there is now. And the new, U.S.-installed government in Iraq has an Islamist constitution.

Most of the 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, as does much of Al Qaeda’s funding. Also, both the Saudi government and individual Saudi billionaires still spend vast sums on teaching the most intolerant form of Islam (Salafi/Wahabi) worldwide. But Saudi Arabia is considered an ally, not an enemy, in the “war on terror.”

We are concerned about the possibility that, despite the alleged “war on terror,” the U.S. foreign policy establishment may still see Islamist terrorism as a useful weapon against Russia and China. There has been lots of terrorism in Russia, e.g. in Chechnya and Dagestan. And the U.S. foreign policy establishment seems to have both the goal of encircling Russia and a tendency to downplay that goal in public (e.g. the U.S. missiles in Poland, allegedly aimed at Iran).

To whatever extent a pro-Islamist policy still exists, it is very harmful to all non-Muslims, and to women, and to gays. It is also very harmful to moderate Muslims, both by killing them directly and by sparking bigotry, on the part of non-Muslims, against all Muslims including moderates.

The threat of Islamist terrorism has been used as an excuse for war against Muslim countries (including relatively secular Muslim countries such as Saddam Hussein's Iraq). We, on the other hand, aim to oppose both Islamism and the wars by pointing to the history of U.S. support for Islamism. For more about this history, see the following collections of news stories on the History Commons site:

(The first three of the above pages are part of a much larger collection of news stories on Geopolitics and Islamic Militancy, which in turn is part of the Complete 9/11 Timeline on the History Commons site.)

Thus, the "war on terror" has been conducted in a very hypocritical manner, in addition to being, itself, a reign of terror against Muslims. We believe that both Islamism and terrorism should be opposed by means other than war, where possible.

###

Comments? Please post them here on the NYARBB blog.

[Last edited November 9, 2008.]