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Front page magazine
Sept 20 2004
Ninety-Nine Eyes to Go
By Joseph D'Hippolito
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 22, 2004
As it rumbles down a narrow road in the West Bank, a steel-gray tank
confronts a boy in his early teens, his right arm cocked, ready to
throw a rock.
"This occupying army is supported by the West," reads the caption
above the tank. Another caption to the rock-thrower's left asks, "Who
is going to support this boy?"
That picture greets visitors to the Web site of the Islamic Human
Rights Commission, an organization with a noble title and an ignoble
purpose: to provide a front for anti-Western, anti-Semitic jihadism.
The IHRC, based in London and founded in 1997, adopts the feminist
and gay models for activism. The commission positions itself as the
defender of Muslims around the world who have been victimized by what
the group calls, "Islamophobia".
How does the IHRC define "Islamophobia"? Just look at the "winners"
of the commission's first Islamophobia Awards Ceremony late last
year.
Most Islamophobic Media Outlet: Fox Network News
Most Islamophobic International Politician: Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon.
Islamophobe of the Year: President George W. Bush.
To the IHRC, fighting "Islamophobia" means opposing laws that
prohibit Muslim women from wearing headscarves, boycotting companies
that do business in Israel and supporting radical Muslim clerics in
custody (such as Sheikh Abdul Kareem Obeid, the leader of Hezbollah
in Lebanon, who was freed in January), Chechen independence and the
Palestinian intifada.
The IHRC has even mastered the paranoid, hysterical rhetoric of its
models. Massoud Shadjareh, the commission's chairman and co-founder,
told the Edinburgh newspaper The Scotsman in February that proposals
from Britain's Home Office to strengthen anti-terrorism laws were
"the sort of legislation that in Germany led to genocide and
concentration camps."
One example of the IHRC's activism involves Iran's Arash Miresmaeili,
the two-tim e world judo champion who refused to compete against an
Israeli in the first round of this year's Olympic judo competition.
As Front Page Magazine reported in "All Free Men Are Israeli
Olympians," Miresmaeili said he deliberately forfeited to support the
Palestinians. Olympic authorities considered expelling him from
Athens, so the IHRC asked supporters to send form letters to the
International Olympic Committee and the International Judo
Federation.
"That you should choose to differentiate between this political
boycott and others, such as the boycott of South Africa under the
apartheid regime, and of Serbia in 1992 for its commission of war
crimes in Bosnia, smacks of sheer hypocrisy," part of the form letter
states. "Further, it demeans the plight of the Palestinians and
effectively legitimizes the Israeli policy of apartheid."
Another example of IHRC activism is the work of lawyer Mudassar
Arani, who received an award in June for what the commission called
"challenging Islamophobia." Arani represents Sheikh Abu Hamsa
al-Masri, who was arrested by British authorities and awaits
extradition to the United States to face charges of supporting
terrorism. The sheikh made these remarks in London's radical Finsbury
Park Mosque one month before his arrest:
"The ideology of martyrdom is spreading now in our (Islamic) nation,
praise be to Allah," reported the Middle East Media Research
Institute. "It exposes the (falsehood of the) People of the Book" -
the Muslim term for Christians and Jews - "especially the Jews, who
claim they are God's deputies on earth, but they are lying."
IHRC activism includes spinning world events to portray Muslims as
perpetual victims, never as perpetrators. Concerning the crisis in
Sudan, the IHRC's Web site links to a story from Britain's Leftist
newspaper, The Guardian, which reports that the European Union did
not consider the killing in Sudan's Darfur region as genocide.
Another link to a story from another British newspaper, The
Independent, describes Sudanese Muslims being brutalized by
non-Muslim tribesmen. The story quotes one 23-year-old refugee, Asif
Omar Sayeed:
"The foreigners blame us for everything," he said. "But I realize
what is going on. The Americans and the British want to use this as
an excuse to occupy our country, just as they have done in Iraq. Like
Iraq, we have oil. What has happened made me realize that, as a true
Muslim, I must fight for
my country when the foreigners come."
An IHRC report from 1996 concerning Chechnya issues an intimidating
warning, particularly frightening in light of the massacre of
schoolchildren in Beslan. After calling Russia "the only colonial
dinosaur that remains in the modern world," the report concludes
thus:
"If international law does not rise to the challenge in the killing
fields of Chechnya, it must prepare to be blown away in a cloud of i
ts own dust and dreams."
A link to an editorial from Crescent International magazine published
after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks proves even more chilling. Some
excerpts:
"We know from past experience that people who feel themselves and
their peoples to be under sustained and unrelenting attack can react
in the most unbelievable ways.
"The problem is that none of these (Americans) seem to realize that
America has long been at war with numerous peoples all over the
world. This is not the opening salvo of a new war; it is probably
likely a stunningly successful attempt by one of America's many
victims to hit back - very, very hard.
"(The) argument is that democracy, freedom and civilization are under
attack and must be forcefully defended; such words ring hollow from
Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, Vladimir Putin, George W. Bush, Colin
Powell and Tony Blair, each of whom has been responsible for far, far
more death and suffering than seen in the US yesterday."
By contrast, the IHRC shows no support for Muslims oppressed by
Iran's brutal theocracy or by Syria's occupation of Lebanon. Nor does
the group fight for civilians from Egypt, Kuwait and Turkey (let
alone from Western nations) who were abducted and murdered in Iraq by
ad hoc jihadists. That selective outrage accurately reflects the
agenda of the IHRC's advisory board.
One advisor is Dr. Muhammad al-Massari, who heads a London-based
organization that seeks to overthrow the Saudi monarchy. Al-Massari
said the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center "was a counterattack
for the attacks on Iraq and Palestine," he told Associated Press.
"One Muslim decided to take action," al-Massari said about Osama bin
Laden. "He took one eye for a hundred. He still has 99 eyes to go."
Another advisor is Hamid Algar, professor of Persian and Islamic
Studies at UC Berkeley. In an address honoring Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini in 1994, Algar praised and advocated global jihad:
"Let us remember the comprehensive Jihad that starts with our own
persons and should also embrace our communal and political lives and
if necessary go to the point of taking weapons in our hands to defeat
the enemies of Islam."
Algar immediately defined those enemies:
"Let us remember the clear analysis of the West that Imam (Khomeini)
gave us.. as a collection of international bandits.which has
consolidated itself since Imam's death. Let us also remember his
insistence that the abominable genocide state of Israel completely
disappear from the face of the globe."
In Algar's universe, jihad has no innocent victims. Witness his
opinion of Palestinian suicide bombers.
"That term, an invention of the West. is not very helpful," Algar
told California Monthly, UC Berkeley's alumni magazine. "While no one
can take pleasure in the sight, as you say, of women and children
being killed, it seems to me th at a greater degree of moral
condemnation should be reserved for those who continue, daily, with
impunity, to kill and to humiliate the Palestinian people.
"In other words, there is definitely a cause-and-effect relationship
here, and to criticize or condemn an effect while overlooking the
cause is not very helpful."
Algar's support for violence is not always so polite. In 1998, he
verbally harassed and spat upon members of UC Berkeley's Armenian
Student Association, who were commemorating the genocide of Armenians
by the Turks.
"It was not a genocide, but I wish it were, you lying pigs," Shake
Hovsepian quoted Algar for Usanogh: Periodical of Armenian Students.
"You are distorting the truth about history. You stupid Armenians;
you deserve to be massacred!"
The students filed a grievance and Berkeley's Associated Students
demanded that the administration force Algar to issue a written
public apology or censure him.
Another advisor is Mohammed al- Asi, a research fellow at the
Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought and the imam of the Islamic
Center of Washington, D.C. Muslim student associations regularly
invite al-Asi to speak at their events, where he dispenses more
incendiary rhetoric.
"The Zionist-Israeli lobby is taking the United States . to the
abyss," al-Asi said at UC Irvine in 2001.
"We have a psychosis in the Jewish community that is unable to
co-exist equally and brotherly with other human beings. You can take
the Jew out of the ghetto but you cannot take the ghetto out of the
Jew."
During the 1990-91 war to free Kuwait from Iraq, al-Asi said, "If the
Americans are placing their forces in the Persian Gulf, we should be
creating another war front for the Americans in the Muslim world -
and
specifically where American interests are concentrated."
The long-term goal of such military action is the imposition of a
worldwide Islamic state, as al-Asi stated in a paper presented in
2000. Some excerpts:
"...all the Muslims . are living in a kafir (unbelievers') domain;
they are virtually adrift and homeless. The inherent condition of
today's Muslims who have lost sight of a Prophet as commander is a
religious community of people who are beholden to the forces and
powers of kufr (apostasy): secular kufr and religious kufr, mental
kufr and military kufr, as well as kufr by choice and kufr by force.
"Never in the history of ijtihad (theological analysis) have we
Muslims had to live in a time in which we no longer have in our
possession a government which belongs to all the Muslims, or at the
very minimum which is open to the Ummah's (community of believers')
popular affiliation.
"We should not be studying hair-splitting fiqhi (legalistic) issues
in halaqat (study sessions and circles); we should be learning how to
consolidate our social will-power and how to form active and
status-quo-challenging units throughout our African and Asian lands
to reclaim them for Islam."
The world has heard similar rhetoric before.
The Nazis cleverly manipulated the German people's collective
frustration into a pervasive sense of victimization. Then the Nazis
offered the answer: Germans should embrace their inherent
superiority, forcefully claim their entitled power and destroy all
who oppose them - even, as history showed, children.
Given its selective outrage and its advisors' values, the Islamic
Human Rights Commission is as much of a non sequitur as a National
Socialist Human Rights Commission would be.
Sept 20 2004
Ninety-Nine Eyes to Go
By Joseph D'Hippolito
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 22, 2004
As it rumbles down a narrow road in the West Bank, a steel-gray tank
confronts a boy in his early teens, his right arm cocked, ready to
throw a rock.
"This occupying army is supported by the West," reads the caption
above the tank. Another caption to the rock-thrower's left asks, "Who
is going to support this boy?"
That picture greets visitors to the Web site of the Islamic Human
Rights Commission, an organization with a noble title and an ignoble
purpose: to provide a front for anti-Western, anti-Semitic jihadism.
The IHRC, based in London and founded in 1997, adopts the feminist
and gay models for activism. The commission positions itself as the
defender of Muslims around the world who have been victimized by what
the group calls, "Islamophobia".
How does the IHRC define "Islamophobia"? Just look at the "winners"
of the commission's first Islamophobia Awards Ceremony late last
year.
Most Islamophobic Media Outlet: Fox Network News
Most Islamophobic International Politician: Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon.
Islamophobe of the Year: President George W. Bush.
To the IHRC, fighting "Islamophobia" means opposing laws that
prohibit Muslim women from wearing headscarves, boycotting companies
that do business in Israel and supporting radical Muslim clerics in
custody (such as Sheikh Abdul Kareem Obeid, the leader of Hezbollah
in Lebanon, who was freed in January), Chechen independence and the
Palestinian intifada.
The IHRC has even mastered the paranoid, hysterical rhetoric of its
models. Massoud Shadjareh, the commission's chairman and co-founder,
told the Edinburgh newspaper The Scotsman in February that proposals
from Britain's Home Office to strengthen anti-terrorism laws were
"the sort of legislation that in Germany led to genocide and
concentration camps."
One example of the IHRC's activism involves Iran's Arash Miresmaeili,
the two-tim e world judo champion who refused to compete against an
Israeli in the first round of this year's Olympic judo competition.
As Front Page Magazine reported in "All Free Men Are Israeli
Olympians," Miresmaeili said he deliberately forfeited to support the
Palestinians. Olympic authorities considered expelling him from
Athens, so the IHRC asked supporters to send form letters to the
International Olympic Committee and the International Judo
Federation.
"That you should choose to differentiate between this political
boycott and others, such as the boycott of South Africa under the
apartheid regime, and of Serbia in 1992 for its commission of war
crimes in Bosnia, smacks of sheer hypocrisy," part of the form letter
states. "Further, it demeans the plight of the Palestinians and
effectively legitimizes the Israeli policy of apartheid."
Another example of IHRC activism is the work of lawyer Mudassar
Arani, who received an award in June for what the commission called
"challenging Islamophobia." Arani represents Sheikh Abu Hamsa
al-Masri, who was arrested by British authorities and awaits
extradition to the United States to face charges of supporting
terrorism. The sheikh made these remarks in London's radical Finsbury
Park Mosque one month before his arrest:
"The ideology of martyrdom is spreading now in our (Islamic) nation,
praise be to Allah," reported the Middle East Media Research
Institute. "It exposes the (falsehood of the) People of the Book" -
the Muslim term for Christians and Jews - "especially the Jews, who
claim they are God's deputies on earth, but they are lying."
IHRC activism includes spinning world events to portray Muslims as
perpetual victims, never as perpetrators. Concerning the crisis in
Sudan, the IHRC's Web site links to a story from Britain's Leftist
newspaper, The Guardian, which reports that the European Union did
not consider the killing in Sudan's Darfur region as genocide.
Another link to a story from another British newspaper, The
Independent, describes Sudanese Muslims being brutalized by
non-Muslim tribesmen. The story quotes one 23-year-old refugee, Asif
Omar Sayeed:
"The foreigners blame us for everything," he said. "But I realize
what is going on. The Americans and the British want to use this as
an excuse to occupy our country, just as they have done in Iraq. Like
Iraq, we have oil. What has happened made me realize that, as a true
Muslim, I must fight for
my country when the foreigners come."
An IHRC report from 1996 concerning Chechnya issues an intimidating
warning, particularly frightening in light of the massacre of
schoolchildren in Beslan. After calling Russia "the only colonial
dinosaur that remains in the modern world," the report concludes
thus:
"If international law does not rise to the challenge in the killing
fields of Chechnya, it must prepare to be blown away in a cloud of i
ts own dust and dreams."
A link to an editorial from Crescent International magazine published
after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks proves even more chilling. Some
excerpts:
"We know from past experience that people who feel themselves and
their peoples to be under sustained and unrelenting attack can react
in the most unbelievable ways.
"The problem is that none of these (Americans) seem to realize that
America has long been at war with numerous peoples all over the
world. This is not the opening salvo of a new war; it is probably
likely a stunningly successful attempt by one of America's many
victims to hit back - very, very hard.
"(The) argument is that democracy, freedom and civilization are under
attack and must be forcefully defended; such words ring hollow from
Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, Vladimir Putin, George W. Bush, Colin
Powell and Tony Blair, each of whom has been responsible for far, far
more death and suffering than seen in the US yesterday."
By contrast, the IHRC shows no support for Muslims oppressed by
Iran's brutal theocracy or by Syria's occupation of Lebanon. Nor does
the group fight for civilians from Egypt, Kuwait and Turkey (let
alone from Western nations) who were abducted and murdered in Iraq by
ad hoc jihadists. That selective outrage accurately reflects the
agenda of the IHRC's advisory board.
One advisor is Dr. Muhammad al-Massari, who heads a London-based
organization that seeks to overthrow the Saudi monarchy. Al-Massari
said the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center "was a counterattack
for the attacks on Iraq and Palestine," he told Associated Press.
"One Muslim decided to take action," al-Massari said about Osama bin
Laden. "He took one eye for a hundred. He still has 99 eyes to go."
Another advisor is Hamid Algar, professor of Persian and Islamic
Studies at UC Berkeley. In an address honoring Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini in 1994, Algar praised and advocated global jihad:
"Let us remember the comprehensive Jihad that starts with our own
persons and should also embrace our communal and political lives and
if necessary go to the point of taking weapons in our hands to defeat
the enemies of Islam."
Algar immediately defined those enemies:
"Let us remember the clear analysis of the West that Imam (Khomeini)
gave us.. as a collection of international bandits.which has
consolidated itself since Imam's death. Let us also remember his
insistence that the abominable genocide state of Israel completely
disappear from the face of the globe."
In Algar's universe, jihad has no innocent victims. Witness his
opinion of Palestinian suicide bombers.
"That term, an invention of the West. is not very helpful," Algar
told California Monthly, UC Berkeley's alumni magazine. "While no one
can take pleasure in the sight, as you say, of women and children
being killed, it seems to me th at a greater degree of moral
condemnation should be reserved for those who continue, daily, with
impunity, to kill and to humiliate the Palestinian people.
"In other words, there is definitely a cause-and-effect relationship
here, and to criticize or condemn an effect while overlooking the
cause is not very helpful."
Algar's support for violence is not always so polite. In 1998, he
verbally harassed and spat upon members of UC Berkeley's Armenian
Student Association, who were commemorating the genocide of Armenians
by the Turks.
"It was not a genocide, but I wish it were, you lying pigs," Shake
Hovsepian quoted Algar for Usanogh: Periodical of Armenian Students.
"You are distorting the truth about history. You stupid Armenians;
you deserve to be massacred!"
The students filed a grievance and Berkeley's Associated Students
demanded that the administration force Algar to issue a written
public apology or censure him.
Another advisor is Mohammed al- Asi, a research fellow at the
Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought and the imam of the Islamic
Center of Washington, D.C. Muslim student associations regularly
invite al-Asi to speak at their events, where he dispenses more
incendiary rhetoric.
"The Zionist-Israeli lobby is taking the United States . to the
abyss," al-Asi said at UC Irvine in 2001.
"We have a psychosis in the Jewish community that is unable to
co-exist equally and brotherly with other human beings. You can take
the Jew out of the ghetto but you cannot take the ghetto out of the
Jew."
During the 1990-91 war to free Kuwait from Iraq, al-Asi said, "If the
Americans are placing their forces in the Persian Gulf, we should be
creating another war front for the Americans in the Muslim world -
and
specifically where American interests are concentrated."
The long-term goal of such military action is the imposition of a
worldwide Islamic state, as al-Asi stated in a paper presented in
2000. Some excerpts:
"...all the Muslims . are living in a kafir (unbelievers') domain;
they are virtually adrift and homeless. The inherent condition of
today's Muslims who have lost sight of a Prophet as commander is a
religious community of people who are beholden to the forces and
powers of kufr (apostasy): secular kufr and religious kufr, mental
kufr and military kufr, as well as kufr by choice and kufr by force.
"Never in the history of ijtihad (theological analysis) have we
Muslims had to live in a time in which we no longer have in our
possession a government which belongs to all the Muslims, or at the
very minimum which is open to the Ummah's (community of believers')
popular affiliation.
"We should not be studying hair-splitting fiqhi (legalistic) issues
in halaqat (study sessions and circles); we should be learning how to
consolidate our social will-power and how to form active and
status-quo-challenging units throughout our African and Asian lands
to reclaim them for Islam."
The world has heard similar rhetoric before.
The Nazis cleverly manipulated the German people's collective
frustration into a pervasive sense of victimization. Then the Nazis
offered the answer: Germans should embrace their inherent
superiority, forcefully claim their entitled power and destroy all
who oppose them - even, as history showed, children.
Given its selective outrage and its advisors' values, the Islamic
Human Rights Commission is as much of a non sequitur as a National
Socialist Human Rights Commission would be.