1. I think that the term ‘Islamophobia' sounds insulting to non-Muslims who live in the Muslim-majority countries worldwide if one oberves what has been happening to them especially after the Islamic resurgence in the 1970s.
2. As for the usage ‘Kamikaze' in English and other languages, the meaning and nuance is different from the original Japanese usage. ‘Kamikaze' was used only in a short period during the Second World War: 20 October 1944 and 15 August 1945. So, the ‘Muslim Kamikaze' is a confused usage by those who have not studied seriously about the origin of the Japanese military invasion during the wartime and its aftermath.
3. Concerning the 9.11 memorials, please refer to my previous postings (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20070911)(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20090911)(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20110909)(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20130912). (Lily)
1. WorldWide Religious News（http://wwrn.org）
Since 9/11, U.S. policy enforces Islamophobia
by Nathan Lean ("CNN," September 11, 2013)
The attacks of September 11, 2001, were unthinkable, and are rightfully memorialized with the somber reflection that marks other tragedies of our nation’s past.
From the Oval Office that Tuesday evening 12 years ago, President George W. Bush addressed the stricken nation with a message of hope.
“Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America,” he said. “This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace.”
Sadly, though, out of that dark hour came more darkness.
Throughout the past 12 years, government agencies and local law enforcement have often turned inward, eroding the liberties of ordinary, law-abiding citizens.
In the name of defending national security, they’ve fractured relationships with American Muslim communities and undermined the foundations of freedom on which this land was built.
Anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States has not only manifested itself through mosque arsons, assaults, murders and invariably hostile rhetoric from society’s extreme fringes. It has also become a permanent fixture of the very institutions that should provide safeguards against those things.
A long view of the response to terrorism since 9/11 suggests that Islamophobia — an irrational fear or suspicion of all Muslims and Islam based on the actions of a few — is increasingly legislated and enforced.
The most recent example of this comes from the city that bore the brunt of the 9/11 attacks.
Revelations surrounding the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslim communities in Brooklyn and Manhattan show that, without specific evidence of criminal activity, police officers teamed up with the CIA to form a clandestine intelligence program that spied on ordinary Muslim Americans.
The program sent “rakers” into Muslim neighborhoods to observe restaurant owners and shop keepers, deployed “mosque crawlers” into Muslim houses of worship to monitor sermons, and planted undercover agents on a university rafting trip in Buffalo where they took notes on how many times Muslim students prayed each day.
It gets worse.
The NYPD parked a yellow taxicab, bugged with cameras and voice recorders, outside a popular mosque in Brooklyn, hoping to capture Friday prayer-goers mumbling something about terrorism.
They also designated all mosques in the city as terrorist organizations, meaning that anyone who attends worship services is a potential subject for investigation, and they attempted to infiltrate the board of the nonprofit Arab American Association of New York, labeling the group a “terrorism enterprise.”
The six years of surveilling American Muslims led to no arrests or leads, the head of the NYPD's Demographics Unit admitted in court testimony.
The NYPD says its surveillance programs are lawful and orchestrated to keep the city safe from "those who are intent on killing New Yorkers."
The FBI criticized the NYPD spying program, however, saying that it produces a “negative impact” and makes their job harder than ever.
But it was the FBI who, in 2010, paid informant Craig Monteilh more than $11,000 a month to disguise himself as a convert to Islam, infiltrate Southern California mosques, and have sex with Muslim women. The plan was to entrap young Muslims by initiating conversations about “jihad” and terrorism.
In the end, the very people he was spying on reported him to the FBI — the organization that sent him there. Last year, Monteilh expressed his regret for participating in the sting operation, saying, “There is no hunt. It’s fixed.”
The FBI said its program, called "Operation Flex," was "focused on fewer than 25 individuals and was directed at detecting and preventing possible terrorist attacks."
The FBI came under fire again in August of this year as we learned about a covert security program in conjunction with U.S. immigration authorities.
The American Civil Liberties Union reports that the FBI and immigration officials have the authority to blacklist law-abiding Muslim Americans who have applied for citizenship, flagging their applications on the basis of “national security concerns” and sidelining their path to nationality for years on end.
Those applications are primarily docked on the basis of the applicant’s name, their country of origin, or as a result of their travels to countries on a watch list.
The U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services says its reviews comply with immigration laws.
Anti-Muslim prejudice is institutionalized at the state level, as well.
Over the past two years, lawmakers in 32 legislatures across the country have targeted Muslims by moving to ban Islamic law, or “Shariah.” Seven states (most recently North Carolina) have signed the proposed ban into law, despite the inability of legislators to name a single specific case in which a court ruling based on Shariah law was allowed to stand.
Additionally, mosque construction projects in states like Oklahoma, Tennessee, California and Minnesota have faced backlash from local lawmakers who, failing to thwart their construction by advancing arguments about Shariah or the supposed threat of radicals, resorted to pretenses like traffic patterns, zoning regulations, parking restrictions and noise ordinances to block the building permits.
This cannot be our response to tragedy.
We’ve lost our way, and the path that we are traveling down today is hardly representative of the sacred foundations that our founding fathers envisioned.
Surely we can, and we must, remain vigilant in our effort to combat those who threaten us, but we cannot be so overly zealous in our aim to root out potential perpetrators that we abandon our national values and strip our fellow citizens of their unalienable and constitutionally protected rights.
That doesn’t make us stronger; it makes us weaker, and more vulnerable.
・Disclaimer: WWRN does not endorse or adhere to views or opinions expressed in the articles posted. This is purely an information site, to inform interested parties of religious trends.
2.(http://www.martinkramer.org/sandbox/2001/09/no-greater-hate-what-inspires-the-muslim-kamikazes/)
No Greater Hate: What Inspires the Muslim Kamikazes?
by Martin Kramer in Sandbox on September 16, 2001
This article by Martin Kramer appeared in Tel Aviv Notes on September 16, 2001. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.
NO GROUP has issued a claim of responsibility for the hijackings and devastating suicide attacks against the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Virginia. But the names of the hijackers, released by U.S. law enforcement agencies, confirm that the hijackers were Arab Muslims. The precise mix of their nationalities will become known in the coming days. From the names, they would appear to be mostly from Saudi Arabia. From other information, and the suicidal method employed by the terrorists, it seems clear that the United States has fallen victim to an attack by Islamic extremists.
The shorthand for these extremists, in American parlance, is “the network of Usama Bin Ladin,” a reference to the elusive Saudi terrorist who has found shelter with the Taliban government in Afghanistan. It is not impossible that the conspiracy was hatched and planned independently of him. But the operation, in its conception and objectives, conforms closely to the precedents established by Bin Ladin in previous anti-American attacks.
What, then, is the message of these acts of mass terror? The perpetrators, by leaving no statement of intent, assume that we are intelligent enough to draw the conclusions ourselves. In fact, the message is intrinsic in the very nature and magnitude of the attack, and understanding it must inform the American response.
ONE SHOULD begin by making it clear what the attack is not. It is not an attempt to compel the United States to reconsider or reverse one of its policies in the Middle East. If it were, the perpetrators would have indicated precisely which policy they had in mind.
The United States pursues an array of policies in the region that many Middle Easterners, especially Islamic extremists, find objectionable. U.S. support for Israel is regarded as a form of neo-colonialism. Its maintenance of sanctions against Iraq is deemed a crime against humanity. American backing for moderate Arab regimes, especially the monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, is considered an instrument of foreign control over Islam’s holiest places and oil resources. U.S. attempts to isolate the so-called “rogue regimes” of Iran, Sudan, Libya, and Afghanistan are resented as imperialist encirclements.
If it had been the intent of the perpetrators to intimidate America into reversing any one of its policies, they would have specified that policy. After all, every other aspect of the operation was meticulously planned.
This has not prevented some persons, inside and outside the Middle East, from attempting to present the act as a protest against one or another American policy. For example, Jordan’s King Abdullah II, interviewed Wednesday by CNN, claimed that the attack might not have occurred had Israelis and Palestinians not been locked in a cycle of violence—the implication being that the absence of an American-driven “peace process” triggered the attack.
In fact, attacks by Islamic extremists against Americans gained momentum right through the 1990s, despite American-led progress in the “peace process.” These included the attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, the bombing of the U.S. military residence in Dhahran in 1996, and attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. There was no correlation between these attacks and the ups or downs of Israeli-Palestinian relations.
THOSE WHO killed thousands in New York and Washington had a different agenda, many levels above resentment at any specific American policy. Their grievance combines all grievances and supersedes them. The problem, as they have diagnosed it, is not what America does, but what America is. By America’s very nature, they believe, it is a power arrayed against Islam. Those who went happily to their deaths at the helm of four airliners were striking a blow against Satan incarnate—centers of a vast economic and military conspiracy to subordinate and enslave over a billion Muslims. Their message to America was this: cease to exercise your power now, or we will overpower you.
An audacious agenda? These same extremists believe that they single-handedly brought down another world power, the Soviet Union, by their steadfast jihad in Afghanistan. As a result of their deeds, so they believe, Soviet forces retreated, the Soviet Union collapsed, and hundreds of millions of Muslims trapped in the Soviet empire gained their freedom. Islam’s extremists believe that the fall of the Soviet Union was a triumph of Islamic belief over communist atheism. America, to them, represents the other face of unbelieving materialism; like the Soviet Union, America too will tumble.
And so the expectations of those who conceived and executed the attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are limitless. Their campaign is meant to compel the withdrawal of American fleets from the shores of Muslim lands; the disappearance of American fighters, bombers, and cruise missiles from the skies over Muslim heads; a cut-off of American support for puppet regimes that control Mecca and the oil treasures of Islam; and an abandonment of the Jews, occupiers of a Muslim land—in short, a general American retreat from the Middle East, heartland of Islam.
IRONICALLY, the attacks against America have come at the low tide of Islamic extremism in the Middle East. Over the past decade, regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and other threatened countries, have suppressed the domestic threat posed by extremists. Some scholars have even determined that the Middle East has entered a “post-Islamist” phase.
But it is precisely the success of suppression in the Arab world that has created the threat to the West in general, and the United States in particular. Extremism, unable to defeat the Arab regimes or Israel, now directly targets their American protector. In the past, the United States relied upon allies to bear the brunt of the battle against Islamic extremism. At this moment, it seeks to build a coalition. But in future, it will have no choice but to lead from the front.
3.(https://www.facebook.com/cinnamon.stillwell/posts/10201866405599892)
9/11: A Defining Moment
by Cinnamon Stillwell
September 11, 2003
It’s hard to believe that the second anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is upon us. We Americans have had to push the horrific events of that day into the recesses of our minds, in order to get on with the business of living. But this anniversary is an opportunity to reflect on what it meant to each of us, and also to revive a memory that must never be forgotten.
What can we say about 9/11 that hasn’t already been said? The tale has been told so many times, and we have been flooded with so many images and words attempting to describe the indescribable. Nonetheless, the need to tell our own stories is a strong one, and the following is my attempt to do so.
On the morning of 9/11/01, like most people, I was startled out of sleep by a phone call, telling me to turn on the television. From that point on, the day became a blur. I could do little but stare transfixed at the horror unfolding before me on the television screen. I must have watched more TV (in one sitting) than in my entire life, but it was a way of masking my helplessness. I realized that I’d never truly comprehended evil until that day, for nothing prepared me for the feeling of immediacy that this crime brought with it. These were my people, and my country that were being attacked and it was done with an utter savagery and cruelty that I’d never thought possible.
It was not the huge spectacle that affected me the most, but rather the images that demonstrated the human frailty at the center of it all. The close-up of one of the towers after it had been hit, where people, looking so small against the enormity of the building, peered out of the windows in desperation. The bodies of those who jumped out of the buildings to escape the fiery inferno, falling like rag dolls to the earth. But the quintessential image of the day for me, was the photo of a “Windows on the World” chef holding hands with another person as they jumped together. It demonstrated the human spirit in the face of the most unimaginable situations.
Later other pictures would be seared into my brain, in particular the many faces of the “missing” plastered all over the city by relatives desperate to find their loved-ones, and doomed to failure by the undeniable odds against anyone surviving the attacks. There were fathers, sons, mothers, daughters, aunts, uncles, and cousins, all of whom simply went to work that day, never to return. The incalculable loss suffered by these people haunts me still.
I did not know anyone who died in the attacks, but I felt that I had lost something irreplaceable nonetheless. Perhaps it was my innocence, because I was the never the same after 9/11. It was many months before I was able to emerge from a period of mourning that permeated my whole body and infiltrated every waking moment. I felt that I’d aged, and it was a long time before I could enjoy the things I always had, such as music, food, and especially laughter. I sought comfort in local commemorative events, and found pain instead. In the end, I performed a simple ritual by myself that brought some closure. I went to Ocean Beach at sunset and lit a single candle in memory of all those who died and suffered on 9/11.
I went to New York to visit Ground Zero almost a year after 9/11. I saw that vast hole in the ground where once the mighty World Trade Center towers had stood, and I felt the bitterness rising in my throat as I thought to myself, “Those bastards destroyed our pyramids.” A priest who was making his way through the crowd of onlookers caught my teary eye and responded with a sympathetic nod, as did one of the men working to clean up the site. I made my way around the circumference, taking note of all the graffiti, missing signs, and wreckage still left along the way.
At the waters’ edge there was a memorial to the firefighters, police, Port Authority, and other officials who died in the attacks, where I stopped to pay homage. Crisp American flags flew in unison on a row of boats docked nearby, a sight that added a glimmer of light to a dark frame of mind. Indeed, New York’s vibrancy had returned, along with a new substance and patriotism, all of which were in evidence across the city. Being able to witness that resurrection helped me overcome my own scars, although they will never disappear completely.
In the end, 9/11 altered my perspective on the world and ultimately, it changed my life. Everything become crystal clear to me, where before it was murky and indistinct. The attacks of 9/11 were undoubtedly an act of war against our country, but they were also a crime against humanity. Those who didn’t recognize that at the time probably never will, and those who did will never forget it. On both a personal and political level, it was indeed a defining moment.
(End)
