The New York Times reported last week that climate change is forcing environmental researchers to seek cold-water refuges for imperiled salmon. This raises an obvious question for Republican candidates in the US presidential race: how do we ensure no Muslim salmon are swimming among the pink refugees? Clearly, we need a religious test for lox. The idea is absurd, of course. Climate change does not exist.
The US Republican party is drowning in its own stupidity and threatening the rest of us — especially Muslim-Americans — with it. US presidential hopeful Donald Trump, or Vanilla ISIS, as I prefer to call him, recently proposed temporarily barring Muslims from entering the US. The rebukes were swift, but as many as 66 percent of likely US Republican voters favor such a ban, a Rasmussen poll showed.
Not for nothing, Islam has been practiced in the US for a very long time. During slavery a significant number of enslaved Africans were Muslim. This history dates back much further than the late 19th century, when Trump’s ancestors first landed on US shores.
However, Trump is not the only one spreading fear and loathing by ignoring facts about Muslims. The day before Trump announced his Muslim ban, Marco Rubio, the Florida senator also seeking the Republican nomination, claimed that Islamophobia is fictitious.
“Where is the widespread evidence that we have a problem in the US with discrimination against Muslims?” Rubio asked, seemingly oblivious to the spike in assaults on Muslims in the US.
In fact, two weeks earlier, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) had issued a report about violence aimed at Muslim-Americans after the Paris attacks.
CAIR said that it had “received more reports about acts of Islamophobic discrimination, intimidation, threats and violence targeting American-Muslims or those perceived to be Muslim and Islamic institutions in the past week and a half” than during any other limited period of time since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Its got significantly worse in recent days.
Prominent US Republican Representative Steve King said he would allow entry to the US only to those who are “the most likely to be able to contribute to our society and our economy and assimilate into the American civilization,” and concluded that “Muslims do not do that in significant numbers.”
This too is demonstrably false. Consider the medical profession. Muslim-Americans constitute 1 to 2 percent of the population, but account for about 5 percent of the nation’s physicians. A study conducted before this current wave of anti-Muslim hysteria said that nearly half of the responding Muslim-American physicians had felt greater scrutiny compared with others due to their faith, while a quarter reported experiencing religious discrimination frequently over their career. Nearly one in 10 said patients had rejected their care because the doctors were Muslim.
Statements from US Republican leaders are so wrongheaded, one has to wonder not only in which US, but in which universe they live. However, while it is important to call out US Republicans, it is also necessary to remember that the policies of US President Barack Obama’s administration have also unfairly targeted Muslim-Americans.
Under Obama, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has routinely denied thousands of law-abiding people — mostly Muslims — citizenship, permanent residency and visas through the little-known Controlled Application Review and Resolution Program.
The program mandates that immigration services field officers deny or delay, often indefinitely, any application with a potential “national security concern,” which is defined incredibly broadly by USCIS. Some applicants have waited 14 years for a process that should take six months. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a lawsuit last year against the government over this scheme, more than 19,000 people from 21 Muslim-majority nations or regions were subjected to the program between 2008 and 2012. Those who have had their applications denied have no means of discovering why, or any meaningful opportunity to respond.
In addition, the Obama administration continues to trumpet its Countering Violent Extremist program, which, like its British counterpart, places an exclusive focus on the Muslim community — even though gun violence and right-wing terrorism have claimed many more lives in the US than extremists acting in the name of Islam. The program relies on flawed assumptions about who becomes a terrorist and why, stigmatizes the entire Muslim community and tarnishes the community’s relationship with law enforcement.
Likewise, the FBI under the Obama administration has routinely set up vulnerable losers in terrorism sting plots that in all likelihood would never have happened without the FBI’s dirty work and offers of handsome payouts. During the sentencing phase in one of these cases, the judge herself said it was “beyond question that the government created the crime here,” criticizing the FBI for sending informants “trolling among the citizens of a troubled community, offering very poor people money if they will play some role — any role — in criminal activity.”
Obama rightly acknowledges the contribution that Muslim-Americans have made to the country and condemned this current wave of bigotry, but both Democrats and Republicans have treated Muslims as deserving of fewer rights than other Americans. It is time to face the fact that blanket anti-Muslim policies feed an ugly prejudice and degrade our professed values of equal treatment under the law. There is a dark cloud hovering ominously over Muslims today. It is time for climate change.
Saudi Arabian largesse is flooding Egypt’s cultural scene, but the reception is mixed. Some welcome new “cooperation” between two regional powerhouses, while others fear a hostile takeover by Riyadh. In Cairo, historically the cultural capital of the Arab world, Egyptian Minister of Culture Nevine al-Kilany recently hosted Saudi Arabian General Entertainment Authority chairman Turki al-Sheikh. The deep-pocketed al-Sheikh has emerged as a Medici-like patron for Egypt’s cultural elite, courted by Cairo’s top talent to produce a slew of forthcoming films. A new three-way agreement between al-Sheikh, Kilany and United Media Services — a multi-media conglomerate linked to state intelligence that owns much of
The US and other countries should take concrete steps to confront the threats from Beijing to avoid war, US Representative Mario Diaz-Balart said in an interview with Voice of America on March 13. The US should use “every diplomatic economic tool at our disposal to treat China as what it is... to avoid war,” Diaz-Balart said. Giving an example of what the US could do, he said that it has to be more aggressive in its military sales to Taiwan. Actions by cross-party US lawmakers in the past few years such as meeting with Taiwanese officials in Washington and Taipei, and
Denmark’s “one China” policy more and more resembles Beijing’s “one China” principle. At least, this is how things appear. In recent interactions with the Danish state, such as applying for residency permits, a Taiwanese’s nationality would be listed as “China.” That designation occurs for a Taiwanese student coming to Denmark or a Danish citizen arriving in Denmark with, for example, their Taiwanese partner. Details of this were published on Sunday in an article in the Danish daily Berlingske written by Alexander Sjoberg and Tobias Reinwald. The pretext for this new practice is that Denmark does not recognize Taiwan as a state under
The Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan has no official diplomatic allies in the EU. With the exception of the Vatican, it has no official allies in Europe at all. This does not prevent the ROC — Taiwan — from having close relations with EU member states and other European countries. The exact nature of the relationship does bear revisiting, if only to clarify what is a very complicated and sensitive idea, the details of which leave considerable room for misunderstanding, misrepresentation and disagreement. Only this week, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) received members of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations