The Left Has Admirable Values, But....

One value all progressives have is opposition to racism. Some white people are better at it than others. Most  interfaith  and progressive groups take the following WEAK stand on Islamaphobia. They say we should not hold all Muslims accountable for the actions of s few. This is an appeal only to people with such high minded sensibilities that they already assume racism is wrong. You are essentially throwing in the towel rather than confront  chest thumping proponents of American exceptionalism. If these reactionaries were shown evidence that 9/11 was a false flag operation, some would be MUCH less likely to support dropping bombs on Muslim homes thousands of miles away.

So, am I being unfair when I say progressives take a racist position when they refuse to discuss the possibility that Muslims are not the 9/11 culprits? If you won't even discuss the issue, I'm still hesitant to accuse you of racism, but I would level an accusation of hypocrisy. Disagreeing on analysis is fine, but refusing to dialog is not.

I have a bachelors from MIT, where I was radicalized by Noam Chomsky, Lillian Robinson, Wayne O'Neill and others. I took Noam's political course , "Intellectuals and Social Change" twice and audited ir twice , all within 5 years. Each semester was different. My favorite semester was on fascism. Noam will, of course, address us this weekend. Allow me to take a lesson from my favorite of all his quotes. It was from his first political book, American Power and the New Mandarins. It goes, "The responsibility of intellectuals is to speak the truth and expose lies." Since so many progressive leaders, including Noam, hold that discussion of the evidence of a false flag operation on 9/11 is a distraction, isn't that equivalent to "We don't mind looking the other way about SOME government lies."

If the left welcomed us as allies as you should, you would give us some stage time at larger conferences and rallies as the late Howard Zinn recommended in my interview of him listed at 911truth.org on March 2, 2009.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31823.htm

We Mustn't Allow Muslims in Public Life to be Silenced

Even in polite society, fear-mongering, negative stereotyping and abuse are now out of control – as I know from bitter experience

By Mehdi Hasan

July 12, 2012 "The Guardian' - - Have you ever been called an Islamist? How about a jihadist or a terrorist? Extremist, maybe? Welcome to my world. It's pretty depressing. Every morning, I take a deep breath and then go online to discover what new insult or smear has been thrown in my direction. Whether it's tweets, blogposts or comment threads, the abuse is as relentless as it is vicious.

You might think I'd have become used to it by now. Well, I haven't. When I started writing for a living, I never imagined I'd be the victim of such personal, such Islamophobic, attacks, on a near-daily basis. On joining the New Statesman in 2009, I was promptly subjected to an online smear campaign, involving a series of selectively edited videos of speeches I'd delivered in front of groups of Muslim university students several years ago. I was accused of being a "secret" member of the extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, and a "dangerous Muslim shithead" in the "same genre" as the Nazis. The post that sticks in my mind is from the blogger who referred to me as a "moderate cockroach" whose Islamic faith was "no different from the Islam of Abu Hamza, Abu Qatada, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Anjem Choudary or any of the 'tiny minority' of Islamic terrorists who believe that Islam must dominate, no matter what the cost".

Three years later, as I leave the New Statesman to join the Huffington Post UK, little seems to have changed. "Huffington Post's new UK political director brings pro-Iran baggage," screamed the headline on the Fox News website back in late May. My "baggage"? I once publicly praised a fatwa from Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, forbidding the production of nuclear weapons. Shame on me! Another ultra-conservative US news website, the Washington Free Beacon, referred to me as the "HuffPo's house jihadi".

In Shift, Police Say Leader Helped With Anti-Islam Film and Now Regrets It
By MICHAEL POWELL
Published: January 24, 2012

The New York City police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, through a top aide, acknowledged for the first time on Tuesday that he personally cooperated with the filmmakers of “The Third Jihad” — a decision the commissioner now describes as a mistake.
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The film, which says the goal of “much of Muslim leadership here in America” is to “infiltrate and dominate” the United States, was screened for more than 1,400 officers during training in 2010.

Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne told The New York Times on Monday that the filmmakers had relied on old interview clips and had never spoken with the commissioner.

On Tuesday, the film’s producer, Raphael Shore, e-mailed The Times and provided a date and time for their 90-minute interview with the commissioner at Police Headquarters on March 19, 2007. Told of this e-mail, Mr. Browne revised his account.

“He’s right,” Mr. Browne said Tuesday of the producer. “In fact, I recommended in February 2007 that Commissioner Kelly be interviewed.”

In an e-mail, Mr. Browne said that when he first saw the film in 2011, he assumed the commissioner’s interview was taken from old clips, even though the film referred to Mr. Kelly as an “interviewee.” He did not offer an explanation as to why he and the commissioner, on Tuesday, remembered so much of their decision.

The Police Department’s admission suggests a closer relationship between it and the provocative film, which has drawn angry condemnation from Muslim and civil rights groups, than officials had previously acknowledged.

In Police Training, a Dark Film on U.S. Muslims

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An Islamic flag atop the White House in “The Third Jihad.”
By MICHAEL POWELL
Published: January 23, 2012

Ominous music plays as images appear on the screen: Muslim terrorists shoot Christians in the head, car bombs explode, executed children lie covered by sheets and a doctored photograph shows an Islamic flag flying over the White House.

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"The Third Jihad" says a covert jihad is under way in the West.
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“This is the true agenda of much of Islam in America,” a narrator intones. “A strategy to infiltrate and dominate America. ... This is the war you don’t know about.”

This is the feature-length film titled “The Third Jihad,” paid for by a nonprofit group, which was shown to more than a thousand officers as part of training in the New York Police Department.

In January 2011, when news broke that the department had used the film in training, a top police official denied it, then said it had been mistakenly screened “a couple of times” for a few officers.

A year later, police documents obtained under the state’s Freedom of Information Law reveal a different reality: “The Third Jihad,” which includes an interview with Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, was shown, according to internal police reports, “on a continuous loop” for between three months and one year of training.

During that time, at least 1,489 police officers, from lieutenants to detectives to patrol officers, saw the film.

Teachers are reluctant to discuss the September 11 attacks on America because they fear it will provoke racism and Islamaphobia in class, according to a survey.Those in schools with high numbers of Muslim children are particularly concerned about talking about the atrocity - despite it being arguably the defining event of the 21st century so far.

Alison Kitson, faculty director at the Institute of Education at London University, which carried out the survey, said teachers should "grasp the nettle" and tackle the subject. They should credit children with more maturity, she said.

Four in five teachers (81 per cent) said that when teaching the topic, it was a challenge to break "students' stereotypes and prejudices about other cultures".

The academics polled almost 200 teachers across the country and also visited eight schools: four in London, and one each in Leeds, Worcestershire, Oxford and Surrey.

At two schools, teachers showed "serious resistance" to raising the subject, while in another there was "some resistance" from staff. Continued