As if we haven’t had enough unexpected twists in the Oslo tragedy, a fascinating op-ed on Islamophobia by none other than Abe Foxman (“Norwegian attacks stem from a new ideological hate – The Washington Post“) of the Anti-Defamation League appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post.

I don’t often find myself agreeing with Mr. Foxman on issues involving Muslims – though I certainly share his concerns about the use of anti-Semitism as a political tool by Muslim extremists — but I think he is to be applauded for this principled and thoughtful warning about the growing threat of Islamophobia. Most interestingly, Foxman explitly explores the profound parallels between this new hate and the age-old “Socialism of Fools” that the ADL exists to fight.

Abe Foxman: “Norwegian attacks stem from a new ideological hate” – The Washington Post

During a decade spent in the Beltway, I was periodically flabbergasted by the striking provincialism of ostensibly highly educated, well traveled and professionally accomplished individuals when discussions turned to the Muslim world. Frankly, in some people, when question of Muslims come up certain parts of the human brain seem to simply cease to operate, with consistency, common sense and rigor temporarily going out the window as a result. Thus, a variety of anachronistic attitudes and essentializing stereotypes return from the dustbin of intellectual history, until a modicum of socio-historical rigor (or at least caution) is restored when attention shifts to some more “normal” and less exoticized community.

Peter Hart points out an especially egregious recent example of this phenomenon on the invaluable FAIR Blog:

The end of a Wall Street Journal article (7/14/11) on a new report on Afghan deaths highlights the peculiarity of their culture:

Of civilian casualties, 2 percent were caused by night raids, slightly down from last year, with 30 fatalities, the report says. Night raids have been a contentious issue between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. military officers and civilian leaders. The raids are sensitive in Afghanistan, because foreign soldiers burst into civilian homes, where strangers are unwelcome in the country’s conservative Islamic traditions.

Now that justice has finally caught up with Osama bin Laden, one hopes that sanity will finally catch up with Washington. In the indispensable TomDispatch.com, editor Tom Engelhardt rains on our very premature victory parade at bin Laden’s death, pointing out that OBL lives on in a host of crucial ways and that the fiend’s enduring victory lies in America’s self-imposed political debasement after 9/11:

Unfortunately, in every way that matters for Americans, it’s an illusion that Osama bin Laden is dead. In every way that matters, he will fight on, barring a major Obama administration policy shift in Afghanistan, and it’s we who will ensure that he remains on the battlefield that George W. Bush’s administration once so grandiosely labeled the Global War on Terror.

A few days ago, I came across a wonderful op-ed by a journalist and Middle East commentator in the Danish newspaper Politiken – which one might call Denmark’s answer to The New York Times – that I think admirably sums up how the last few months’ events in the Middle East have exposed the abject superficiality and thinly-veiled prejudice that often infects Western and especially American MSM analysis of Middle Eastern politics.

For far too long, it’s been customary to dismiss the Arab masses with this offensive, meaningless shorthand — the “Arab Street” — that casts them as mindless herds of animals ever on the verge of violence and in thrall to extremists.

What follows is my (no doubt imperfect) translation of the article in its entirety.

Criminal charges have been filed against the “Irvine 11″ — the ring leaders of a large group of Muslim students at University of California, Irvine who repeatedly disrupted a speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren last February, sparking outrage – which could result in 6 months of prison time. This draconian and unprecedented overreaction raises a host of issues and is being criticized by many in the UC Irvine community. Joseph Serna writes in the The Los Angeles Times (4/16/11):

Orange County prosecutors didn’t flinch Friday when a group of university student activists charged with disturbing an Israeli ambassador’s speech last year at UC Irvine brought more than 60 supporters with them to court.

Instead, prosecutors filed a motion at the hearing to release grand jury transcripts from their investigation and handed out copies of court filings they said illustrated point by point how the students – “the Irvine 11″ – conspired to disrupt Ambassador Michael Oren’s speech at UC Irvine on Feb. 8, 2010, then tried to cover it up.

“They’re caught red-handed,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Dan Wagner said outside court. “They very intentionally tried to shut down” Oren’s speech.

Prosecutors have charged eight former or current UC Irvine and three UC Riverside students with misdemeanor conspiracy to commit a crime and misdemeanor disruption of a meeting. Seven of the 11 were in court and pleaded not guilty. Attorneys pleaded not guilty on behalf of the other four.

Apparently, the charge that packs the most punch here is the conspiring part, a charge the defendants are (implausibly, it seems) denying.

A Kansas politician has “joked” about gunning down “illegal immigrants” (read: Mexicans) like animals. The naked prejudice of such a quip and the irresponsibility of it issuing from the lips of an elected official are mind-boggling.

Kansas GOPer: Let’s Shoot Illegal Immigrants Like Pigs | TPMDC

Kansas State Rep. Virgil Peck (R) suggested Monday that the best way to deal with the illegal immigration problem may be the same way the state might deal with the problem of “feral hogs” — by shooting them from a helicopter. [MORE]

Not to distract us from the appalling anti-Mexican and anti-Latino racism of this odious pronouncement, but I have to say it: Imagine if a Muslim politician (say, Congressman Keith Ellison) said something this extreme about his own (in some cases quite “feral”) opponents.

In a curiously un-self-aware move a few weeks ago, Christopher Hitchens slammed President Obama’s handling of the unrest in North Africa as “pathetic” and “cynical” in a piece for Slate Magazine. Employing a facile (and – given how devoid of neutrality US Mideast policy often has been – a tad euphemistic) analogy to a fickle Swiss banker, he declares:

The Obama administration also behaves as if the weight of the United States in world affairs is approximately the same as that of Switzerland. We await developments. We urge caution, even restraint. We hope for the formation of an international consensus. And, just as there is something despicable about the way in which Swiss bankers change horses, so there is something contemptible about the way in which Washington has been affecting – and perhaps helping to bring about – American impotence. Except that, whereas at least the Swiss have the excuse of cynicism, American policy manages to be both cynical and naive.

He’s right, but I’m not sure he has the credibility to point this out. Much more importantly, nor do many in Washington these days, at least those inside the halls of power. It’s a charge only someone with a track record of at least mild dissent from the dreary, self-defeating status quo in US Mideast policy should dare to make.

The New York Times ran an engrossing and very timely look back in February at the momentous yet curiously under-reported battles that have been waged for decades in the Lone Star State over the religious, scientific and political message of its school textbooks. The stakes are a lot higher than you might guess.

You’ve probably noticed the absurd spectacle – and resulting media feeding frenzy – of a Muslim “group” in New York making a barely veiled threat to the creators of “South Park” for (almost) portraying Muhammad and causing the episode to be censored.

As Hussein Rashid rightly emphasizes in his observations in Religion Dispatches, these inane provocations don’t come from an Islamic “group”. To hear the breathless media coverage you’d think this a call to arms from jihadi leaders on American soil, when this duo is far more Beavis and Butt-Head than Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri. Two foolish men with an Internet connection that happen to be Muslim are getting their 15 minutes of fame and scaring the daylights out of everybody. Two men do not an organization make and so far, there is no more evidence that these hateful nutcases are any more representative of any broader stream–or even a really narrow one–within “their” community than, say, the infamous and equally odious Westboro Baptist Church, whose handful of congregants are known for traveling the land to picket at high profile events with outrageously homophobic and anti-Semitic signs (e.g., “AIDS cures fags.”). Both “groups” are minuscule and repudiated by their fellows, and both would be unknown were it not for the media attention they’ve gotten.

That doesn’t make their antics any less disturbing or repulsive. (But what do you expect from disturbed cretins who’d praise the murderer of Fort Hood as an “officer and a gentleman”?) Neither does it make the threat any less concerning or worthy of investigation–I don’t always agree with what’s done in the name of the War on Terror today, but vigilance is certainly necessary. Nonetheless, this episode still needs to be kept in perspective.

A little post-holiday levity. TIME has a photo essay on the storied history of the AK-47 and I had to share this incongruous photo from Somalia.

Read the accompanying blurb below and then inspect the weapon.

Dhushamareb, Somalia, 2009 – The Timeless, Ubiquitous AK-47 – Photo Essays – TIME:

Dhushamareb,Somalia, 2009
A Sufi Muslim fighter attends an outdoor religion class. Traditionally nonviolent and tolerant, Sufis in Somalia have only recently picked up guns in response to attacks from al-Shabab, a hard-line Islamist group that has subjected the country’s south to a reign of terror. So far, these moderates control an area in the center of the country, enjoy popular support and have fended off incursions.

I’m not sure I’d be able to focus my thoughts on the Sacred with my muṣḥaf (i.e., my copy of the Quran; literally, a manuscript or collection of sheets) resting on a machine gun, much less with it sharing my lap with with an advertisement for our time’s preeminent icon of pornography, but perhaps this particular gift of Globalization has yet to reach Somali village life (unlike the even more iconic, successful, nearly as pornographic and sexist–and, sadly, increasingly tame-seeming–TV series “Baywatch”).

Sometimes as a Muslim I feel suspect that the simplest, most effective way to begin to answer the many burning questions Westerners have about Islam and Muslims isn’t to give them a Quran or even the most erudite and engaging book on Islam. For many living in our postmodern world, such a discussion needs to start far closer to home, with a crash course in Western religious history and the basic ideas of the Judeo-Christian Tradition. Not only is that often a necessary remedial measure, but in this day of –to borrow an inspired metaphor once applied to U.S.-Iranian relations–“mutual Satanization” I think it is for many probably the only way to begin this critical conversation.

As an undergrad studying French in the early 1990s, I took a class on the Francophone literature of Quebec. Until recently in most Western societies literature was riddled with references to and assumptions of familiarity with the Bible, and this was especially true of Quebec’s literary output thanks to the province’s tradition of being *plus catholique que le pape*.

I was the only non-Christian in the class and my knowledge of the Bible is anything but encyclopedic, yet it sometimes seemed that I was the only student with even a rudimentary familiarity with the famous biblical narratives, events and turns of phrase that were mined at every turn by our Quebecois authors and film makers. During one class room discussion of the wonderful 1989 world cinema classic “Jesus of Montreal”, after painfully obvious Gospel allusion after painfully obvious Gospel allusion had appeared to be zoom over most people’s heads, I remember thinking, “My God, if these guys are so ignorant of their own tradition, what hope is there of explaining the yet more unfamiliar worldview of Muslims?” (For more on this trend, see Stephen Prothero’s stimulating Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know–And Doesn’t.)

In such a backdrop of abject religious illiteracy, the most effective introduction to Islam for the average American may not be a book on Islam at all, but rather an discussion of the parallels of Islam’s supposedly peculiar doctrines and practices that are to be found in one’s own culturo-religious heritage.