The golden days of Summer are for days at the beach. And days at the beach mean sunscreen, proper hydration, a snack, sunglasses, and a good book to read. But if you’re like me, you may be running out of thrillers. But no worry! We’ve got some great recommendations of fiction from – yes! – the FBI. But first some context.

In recent days, the Norway shootings have revealed a huge number of connections with American hate groups and so called Islam experts. Despite the huge number of these groups, Department of Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano took it on the chin from right-wingers last April for suggesting it even exists. The Southern Poverty Law Center and former DHS investigator Darryl Johnson have written that Napolitano caved to right-wing criticism and dismantled a unit responsible for investigating home-grown terror in 2009. A report by CNN’s Anderson Cooper recently revealed that one of the many “Islam experts” feeding at the government trough who has trained DHS employees, Walid Shoebat, is a complete fraud. Congressman Peter King is still running his McCarthyite hearings on American Muslims, and instead of focusing on real terror, national paranoia has now led to effectively ignoring domestic threats and instead demonizing one of our own religious communities. It all sort of reminds me a bit of the obsession with Jews by the Jüdische Abteilung of the Nazi bureaucracy.

But, people! There’s a silver lining in all this rain! A recent Freedom of Information Act request forced the disclosure of a PowerPoint and other materials the FBI used to train agents on dealing with Muslims. The materials themselves, as well as the recommended readings, are fascinating in a crude, reptilian sort of way – in their demonization of Muslims by the authors, many of whom, it turns out, know bupkus about Islam or have their own axe to grind. If you want some exciting fiction, ladies and gents, it doesn’t get any better or more fictional than this!

So without further ado, here is the FBI’s recommended Summer Reading List on The Evil Moozlim Threat:

The Arab Mind (Raphael Patai)

“The book came to public attention in 2004 after investigative journalist Seymour Hersh writing for the New Yorker magazine revealed that the book was ‘the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior’ to the effect that it was the source of the idea held by the US military officials responsible for the Abu Ghraib scandal that ‘Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation’.”

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (Robert Spencer)

This book should simply be titled “The Incorrect Guide to Islam” because it is a hack job by someone who lacks any academic qualifications in Islamic studies. This book’s many similarities to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” should not be overlooked by librarians.

The Truth about Muhammad (Robert Spencer)

Karen Armstrong sums up this one best: “Like any book written in hatred, his new work is a depressing read. Spencer makes no attempt to explain the historical, political, economic and spiritual circumstances of 7th-century Arabia, without which it is impossible to understand the complexities of Muhammad’s life. Consequently he makes basic and bad mistakes of fact. Even more damaging, he deliberately manipulates the evidence.”

The Quran Itself

No doubt included for those who want to selectively hunt the Qu’ran for suspicious passages.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Islam (Yahiha Emerick)

Of this appropriately-titled book, one reviewer wrote: “Throughout the book Yahya Emerick seems to be getting his information from modern fringe scholars who are not representive of the majority in Islam. Many of the ‘reformers’ he mentioned and praised were founders of extremist movements and many people believe these men caused a lot of damage to Islam. I personally do not think Mr. Emerick is qualified to say many of the things he does, I think he should have co-authored the book with a recognised mainstream scholar. There are also many other things, and then some of the information about shias is very incorrect, I am not shia but I found the ignorance about the shia side of Islam offensive. I personally could not give this book to a non muslim because of the errors and minority views it contains…”

Islam and Terrorism (Mark Gabriel, PhD)

From the Amazon.com blurb: “After earning a Ph.D. in Islamic history, Mark A. Gabriel became convinced that Muhammad did not speak for God. His search for truth led to the love of Jesus Christ, as well as complete rejection from his family and two attempts against his life by political fundamentalists. Now pursuing a Ph.D. in world religion at a Christian university, he speaks and writes about the true nature of Islam with the non-emotional accuracy of an academician. As a reflection of his new life in Christ, he has chosen a Christian name to replace his Islamic name.” Objective?

Milestones (Sayyid Qutb)

Qutb’s book is hopefully intended as an introduction to political Islamism, not as a serious study of how most Muslims look at society, particularly European and American Muslims. From an NPR program on Qutb: “Egyptian writer and educator Sayyid Qutb spent the better half of 1949 in Greeley, Colo., studying curriculum at Colorado State Teachers College, now the University of Northern Colorado. What he saw prompted him to condemn America as a soulless, materialistic place that no Muslim should aspire to live in. Qutb’s writings would later become the theoretical basis for many radical Islamic groups of today — including al Qaeda. Qutb increasingly saw the redemption of Egypt in the application of Islamic law.” About as representative of all Muslims as reading – oh I don’t know – Che Guevara.

Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands (Terri Morrison and Wayne Conaway)

Why this book is included is anyone’s guess.

Last year in a talk to the youth of her Christian Democratic Union party, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared MultiKulti (multiculturalism) to be dead in Germany. Economist Thilo Sarrizin from the Sozialdemoktratische Partei Deutschland broke with his own party to declare it a failure as well in a badly researched book. In Norway a member of the far Right angered by his own country’s embrace of multiculturalism, and exemplified by what he regarded as Creeping Shariah in Europe, murdered many of the next generation of leaders of the Norwegian Labor Party – all children. The fanaticism with which the Right in America has pursued anti-Immigrant, anti-Latino, anti-Muslim, anti-Gay, anti-Feminist, and anti-Secularist rhetoric and legislation, and has had such a bug up its ass since a Black president was elected, got me thinking that when it comes right down to it, race mixing is what really upsets them.

All this got me thinking of the ultimate example of multiculturalism we probably all saw years ago in George Lucas’s Star Wars. I mean, of course, the bar scene on a remote outpost in space. I went looking for the image and found what I was looking for:

But apparently I was not the first. Our old dependable racist pill popper, Rush Limbaugh, beat me to it, I’m ashamed to say he even had the same picture in mind:

I’m sure Rush would much prefer an America that looks like this homogenous group of ansehnliche Jugendliche:

The question should not be “Why can’t we all just get along?” It should be “How can we afford not to?”

In a rapidly shrinking world made even smaller by the import of foreign workers, offshoring, trade agreements, globalization, and refugees, multiculturalism is under renewed attack. Although there’s significant help from the more racist elements of White America and from the Tea Party, hostility to multiculturalism is shared by the German Chancellor; a majority of House Republicans; Black Americans like Louis Farrakhan, Herman Cain and Allen West; Christians like Pat Robertson and Andreas Breivik; Jews like Ayn Rand, Pamela Geller and David Horowitz; Indians like Dinesh DiSouza; Muslims like the late Osama bin Laden; the heads of state of nations like Israel and Saudi Arabia; pundits like Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh; and conspiracy theorists like Orly Taitz and The Donald. Pardon me if I missed a few million.

What all these examples show, though, is that there will always be people who can’t play nice with others. They also serve to remind us that one person’s victim can quickly become another’s tormenter. Being persecuted yourself does not automatically guarantee compassion for others. Sadly, it often has the opposite effect.

But changes in demographics are virtually impossible to roll back. Large-scale Jewish resettlement of Israel began half a century ago. Palestinians were there for centuries. But nobody’s going anywhere. American descendants of slaves have no African home to return to. Many Latinos living in Texas are the descendants of those who were there when the United States took it from Mexico. To Native Americans the arrival of Europeans was not a welcome development, but where are the voices calling for 200 million Europeans to return to the Old Country? The descendants of South African white settlers are still trying to figure out their place in a post-Apartheid nation. Indian and Chinese merchants have old, established communities on almost every continent. The fingerprints of British, French, and Portuguese colonialism are all over Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The handiwork of Spanish colonialism is seen all over most of the Americas. The least and most recent of these global changes has been an influx of Muslims into Europe, whether resulting from French colonialism or the German Gastarbeiter program. Yet, apparently, there are those who believe they can just roll back the clock on all this change.

What’s done is done.

Multiculturalism encompasses more than ethnicity and language. It has certainly been a shock to many American fundamentalists and conservatives to discover that we have Gay culture, Green culture, liberal culture, conservative culture, religious culture, secular culture, and a bewildering assortment of others. Amazingly, not all families look like June and Ward Cleaver’s, and this has been difficult for many to accept in an economic system where White Protestantism was once dominant and automatically conferred economic and social advantages on its members over all others.

Faced with the reality of change, the only sensible approach is to accept reality. Fundamentalism, racism, ignorance, fear, or self-interest blinds people to what is rational. Their first impulse is to try to make unwelcome interlopers or the new competition pick up and leave. We see this in the Zionist state, where Arabs are hounded from their homes and villages, even in Israel proper. We see this in a variety of Muslim states where Shi’ites, Alawites, Copts, Sufis, and others are persecuted or driven out. We see this in a dozen American states which have instituted laws for ostensibly preventing illegal immigration but whose real function is to harass and send the message to Latinos: you don’t belong here. We see it in new voter registration laws that attempt to disenfranchise minority, poor, and immigrant voters. It’s no coincidence that many of these same states had Jim Crow laws not so long ago.

Resistance to all this change is futile. But why embrace multiculturalism?

First, the world is the way it is because we have changed it. We have to live with the reality and the consequences of how we’ve changed it. Cross burnings and lynchings or the demonization of people who are, for better or worse, now our neighbors doesn’t unravel reality. It only serves to criminalize and destabilize society, to trivialize the meaning of our Constitution, and to divide communities. Embracing reality is really the only sane option. We can’t move forward if we don’t think rationally.

Second, we strengthen democracy by being inclusive, not by building walls. What does it say about our so-called democracy, in the 21^st Century, when gays still do not have all the legal protections of any other class of citizens? If we are truly so concerned about the institution of marriage, why is there such a preoccupation with keeping the fundamentalist Christian, Jewish, and Muslim ideal of heterosexual marriage the standard, and so little interest in keeping families together or raising healthy, well-educated children? Inclusivity focuses on what we all have in common, rather than attempting to preserve some advantage for just our own group or foisting our own religious views on the rest of society.

On those rare occasions in which Americans have been attacked we have felt a remarkable connection to each other, regardless of culture or religion. In the first days after 9/11, there we were — giving blood, saying prayers, just helping each other. But within days we needed to find someone to blame — and the nativists chose Muslims, Sikhs, Indians, or brown-skinned people whom they thought were Muslims. They weren’t picky. Any number of people were beaten, stabbed, shot, and that was just the beginning. These acts of hate may have sufficed to unite xenophobes, but it did not united the rest of society. Faced with economic hardship, the nativist looks accusingly at the undocumented worker. Faced with doubts about the nation’s future, he grasps at straws, believing that simpler times, simpler rules, a simpler mix of people will make everything all right.

But we can create a sense of shared values, compassion, and true connections to teach other by welcoming multiculturalism.

We are blessed with a vibrant mix of people here in the United States. We’ve got just about every language spoken on earth. Go to Washington DC and you’ll often hear Amharic on your cab driver’s radio — at least until the next wave of immigrants replaces the Ethiopians in the taxi business. We’ve got Spanglish. We’ve got Yiddish. We’ve got Creole. Different Creoles. We’ve got tortillas and spaghetti, Swedish meatballs and sushi, baba ganoush and blintzes, hot dogs and crepes, kale soup and cornbread. And there’s the fusion of all these. Instead of a bright white light, we have a dazzling prism of color in film, music, art, theater, and literature. Every religion is here, every spiritual dialect used to talk to God.

Besides the incredible, beautiful, variety within our society, new Americans are a credit, not a debit in demographic and economic terms. While European population growth is flat, ours is growing. This means that the future generation will be large enough to buoy economic growth, even when many of us today are long retired.

Our strength has always been new citizens bringing new strength to an old democracy-in-progress. In every case new Americans have adopted the national story as passionately as each previous group. Multiculturalism is the celebration and the embrace of this ongoing change. The alternative is stagnation, hate, and the erosion of our democratic principles.

Yesterday’s terrorist attack in Norway was totally expected.

Of course, when it occurred, the first fingers jabbed into the air were pointed accusingly at Muslims. The Washington Post’s necon columnist Jennifer Rubin didn’t bother for any pesky facts to come in before quoting extensively from an article in the Weekly Standard: “We don’t know if al Qaeda was directly responsible for today’s events, but in all likelihood the attack was launched by part of the jihadist hydra.” Rubin expanded the Standard’s neocon arguments to demand more defense spending. The Washington Post never published an update or retraction.

The New York Times also published a headline somewhat prematurely: “Blasts and Gun Attack in Norway; 7 Dead – Powerful Explosions Hit Oslo; Jihadis Claim Responsibility.” The problem was that no such thing had occurred.

Even President Obama got into the act. “It’s a reminder that the entire international community holds a stake in preventing this kind of terror from occurring,” he said, referring to al Qaeda.

But because of the climate of sanctioned and encouraged hate speech here in the United States, it was a surprise to me that the attack did not originate here – in the cradle of anger, paranoia, and hatred.

The proliferation of anti-immigrant and xenophobic groups like Pamela Geller’s “Atlas Shrugs” has created a large network of hate websites, encouraging violence against foreigners (Muslims principally) and giving a forum to foreign xenophobes like Geert Wilders and neo-Nazi groups like the English Defense League. It turns out that the alleged Norwegian attacker, Anders Behring Breivik, was a regular contributor to “Atlas Shrugs” over several years. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which previously used to track the KKK, now has a full-time job tracking militia groups, “sovereigns,” neo-Nazis, various “Aryan churches,” the “Christian identity” movement, and a slew of groups which violently target Blacks, gays, Muslims, abortion doctors, immigrants, “secularists,” and others.

But if you think these insects are only hiding under a couple of rocks, an NAACP study of the Tea Party movement last year identified these same elements in six of the seven Tea Party organizations [http://www.naacp.org/pages/tea-party-report].

A typical example (from the report): “Larry Pratt of Virginia is a member of two different national Tea Party networks: Tea Party Nation and 1776 Tea Party. He has been promoting the gun and militia movement for years. In 1992 he spoke at a Colorado meeting of Aryan Nations leaders, former Ku Klux Klansmen, and adherents of so-called ‘Christian Identity’ — a doctrine in which Jews are considered Satanic and persons of color are referred to as ‘mud people.'”

No rational person can claim to understand how Constitution’s protections are being applied nowadays. Freedom of association, speech, privacy, and assembly are all under attack by our rapidly-expanding security apparatus and security-friendly courts. But paradoxically we have never been freer to advocate shooting our neighbors in the head with a fifty caliber weapon. Last week a federal appeals court defended the rights of a right-wing racist, Walter Bagdasarian, who had called for Barak Obama’s assassination. In 2008 Bagdasarian, in a Yahoo financial forum, called Obama a “n––” and wrote “he will have a 50 cal in the head soon.” He posted another comment 20 minutes later that said “shoot the n––.”

This insanity occurs within religious groups that should know better. Any number of Christian churches, including the infamous Westboro church, have hosted Dutch extremist Geert Wilders. Although primarily a Christian fundamentalist assault on secularism and a competing religion, as a Jew it rankles me that even a Stoughton Jewish congregation has hosted Wilders, who has extensive links to European neo-Nazis. A Muslim I know has likened the current climate for Muslims in the U.S. to the Germany of 1935 for Jews. He’s absolutely right.

The argument for “tolerance” may well be that democracy cannot afford to legislate civility. But what kind of civil society can survive if even the most violent forms of hate speech are permitted?

So, friends and neighbors, just keep watching the news. Al Qaeda is the least of our worries. It’s only a matter of time before someone — encouraged by their fundamentalist church, a right-wing synagogue, a Tea Party congressman, or some bizarre court ruling — harvests the fruit of the pervasive hate in this sick society.

This was published in the Standard Times on July 26, 2011
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20110726/opinion/107260318