The Arab World Is On Fire Lately

Figuratively, in the media, I mean it’s almost as news-worthy as Lindsay Lohan or Charlie Sheen nowadays. I mean, eight years of war in Iraq had to fight for a few minutes on the news here and there, but now it’s all about the people’s uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and so on.

Even on the subject of Islam and Muslims the good blogs are trouncing me at my own game. Here’s Wonkette a couple days ago with three posts about Muslims in America: one on jackasses hired by the govt to give misinformation about Islam, one about Christians throwing crosses at a Muslim man praying, and one about a crowd of good Americans chanting insults and curses at a Muslims attending a charity fundraiser.

I think you can see how full of God’s love these Christians are in the videos posted on Gawker.

And here’s a CNN article from late last year about how some whites in the US now perceive themselves as a minority. Yes, the group that is extremely well represented in both houses of Congress, all the nation’s CEOs, and who fielded 43 of 44 US presidents, feels oppressed.

A recent Public Religion Research Institute poll found 44% of Americans surveyed identify discrimination against whites as being just as big as bigotry aimed at blacks and other minorities. The poll found 61% of those identifying with the Tea Party held that view, as did 56% of Republicans and 57% of white evangelicals.

Conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh argued in a radio show that Republicans are an “oppressed minority” in need of a “civil rights movement” because its members willingly sit in the “back of the bus” and “are afraid of the fire hoses and the dogs.”

Conservative news outlets ran a number of stories last summer highlighting an incident from the 2008 elections, in which activists from the New Black Panther Party appeared to be intimidating voters at a polling place. Those claims were never proven.

Peter Brimelow, author of “Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster,” asserts that much of white America’s anxiety derives from living under a black president and changing demographics.

Diversity, he says, “is not strength.”

James Edwards, host of the “Political Cesspool” radio show, isn’t shy about naming those interests. He says white Americans have become the “dispossessed majority” and that coming demographic changes may turn the United States into a “Third-World flop-house.”

You know what would turn the US into a third-world flop-house? Continuing its course of anti-intellectualism, believing that Fox News presents news, putting faith before reason, weakening public education, closing libraries, ending integration programs, downplaying and undermining scientific data, failing to keep church and state separate, and a host of other actions that large segments of the white, Christian population are embracing with open arms.

Now whites are victims of pervasive racism, Edwards says.

“They’re the victims of it every day. Anything a white conservative does that a liberal doesn’t like is called racism.”

Right-Wingers Rushing to Demonize Muslim Brotherhood

The right-wing propaganda machine got cranked up to 11 in the hopes of demonizing the Muslim Brotherhood among Americans, presumably to damage President Obama’s reelection chances, since Americans sure can’t vote on the new Egyptian government.

So a couple poor interns are having to expand their rarely-taxed brains and learn the difference between the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Jazeera, just for propaganda purposes. Up until now Al Jazeera has equaled Al Qaeda in their atrophied minds. I hate to look, but undoubtedly they’ve been all over the MB entry at Wikipedia, adding made-up quotes and figures. Be prepared for some previously-obscure Christian pastors to say some really, mind-bogglingly stupid stuff about the MB in the coming days.

To see a couple brand new hit jobs on the MB and Obama, check out these two posts at MyRightWingDad.net.

Fw: Obama wants radical muslim brotherhood in new egyptian government
and Fw: Obama advice

The latter is a cartoon. And stay and look at the rest of the archive. You sure won’t think racism is dead in America after that.

“Because Muslims Hate Dogs”

Story found at Talking Points Memo. A bunch of moron islamophobes out in California are determined to stop a mosque from being built in Riverside County.

It seems the anti-mosque protesters in California have torn a few pages from the Abu Ghraib field manual. Protesters of a planned mosque and Muslim community center in Riverside County, California are calling on locals to come to a rally outside an existing mosque with their pet dogs because, as the protest organizer says, Muslims “hate dogs.”

“We will not be submissive,” the notice proclaimed. “Our voices are going to be heard!” The alert went on to question what its authors described as Islamic beliefs. It suggested that participants sing during the rally because Muslim “women are forbidden to sing.” It suggested that rally participants bring dogs because Muslims “hate dogs.”

Brilliant scholarship, guys. Here are some photos, found on the internet in a few seconds, of Muslims and dogs:

Are you feeling the hate?

And to go with that, here are Muslim women singing:

Pesky facts.

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UPDATE: I looked more closely and realized at least three of those pictures are of the same man. And another two are of the same man, who might or might not be the same as the first three. I will go hunting for more pictures of different Muslims who don’t hate dogs if I must.

But let’s see what I can do right quick:

From Humane Society International:

Almost no one in Qatar wants a saluki because they are so common there. People there prefer “exotic” breeds like German shepherds.

This from an Omani blog, Muscat Confidential:

The ruling, published in mid-January, had escaped my notice – probably because I don’t have a dog. But it would seem to put an end to evening strolls with your dog. Early morning horseback-rides (or camel rides?) on the beach must now be considered to be illegal too.

Now, there was a couple of real problems that arguably did need addressing – selfish and inconsiderate dog owners who would let their animals run around off the leash on public beaches (especially problematic at Intercon beach), and dog owners who leave their dog shit all over the place instead of picking it up.

Europe Not Overrun by Muslims

BBC News online has an article today about a YouTube video that has been viewed more than ten million times, and is a bunch of hooey.

Below is the entire article.

This seven-and-a-half minute video “Muslim Demographics” uses slick graphics, punctuated with dramatic music, to make some surprising claims, asserting that much of Europe will be majority Muslim in just a few decades. It says that in the past two decades, 90% of all population growth in Europe has been Muslim immigration.

In France, it says 30% of those aged 20 and younger are Muslim, with the birth rate for Muslim families massively exceeding that across all families. It says France will be an Islamic Republic within 39 years.

In the UK it says the Muslim population has risen 30-fold since the beginning of the 1980s.

But are any of the video’s statistics true?

Of the video’s claims that 90% of Europe’s population growth since 1990 is due Islamic immigration, only a fragment is true. Immigration is the main driver of population growth according to EU statistics and in some exceptional years, 90% of population growth has been down to net inward migration.

But that includes all immigrants coming into the EU, not just Muslims.

It is the claims made about individual countries that are most striking. The video says that a typical French family has 1.8 children but that French Muslim families have 8.1 children.

No source is given for this information and the French government doesn’t collect statistics by religion. So it is impossible to say what the precise fertility rates among different religious groups in France are.

But no country on earth has such a high fertility rate and in Algeria and Morocco, the two nations which send the largest numbers of Muslim immigrants to France, the fertility rate is 2.38, according to the UN’s 2008 figures.

In the Netherlands, according to the video, half of all newborns are Muslim, and in 15 years half the population will be Muslim.

But the Dutch office of statistics estimates that Muslims make up only 5% of the population. For Dutch Muslim women to produce half the nation’s babies, they would have to be giving birth at at least 14 times the rate of their non-Muslim neighbours.

Is 25% of the Belgian population Muslim, as the video asserts? No. The Belgian office of statistics points to a 2008 study which suggests the real figure is just 6%.

The video also states that the Muslim population of the UK has grown 30-fold in the past 30 years. They get the figure by estimating that the British Muslim population has risen from 82,000 to 2.5 million.

The firm data is in the 2001 census, which counted close to 1.6 million Muslims in England and Wales. That number will have risen since 2001 so 2.5 million is not impossible. The 2011 census will be looked to for clarification.

However, according to Dr Andrew Hinde, a demographer at Southampton University, the 82,000 figure is a gross under-estimate. “If you take the 1981 census there was no question asked on religious belief,” he says, “but if you take those born in Pakistan and Bangladesh as a minimum estimate of the number of Muslims in 1981, it’s about 300,000.”

That would mean the growth rate has been significantly slower than the video suggests.

But the video doesn’t just rely on statistics, it also uses an official Government statement. It quotes it as saying: “The fall in German population can no longer be stopped. Its downward spiral is no longer reversible. It will be a Muslim state by the year 2050.”

The statement in question was made by then vice-president of the Federal Statistics Office, Walter Radermacher, who is now chief statistician of the European Union. He says that while it is true he said Germany’s population was in decline, the last part of the quote [in italics] is just an invention. He said nothing about Germany becoming a Muslim state.

“The quotation which reads as if the German government believed that Germany will become a Muslim state is simply not true,” he says. “There is no source which can be quoted that the German government has published such an expression or opinion.”

Inexact science

The video also claims the German government believes the number of Muslims in Europe will double to 104 million.

Mr Radermacher adds: “That is not true. The German government does not believe that the Muslim population will double in the next 40 or 50 years. There are no reliable sources that give a proof for that assumption.”

Population projection is an inexact science. No-one knows how many Muslims will be living in Europe or anywhere else by 2050. The current trends suggest that by 2050 Europe will have a bigger proportion of Muslims, although nothing like the level suggested in the video.

But the big assumption here is current trends. Levels of immigration and fertility change over time.

It is certainly true that immigrant communities often have higher fertility rates but over time these usually fall into line with the indigenous population. This might not happen with Muslim immigrants. But nobody can know and that’s why, according to Dr Hinde, it is so hard to guess the future.

“In the 1930s there were population projections made of the UK that by the end of the century the UK population would be 20 million. Well, it turned out to be 50 million.

“That’s how far out you can get when you’re moving 40 or 50 years down the line and not taking into account the uncertainty.”

Published in 1994. England not on her knees yet.

But scary, ooooooh.

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UPDATE: In reality, Muslims make up 3 percent of the population of Europe, and most of them oppose sharia law.

Smear Machine Fail

Please check out this post at MyRightWingDad.net.

It is a right-wing email forward which begins with a tale told in outrage of a little Iranian boy who was caught stealing bread and sentenced to lose (or “loose”–what would a right-wing forward be without misspelling?) the use of his arm by crushing. Then in has a series of photos starting with a very casual-looking group of folks in civilian clothing looking on while the boy lies down in the street, extending his arm in front of the car’s left front tire. In the third and fourth photos the boy is gritting his teeth as the car passes over, and in the fifth and sixth photos his face is blocked by the tire. The we get the caption, “Spread this example of peace and love of Islam to your friends!!”

What monsters those Muslims are! Except what the pictures really depict is the act of some street performers. It’s on Snopes (the Urban Legends Reference Page), but since their site is kind of annoying, here’s a link to the same info at About.com.

Comments: The preceding images are apparently authentic — they were published as such in 2005 on the Iranian news Web site Peyke Iran, at any rate — but the accompanying caption doesn’t jibe with the original report and was clearly fabricated after the fact.

According to a Peyke Iran spokesperson who corrected the record last November in a note posted on Little Green Footballs, the young boy whose arm was run over was not being punished for a crime. He was part of a “Maareke giry” or street magic act and allegedly performed the stunt for money (note the gentleman speaking into a microphone in image #1). The seventh and eighth pictures in the series, which appear to show the child shaken but otherwise unharmed after the ordeal, were omitted from the email flier but can still be viewed on Peykeiran.com (where all the images are attributed to photographer Siamak Yari).

You can also vote there on whether you thought it was plausible that these photos depicted an act of Islamic justice.

Peykeiran.com is in Farsi and I don’t read Farsi, so I can’t find the photos to link you to them.