Author: Margarita Murphy

Webmaster of anti-Islam site openly called for pogroms against Muslims

With news of recent arson attacks against multiple Islamic (and Hindu) targets in NYC, CAIR notes the following:

Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the advocacy group, said CAIR recently called on the FBI to investigate threats targeting mosques posted on an anti-Islam blog called “Bare Naked Islam.”

One comment on the site read: “Throw 10 Molotov cocktails into these mosques and burn them down,” according to Hooper. By Monday, the comment appeared to have been taken down by blog operator WordPress.com.

An example of a particularly vile thread on this site from May 2011 can be found in the Google Cache. The thread is started with a post containing links to news articles describing indiscriminate mob violence against Muslim immigrants in Greece with the author voicing approval. Many of the comments openly call for such tactics against Muslims to be exported to other countries such as the US. An example:

I think we should applaud Greece and use them as an example and start throwing bombs in Mosques. I really don’t CAIR what they think they shouldn’t be here so their rights don’t matter. Treat me as you want to be treated.

This thread is notable because the webmaster behind the website openly calls for riots against Muslims around the world.

A poster named “Shawn” commented that:

It’s about time! Maybe this is the start of an ‘Anti-Islam Summer’. Now that’s something to celebrate and get behind.

The webmaster “barenakedislam” then responded:

Shawn I like that, a worldwide anti-Islam summer.

Leading anti-immigrant activist admitted that NAFTA increased illegal crossings from Mexico but supports free trade anyway

The massive growth in immigration pressures from Mexico in the 1990s was not a failure of NAFTA, but an inevitable consequence. The way we’ll know that CAFTA is promoting economic development in Central America and the Dominican Republic (the scope of the treaty) will be when we see the same increase in immigration pressures. Counterintuitive as it might seem, economic development, especially agricultural modernization, always sets people on the move, by consolidating small farms into larger, more productive operations. These excess farmers then move to cities, where they get manufacturing or service-sector jobs.

But the fact that development cuts peasants loose from the land and compels them to move to cities doesn’t tell us whose cities they’re moving to. Immigration pressure, after all, is not the same as actual immigration. The problem with NAFTA was not that it promoted trade between the United States and Mexico but that neither country did anything meaningful to make sure that the excess Mexican peasantry moved to Mexico’s cities instead of ours. And CAFTA might actually create proportionately greater immigration pressures, because most of the agreement’s impact will be to make our exports more competitive there, with some 80 percent of imports from the CAFTA countries already entering our country duty-free.
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If there is one lesson to be learned from NAFTA it is that free-trade agreements must be accompanied by muscular immigration controls, especially if they are reached with countries that are nearby or already send a lot of immigrants here. If the …

Cold War alliances and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt

Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), pp. 147-149:

In the 1970s, guided by Kamal Adham, Saudi Arabia’s chief of intelligence, Anwar Sadat brought the Muslim Brotherhood back to Egypt. The United States, accustomed to working with Saudi Arabia, was untroubled by the rise of Islamism in Egypt. In fact, Washington was so eager to bring Egypt over the US side in the Cold War that policy makers, diplomats, and intelligence officers viewed Sadat’s restoration of the Islamic right benignly or tacitly encouraged it.
[…]
Concurrent with the growth of the Islamic right in Egypt, Sadat helped engineer a dramatic expansion of America’s power in the Middle East. Under Nasser, Egypt was a nation at odds with the United States. Twenty thousand Soviet troops, technicians, and advisers backed Egypt’s armed force; a war of attrition was under way along the Egypt-Israel border; and Egypt and the United States lacked even normal diplomatic ties. But Sadat established a covert relationship with Adham, the CIA, and Henry Kissinger, the US national security adviser. In 1971, within a year of assuming control, Sadat ousted the Egyptian left from the government, and in 1972 he stunned Moscow by expelling Soviet forces. After the 1973 Ramadan War–waged in concert with Saudi Arabia and organized around Islamic themes rather than Arab nationalism–Egypt and the United States reestablished ties. […] By 1980, Egypt was America’s leading Arab ally, engaged in supporting the US jihad in Afghanistan and …