The Islamic Community Center of Phoenix is a 100% owned subsidiary of the North American Islamic Trust, which is a group founded & controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood. You can explain what implications you do or do not draw from this fact, but a fact it is. Is “libel” the new “Islamophobia?”
NAIT is not controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, but even if it were, your claim is still libelous because you have no basis for your claim of ties to Hamas.
Should have said: Would be libelous but-for the weasel wording of “ties”–since the US Government also has “ties” to Hamas.
What other critical statements about Islam do you think should be the cause for financial penalties imposed by a court?
Falsely saying some particular mosque is connected to terrorism, with the implication that they support terrorists, is not a “critical statement about Islam.”
I realize you’re too much of an idiot to get that. Since you’re just some angry, fearful dude, I doubt your idiocy will ever cost you a court judgment. But that doesn’t change what libel is.
What “ties” to Hamas does the US government have?
Please define the “Muslim Brotherhood”.
Lots of groups call themselves that.
Thank you in advance for what I’m sure will be a well thought-out response which will show a sophisticated understanding of the religion and the region.
Would you like to explain what you think “libel” is, particularly in relation to the extremely high (nearly-impossible) standard that must be met in order for libel to come into play on an issue of public interest? I’m almost certain what you meant to accuse me of was “defamation” and that you are similarly unaware of how nearly-irrelevant the idea of “defaming a religion” is in U.S. law.
Maybe you think we’re living in a country that has a blasphemous libel law, like the UK, or subject to the UN resolution against “defaming religions.” I’ll remind you that we are not.
The point is that “ties” can mean almost anything. If a State Department official meets with a Hamas official, then we have ties. Even if you define “ties” as something like financial support, the U.S. has given money to Hamas-controlled schools and charitable organizations in Gaza. I don’t think the Phoenix mosque has ties to Hamas that are any more substantial than something like that.
American Islamophobes have a very predictable arsenal of claims, and one of the standbys is spurious claims of ties to Hamas, almost entirely drawn from the Holy Land Foundation prosecution, in which the Bush Administration labeled virtually every American Muslim organization as an “unindicted co-conspirator.”
The fact that it’s trivially easy to find evidence of nearly any mosque in America funneling money to Hamas means that:
a) there is a serious problem with extremism in the Muslim community
b) it’s no big deal to funnel money to Hamas and we’re all Islamophobes
I see we already have an answer from you. Are there any other criticisms of Islam that you believe are invalid because they are too simple to demonstrate?
In addition to your mistaken belief that libel is not a species of defamation in American law, you are conflating the rules for defamation of a public figure with the public concern test and incorrectly viewing the claim as “defamation of a religion” instead of a corporation. But instead of explaining American libel law to an idiot, I’ll just invite you to use Wikipedia.
By the way, the mosque held fundraisers in the past for the Muslim Legal Fund of America (a Hamas affiliate), is led by an imam who is a member of CAIR (the Hamas branch in the U.S.), is currently advertising a speech by one of the 1993 WTC bombers on its website, hosted a talk by Lauren Booth who is a propagandist for Hamas leadership, and, again, is entirely owned by NAIT, which is a Muslim Brotherhood-controlled group with all the ties to Hamas that MB bears.
Your rebuttal to this appears to be “it’s unfair to point out the ties that they have with Hamas because it’s too easy to do.” Normal people see the fact that it’s easy to show the links between most mosques and Hamas fundraising/propaganda as a problem with mosques. You view it as making your arguments less exciting. Shrug.
In the non-American laws you are relying on, the name of the crime (usually prosecuted as crime and not a common law tort) is “defaming a religion” or “blasphemous libel.”
There is no such thing in American law to begin with, which is the point.
There is no question that both apply, by virtue of the fact that this is a nationwide news story.
There are expansive additional protections granted to religious opinions by the First Amendment. “The Islamic Community Center of Phoenix has ties to Hamas” is, as a matter of law, a different sort of statement than “Monsanto has ties to Hamas,” and in the U.S. it’s different because the first one can almost never be libel (even if it wasn’t true, which it is). I know that you wish we were living in U.N. world where even saying “I don’t believe Islam is correct” is a crime, but thankfully, we are not.
I like how Haberdash, who was absolutely indignant that anyone would dare be all “well, I condemn what happened to those people, but here’s a bunch of reasons they were bad people to begin with” is busily engaged in doing exactly that.
After all, what’s a little hypocrisy when there are Muslims to hate, right?
Nothing happened to anyone other than getting yelled at. Were you hoping for some sort of violence?
Were you?
I’ll note your equivalence between yelling at Muslims and Muslims killing 12 people (including 1 Muslim and 1 nonreligious North African), though.
Which explains why the DoJ has done nothing to shut down the Muslim Legal Fund of Americas group that is the repeated victim of Islamophobe lies. It is not as though the government would refrain from doing so if it was true; they shut down the Holy Land Foundation and prosecuted its officers.
The purported link of CAIR to Hamas is a lie. There has been one, single accusation by one FBI agent that CAIR and Hamas had some connection for which the government has never bothered to provide a single shred of evidence. (The big claims are that years ago, CAIR was connected to a number of Palestinian groups that, years later, got involved with Hamas. None of the “evidence” (never produced in court or the press) linking CAIR referred to incidents subsequent to those groups being identified as associated with Hamas.)
Funny. All the the recorded talks on the site are from the last couple of years–none are as old as 2001. Do they have ghost recordings?
A direct lie. Booth has spoken out for the people of Gaza, but has no connection to Hamas
No. NAIT is financed by Muslim Students Association, not the Muslim Brotherhood. Either a deliberate lie, or the standard inability of ther uneduacted Muslim haters to be able to recognize different Muslim names translated into English. (“Well, they all sound alike.”)
My rebuttal is that it is a pack of lies.
Basically,you (or your sources) simply wave around the word “Hamas” wenver you encounter an American Muslim group, regardless of the point that your accusations are invention of your own desires.
Well, it would seem there are indeed some “ties” between the NAIT (which seems to own something along the lines of 27%, if not more, of all mosques in the US) and the Muslim Brotherhood.
*A third FBI memo, dated 1988, identified NAIT as one of many “Ikhwan organizations”—i.e., Muslim Brotherhood fronts—that “are involved in organizing political support” for a long-term plan seeking “to institute the Islamic Revolution in the United States” and “establish political control of all non-Islamic governments in the world.”
NAIT was also named in a May 1991 Muslim Brotherhood document—titled “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America”—as one of the Brotherhood’s 29 likeminded allies dedicated to waging a “grand Jihad” aimed at “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”*
Now, perhaps the FBI was wrong in these assessments. Perhaps the Phoenix Mosque is upstanding in its teachings and all these connections are just the unfortunate consequence of one funding network owning such a vast swath of American mosques. The Muslim Brotherhood has at least not seen it apt to disassociate itself.
All this being said, protesting with mean words does not belong in the same continent at hacking people to death or marching to chants of “kill the bloggers.” This should be obvious, one would hope.
This is an interesting chain of logic:
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We can’t allege that Muslim organizations which *have not *been accused by the government of supporting Hamas support Hamas, since if they supported Hamas they would have been accused by the government of supporting Hamas.
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We can’t allege that Muslim organizations which *have *been accused by the government of supporting Hamas support Hamas, since too many organizations have been accused and such accusations are, by fiat, “spurious.”
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Therefore, the only Muslim organizations which support Hamas are those which neither have nor have not been accused by the government of supporting Hamas.
It’s no wonder you think there’s a high barrier to proving that a Muslim organization supports Hamas!