CAIR Wants Bus Assailants Jailed for Hate Crimes

DU genuinely regrets the incident on an Ann Arbor public school bus this past week in a which a group of teens “taunted and jumped” a Muslim girl and her brother, snatching the girl’s hijab off and causing her a black eye and an injury requiring six stitches. (“Rights office urges Ann Arbor schools to cool ethnic tensions following beating”).

Kelvin W. Scott, the director of the Michigan Civil Rights Department, said they had been aware “that tensions between local youths of various ethnic groups were high even before Tuesday's incident. He said tensions may have been escalating in the days before the attack.” No one was arrested, but the four attackers responsible for the assault, two girls and two boys, were being referred to “conflict resolution training.”

Of absolutely no surprise, CAIR-MI is calling “for the incident to be investigated and prosecuted as a hate crime.” Our favorite civil rights leader is still having trouble recognizing the distinction between investigations that uncover the facts, and subsequent decisions about whether or not those facts point to a hate crime having been committed.

Actually, if I believed in hate crimes as a matter of law, which I don’t, I would probably concede that this does sound like an assault motivated by hate: most student assaults between races are motivated by hate, at least on one side, if not always on both sides. And in southeastern Michigan, the black and Arab communities are not known for their strong mutual affection.

When MDCR explains this incident in the context of already-rising tensions “between local youths of various ethnic groups,” Muslim vs. black, or Arab vs. black strife must have something to do with it. I expect the two Muslims siblings, (regardless of who said what first) found themselves in an argument with the four black students, who thought they’d settle it by opening up a can of whup-ass.

I’m sure this kind of thing happens in America only about five days a week. When you hear about kids like this getting sent down for “conflict resoluton training,” it's because they can't even imagine settling any disagreement, no matter how minor, without resorting to violence.

You can bet this isn’t the kind of case Walid and CAIR want to get their hands on, what with the assailants being black teens, instead of white kids whose parents watch Fox News. These facts don’t support CAIR’s Islamophobia theme, the one Walid has been repeating all these years without being able to back up: that white, non-Muslim, Americans have besieged and persecuted the country's Muslims on an ascending scale of savagery since about five minutes after news of the 9/11 attacks reached our redneck ears. But these are desperate times for Islamophobia.

42% of Americans Think 58% of Americans Need to Pay More Attention

Have you been noticing lately you hear fewer and fewer media accusations about America’s widespread Islamophobia? I think that must be part of the reason CAIR-MI is reduced to junk hijab lawsuits to help create some ruckus.

Today’s Detroit News had an article reporting a Pew survey that shows “Americans” having “more favorable views about Muslims” since 9/11, while at the same time we also “believe Muslims in the United States face more discrimination than any other major religious group.” (“Poll: 58% believe Muslims face discrimination”).

The only group that gets treatedworse, in the opinions of those surveyed, are homosexuals, “with almost two-thirds of Americans saying homosexuals are discriminated against a lot.”

I’d say CAIR has some work to do if they want Muslims to be Number One Victim. Here’s a brainstorm. How about a Triangle-CAIR coalition? Man, those guys would be the Victims from Hell.

This Pew survey doesn’t measure objective facts, just what Americans perceive. And what many Americans perceive, especially Americans who rely on sound bites and/or reports of sound bites from friends and family, is what the media repeats most often.

For instance, for five straight years the media, led by the New York Times, repeated day in and day out that the detention camp at Gitmo was a combination Stalinist gulag and Hitler death camp. Then after five years surveys showed the American people had a negative perception of Gitmo. Now where do you suppose they got that idea?

Then there’s the Duke “rape” case. Valerie Plame. Katrina. Millions of my fellow Americans, God bless their souls, still think that the Democrats freed the slaves and America fought a war in the 1940s to free the world from the Republican Party.

This blog has had to respond to repeated news articles that led off with unsubstantiated declarations, reported as historical truth, that there was a post-9/11 “surge of hate crimes”, violence, discrimination and “profiling” against American Muslims, who as likely as not would be kidnapped and renditioned into the Bush gulag as make it to work on any given morning.

Dawud Walid, leader of Michigan CAIR, stated simply, repeatedly, and falsely: “Our community has been under siege since 9/11.”

In January 2008, I wrote:

How prosaic and ineffective it feels to write, simply, that there is no “siege” against the Arab community in Dearborn, not since 9/11, nor ever. The very suggestion is an insult to every resident of the area, Arab, Muslim, or non-Muslim.

If you don’t agree, don’t bother calling me names if you aren’t going to show up with facts to the contrary.

Since 9/11 Americans have been told two things about Islam more or less without letup in the news, in popular shows, and by their lesser informed spiritual leaders: 1) that Islam is a religion of peace being “hijacked” by a teeny-tiny, itsy-bitsy few hundred guys called “terrorists” and 2) that Muslims face a hailstorm of hate crimes every time they leave their houses.

Then we get a guy elected to be President who was saying during his campaign speeches things like, "If there is an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney, it threatens my civil liberties."

So why would it be surprising that after eight years of hearing this Americans have a more favorable view of Muslims (they’re peaceful!), and believe they face a lot of discrimination (they’re under siege)? And on top of which, thanks to George W. Bush, we haven’t had a repeat of 9/11, and have been allowed to forget about Mohamed Atta and Osama bin Ladin, and all that unpleasant stuff about jihad?

Not surprising, the media has been reporting since as far back as the early 1980s that homosexuals, (statistically among the highest-paid, best-educated, and best-postured (males, anyway) people in the country), have been suffering unceasing discrimination, hate, and “intolerance.”

Hollywood has been forcing harmless gay characters on us since Billy Crystal was in “Soap,” all the while telling us that the only thing Bubba and his NRA buddies would rather be doing than shooting Bambi is beating the brains out of some guy in a turtleneck with a ball bat. Is it any wonder Americans “perceive” that homosexuals are even worse sufferers of discrimination than Muslims? Look at the head start they've had! (Oh, it makes me so mad I could just spit!)

Dawud Walid’s response to the survey, (or maybe it's just his automatic response to being approached by a reporter), was to say, “Discrimination towards Muslims has steadily increased according to our own study. It seems Islam-phobia has drastically increased.”

That really isn't what the survey said, but then, Dawud's always saying shit like that.

It’s a living, I guess.

Heroes in Unexpected Places

And here you thought all that talk about how homosexuality wasn’t a choice, meant it wasn’t a choice for the homosexuals!

Brent Bozell nicely captures the moral dimension, the heroism, of what Ms. California did in giving a straight answer to Perez Hilton’s demand she endorse “gay marriages” for all fifty states:

Miss California was a little surprised to be thrown this curveball. Did any other contestant get a question like this? No. She stumbled into an answer: "I think it's great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage." But then, still thinking aloud, she made a decision. She decided to take a stand for traditional values. More to the point, she decided to stay true to her principles: "You know what, in my country and in my family I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman -- no offense to anyone out there -- but that's how I was raised, and that's how I think it should be, between a man and a woman."

Boom! The dream was dead. Carrie Prejean had proclaimed she would rather be "biblically correct" than politically correct. There is now a religion test for Miss USA: Christians need not apply.

Hilton, who laid this trap for Ms. Prejean, then "marched over to a camera to record a rant for the Internet. "She lost, not because she doesn't believe in gay marriage, Miss California lost because she's a dumb [B-word], OK?" The next day on MSNBC, Hilton issued a fake apology: "I was thinking the c-word, and I didn't say it," he said, laughing."

Obviously, Hilton is the dumb bitch, not Ms. California. But if Hilton weren’t queer, but a normal (that’s right—a normal) male, there isn’t a chance in hell he’d be allowed to get away with saying this about any woman, not even Sarah Palin. That is the advantage of homo-immunity, and he knows it.

The only advantage Prejean had was her faith.

There is only one reason why America is standing by and watching this happen to people instead of being up in arms about it: fear. Americans haven’t really changed their minds about whether the homosexual lifestyle is wrong. They’ve changed their minds about what will happen if they voice that opinion out loud.

This isn’t about persuasion, but force. Grandmothers aren’t attending their grandson’s queer weddings because they’ve learned in old age to appreciate the true beauty of fisting and the pipe. They’re doing it because it’s either that or be driven out of the family into the woods—because gays have rights that grandmas don’t—starting with the right to hold the whole family up for blackmail. You can bet any queer bold enough to demand his family attend his gay wedding has been threatening for years to out them as “homophobes.” (“We have a gay son and we’re just as proud of him as all our children!”).

People don’t act like Perez Hilton because they want power. They act that way because they already have it, and they know they have it--a cowed society is giving it to them. Giving them the power of knowing that, whatever they may say or do, or demand, or how they misbehave, society will rip to shreds anyone who dares to criticize them. Freedom to act without consequences is the ultimate power.

I actually don’t get that emotional about the whole gay-rights thing. My main interest is the role it's played degrading free speech rights, which has been profound.

The bullying and intimidation tactics developed by gay-rights activists and their hey-boys in the media were already honed and perfected and easily adapted by the Islamists who grabbed them up and started wielding them after 9/11. All that Queer Nation/Act Up yelling and blackmail in the eighties and nineties had trained Americans to duck and cover reflexively at the sound of the suffix "phobe," as in, "homophobes." But the now strictly-enforced cultural taboo forbidding criticism that it took years for homosexual activists to achieve was won by Islamists within only a few months after the World Trade Center attacks. Once the first charges of "Islamophobia" were flung, we Americans were already trained in what to do: go along and keep your mouth shut, except maybe you might volunteer something harmless like, "Terrorism no more represents Islam than the KKK represents Christianity."

Thought control ends up controlling thoughts but it starts by controlling words, which is much easier. And it doesn’t start out telling you what you must say, but what you cannot say. That's 90% of it. Control the words, and even if people think what you don't want them to, it stays bottled up where it isn't going to hurt anything. Once everybody has stopped saying something the controllers don't want said, that leaves the forum quiet for the sort of one-sided arguments that are the only kind the bullies and activists and blackmailers can ever win. That's how come Al Gore has to spend so much time repeating that the scientific inquiries about global warming are closed, and those who dissent are equivalent to moon-landing deniers.

The alternatives are stark. It’s either, agree with us, or you’re stupid; agree with us, or you’re an evil bigot.

Mark Steyn on the Origins of Tolerating Intolerance

Mark Steyn gave this brief history of the blunt instrument of “Islamophobia” in a speech at Hillsdale College in March, as recorded in Imprimis Magazine:

Every day of the week, somewhere in the West, a Muslim lobbying group is engaging in an action similar to what I’m facing in Canada. Meanwhile, in London, masked men marched through the streets with signs reading, “Behead the Enemies of Islam” and promising another 911 and another Holocaust, all while being protected by a phalanx of London policemen.

Thus we see that today’s multicultural societies tolerate the explicitly intolerant and avowedly unicultural, while refusing to tolerate anyone pointing out that intolerance. It’s been that way for 20 years now, ever since Valentine’s Day 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie, a British subject, and shortly thereafter large numbers of British Muslims marched through English cities openly calling for Rushdie to be killed. A reader in Bradford wrote to me recalling asking a West Yorkshire policeman on the street that day why the various “Muslim community leaders” weren’t being arrested for incitement to murder. The officer said they’d been told to “play it cool.” The calls for blood got more raucous. My correspondent asked his question again. The policeman told him to “Push off” (he expressed the sentiment rather more Anglo-Saxonly, but let that pass) “or I’ll arrest you.” Mr. Rushdie was infuriated when the then Archbishop of Canterbury lapsed into root-cause mode. “I well understand the devout Muslims’ reactions, wounded by what they hold most dear and would themselves die for,” said His Grace. Rushdie replied tersely, “There is only one person here who is in any danger of dying.”

And that's the way it's gone ever since. For all the talk about rampant “Islamophobia,” it's usually only the other party who is “in any danger of dying.”

The UN Wondering If Free Speech Has Had Its Day

I suppose one advantage to being a small, insignificant blog is that we may escape the notice of the enforcement powers of the United Nations Durban II conference. Because according to Durban II’s definitions, since we are regular champions of freedom of expression, and regularly commit the crime of “Islamophobia.”

From National Review Online:
Redefining Anti-Semitism

At Durban II, only anti-Muslim racism counts.

By Anne Bayefsky

Geneva — Tuesday was Day 2 of the United Nations hatefest known as the “first substantive session of the Durban Review Preparatory Committee,” now taking place in Geneva. Delegates rolled up their sleeves, and the Jewish and Western-bashing exercise entered a new phase.

The Egyptian representative gave a good summary of most everything wrong with Durban II. He claimed the conference and its preparatory process should focus on criminalizing “racial profiling,” “racism in the media,” “the challenges posed by Islamophobia since the events on 9/11,” and “instrumentalization of democratic processes for racist applications.” In short, racism is an evil Western plot to victimize Muslims, who can only be protected by the undermining of democracy, freedom, and law enforcement.

The Ambassador of Sri Lanka was more philosophical. In his words, “the relationship between racial discrimination and freedom of expression is a complex and dialectical one; more freedom of expression is not an antidote to racial discrimination.”

The Algerian Ambassador took the U.N. Durban II platform to claim “anti-semitism . . . targets . . . Arabs who are also Semites, and by extension, the whole Muslim community.” Defining anti-Semitism this way has become a key component of the Durban II strategy, since once the concept has been Islamicized, Muslim states are happy to shout about taking it very seriously, confident that Western UN-ophiles still won’t catch on to their game.

While the European Union attendees stayed in their seats, the assault on democracy carried on. Algeria said “freedom of expression spread[s] hatred and violence and lead[s] to the burning of mosques in ‘advanced’ countries.” Syria ranted about “the crimes that are perpetrated in the name of democracy” and the “killers” that “are countries that advocate democracy . . . and give [a] free hand to perpetrate massacres.”

U.N. “expert” Doudou Diene from Senegal — whose name has been bandied about as a possible successor to the current U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, who retires in June — worried about “groups that have instrumentalized the freedom of expression” and the so-called “ideological freedom of expression.” According to Diene, “we should no longer use freedom of expression as the ideological tool [it is] . . . today.” The “Danish caricatures” cannot be tolerated in the name of freedom of expression “anymore.”

Though the United States is boycotting the forum, American taxpayers will be surprised to learn that — if the U.N. gets its way — they are still paying for it. The U.N. Secretariat revealed a new end-run around the U.S. promise not to fund Durban II. The secretariat announced that they had cut their original $7 million price tag for the preparatory side of Durban II in half. The other half will be “absorbed in existing resources” — a euphemism for using funds already in U.N. coffers, 22 percent of which are from American taxes. Washington is now faced with ensuring that this brazen attempt to avoid official American policy does not succeed.

And the EU is faced with the impossible task of keeping a straight face while speechifying that Durban II is good for human rights.

— Anne Bayefsky is senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. She also serves as the director of the Touro Institute for Human Rights and the Holocaust and as the editor of EYEontheUN.org.

Arab-American Roundups?

One of our regular criticisms here at DU is directed to Islamic spokesmen who repeat the grossly unfair calumny that the Arab-American community in the United States is “under siege,” and that Dearborn’s Muslims live in constant fear of being arbitrarily set upon by law enforcement and disappeared into a limbo empty of legal protections.

Dawud Walid, of CAIR-Michigan, is one of the worst offenders: “Our community has been under siege since 9/11,” he says. (See for example, “CAIR Exploits Dearborn Vandalism,” “Press & Guide-ADC Merger in the Works,” and "Siege, Or No Siege?"

As statements from Walid, and from Osama Siblani of the ADC, and articles in the Dearborn Press & Guide, the Detroit News, and Detroit Free Press constantly reinforce, since 9-11 Arab-Americans have been besieged by Islamophobic attacks and an escalating “surge” of “hate crimes”--except they haven’t.

The statements are all the more outrageous because they aren’t just a twisting of facts, or an exaggeration of facts, but a pure invention.

Then there have been the media's frenzy of made-up news stories about "domestic spying" programs, and "profiling" of suspected terrorists, "just for being Muslim."

It is closer to the truth that American law enforcement has prosecuted hardly any one for terrorism since 9/11, in view of the large number of activists in the country explicitly endorsing religious violence against the nation.

I live in Dearborn, and I'm here to say there are no concentration camps, no black mariahs, no boxcars on one-way rides.

Shame on anyone who insists there are.

As I wrote last January,

How prosaic and ineffective it feels to write, simply, that there is no “siege” against the Arab community in Dearborn, not since 9/11, nor ever. The very suggestion is an insult to every resident of the area, Arab, Muslim, or non-Muslim.

Now I see presidential candidate Barack Obama feels he can get some mileage out of repeating the same charge--carelessly, thoughtlessly, and without a shred of basis in any facts.

Lance Fairchok shares our frustration, and has written about it at American Thinker: “Obama: Arab-American Families Being Rounded Up?”):

In a televised twelve-second campaign spot aired in Texas, Senator Obama gives a stirring speech to a standing ovation. It is the predictable litany of American faults he will miraculously correct: literacy, expensive prescription drugs and insufficient civil liberties. However, he seems particularly concerned for Arab-Americans. "If there is an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney, it threatens my civil liberties."

This was an astonishing statement, an infuriating statement and a statement that speaks volumes to Obama's ideology.

Arab-American families being rounded up would not only threaten all our civil liberties, it would raise such a universal outcry, it could not long endure. Even the suggestion it could occur is a profound insult to our nation and our citizenry. It is an image of the gulag, the death camp, the dictatorship, and so inappropriate in any discussion about America, it is beneath our contempt.

This despicable image of innocent families imprisoned and the ethnic cleansing it suggests is a theme the radical left nurtures. It is by design intended to portray an unjust and intolerant people, it was no error, no misstatement. It elicits moral outrage with false assumptions, endlessly repeating those assumptions until believed. It is behind the exaggeration of everything the U.S. does in the war on terror or against Islamic extremism. It is behind the hysteria over the Patriot Act.

As divorced from truth as it is, it is found everywhere in the propaganda of the left, from the Bush-Hitler signs, to the fabrications of American military wrongdoing in the press, to the invented Islamophobia in our populace. It is the motivation behind Michael Moore, Code Pink, MoveOn.Org and George Soros. It is unfortunately the message the media aids and abets….

The bleak fantasy of Arab-American families interred for being Arabs and, of course, for being Muslim is very plausible to the radicals that help write his speeches. Senator Obama holds a wretched America in his heart, a country he has no pride in nor wishes to preserve. If his vision starts from failure, where will it end? There is no truth in his words, just as there is no substance. One may speak well, but still speak lies. An Obama presidency would be a disaster.

That part goes without saying. To think that such a person might actually be in the White House next January is sobering indeed.

Begg Badly Whooped By Free Press Readers

The Detroit Free Press is an extremely biased newspaper. Rather obvious, I know, but it needs saying again and again.

And the fact of the bias at the Free Press is why it’s so interesting that this Sunday’s Free Press letters page was so remarkably one-sided against Victor Ghalib Begg’s December 6 column calling for all Americans to be offended by “anti-Muslim bias.” (“Battle bigotry: Anti-Muslim bias should offend all Americans”).

Not a single letter takes Begg’s side.

Is it possible that the letters editor simply couldn’t find a letter from someone who actually took Begg’s article seriously? Or maybe even the letters editor was insulted by Begg's theme that America is in the grip of the "rapidly advancing disease" of Islamophobia.

Take a look through these letters, and you’ll see universal denunciations of Begg for his gall in calling for an end to Islamophobic intolerance while the Muslim community itself refuses to criticize the intolerant and bigoted actions of their own co-religionists all over the world every American sees reported every single day. Nor did it help Begg to have his column published within days of the Mohammed Teddy Bear prosecution in the Sudan, and while a Saudi court was reviewing the sentence of a gang-rape victim.

We Americans do have our problems with being too PC. Yet these letters encourage me that people just aren't buying the propoganda points of of Begg and CAIR that anyone taking a dim view of Islamist terror and barbarism must be an “Islamophobe” and a bigot.

And that’s a good thing.

Dearborn Police Profile Area Man Just for Being a Medical Student

Dearborn Underground can now report with high confidence that Executive Director of CAIR-Michigan, Dawud Walid, will soon announce that the arrest made by Dearborn police of 26-year-old Dearborn resident Houssein Zorkot at Hemlock Park on Saturday night, who at the time was dressed in fatigues, armed with an AK-47, had his face blacked out with camouflage paint, and who fought back against police so hard (Zorkot boasts martial-arts and kickboxing training) that he had to be tasered by police in order to be subdued, (“Man with AK-47 assault rifle arrested after leaving Dearborn's Hemlock Park”), was profiled and arrested for no other reason than that he was a Muslim.

Now that we have that out of the way, we should also mention that Zorkot, a third-year medical student at Wayne State University, was charged on Tuesday “on multiple felony charges, including carrying a dangerous weapon with unlawful intent — a five-year felony.” Police told WXYZ-TV that the AK-47 was loaded. according to the report on WXYZ-TV news, Zorkot’s bond was also set at $1 million, cash, without the customary ten percent deposit, with the result that he remains in jail.

On the day of his arrest, September 8, he had posted on his website photo gallery a new category, “The Start of My Personal Jihad (in the US)”.

It contained only a single photo.

Note the barrel pointing at you in the little round inset.

Zorkot is a fervent supporter of Hezbollah. Other galleries show pictures of Zorkot visiting South Lebanon, where he posed proudly before missile launchers and posters of Sheikh Nasrallah, (known locally by many here in Dearborn as “Our Leader!”).

As sure as night follows day,CAIR’s soon-to-be-made announcement will blame the young man’s arrest on profiling and Islamophobia, but CAIR is not expected to mention details about Hemlock Park being in the heart of Muslim East Dearborn; in other words, that the scene of the arrest was within a short nightstick’s toss of thousands of profileable Arab Muslims, many of whom were not carrying AK-47s, and who still were not arrested by Dearborn police on September 8 for anything.

Nor is CAIR expected to mention that Dearborn's finest were not cruising around that night looking for Muslims to tase when they targeted the innocent Hemlock Park personal jihadist. The cops in fact were responding to resident reports of a man carrying a rifle in the area. (DU has not been able to confirm whether or not the upcoming CAIR press release will include the standard claim that, had reports of a sniper running around with an assault rifle originated in a nonMuslim neighborhood, police would not have bothered to respond. We are just now investigating potential CAIR legal threats to sue the tattle-tale residents for calling police in violation of Zorkot's civil rights).

According to the WXYZ-TV report, Dearborn's Mayor John O'Reilly has issued a press release indicating all requests for comments about this case are to be made directly to him. We have been unable to obtain a copy of this press release, even on the city hall website, (which really violates the whole spirit of a "press release," in our amateurish view).

But WXYZ states that the Mayor's press release explains how he “did not want the public to make a connection between this case and the anniversary of September 11.” This decision by the Mayor causes problems on several levels, but the most frustrating one is that we were just getting ready to connect this up with September 11, and now we can't!

(When we called to ask about permission for the public to connect this case up with Ramadan, we were told for that we had to consult Imam Hassan Qazwini's anticipated press release forbidding that, too.)

Watch and and be amazed at just how fast this story vanishes like the magician's silver dollar.

MSA-CAIR Double-Teaming Gets Results at Pace University, and at UM-Dearborn

The recent travesty at New York’s Pace University in which student Stanislav Shmulevich was arrested and charged with two felony counts of Criminal Mischief in the Fourth Degree as a Hate Crime for tossing a Koran in a campus men’s room toilet has the hands of the Muslim Student Association’s dawa policy all over it.

Your local campus MSA is not just an ordinary student organization, but a serious pressure group that can throw enough weight against college administrators to get their way. As envisioned by its Muslim Brotherhood founders, MSA's primary mission includes dawa, that is, the non-violent method by which nonMuslim society is prepared for jihad and, ultimately, Islamic rule:

“Preparing the society is achieved thru plans for: spreading the Islamic culture, the possible media means, mosques, and da'wa work in public organizations such as syndicates, parliaments, student unions, ... Parallel to that, distinct muslims should be trained to administer political, economical, social, and student organizations efficiently (and Islamically), as another preparation step.”

At Pace, the university’s decision to categorize the vandalism as a hate crime wasn’t arrived at because administrators had a weakness for the victim claims of Muslim students. According to the New York Times, Pace officials discussed it first with police, and between them decided it was only “an act of vandalism rather than a hate crime.” This made sense.

Then, according to a former MSA board member, Haseeb, who blogs at Hahmed.com, it was only “[a]fter much deliberation between the Muslim Students’ Association with the school’s administration, [that] the university finally agreed to define this as a hate crime and investigated the issue.”

Indeed after the second incident a few weeks later, though it was no more of a intimidating nor a hate crime than the first incident, the MSA was ready to pounce.

The New York Times quoted the MSA's spokeswoman: "This time, the MSA @ Pace was quick to action again, and the university was much more supportive in their concerns“I would say that the university has kind of done a 180 and is definitely working with us in terms of labeling it as a hate crime."

Nor did MSA act without coordinated support from CAIR.

While Ibrahim Hooper and other flacks are complaining that finding pages of the Koran in a campus toilet is an act of intimidation creating a “hostile environment” for Muslim students at Pace, Haseeb more sincerely characterizes the incidents as an “opportunity.” The MSA welcomes the incident to leverage concessions from a scared university administration.

And the MSA never wants only what they’re demanding at the moment. They’re always taking the long view, and incidents like these are handy excuses to leverage greater and greater demands for special treatment for Islam.

At Pace, once they'd gotten the university to investigate the vandalism as a hate crime, the MSA kept up the pressure. Once the university did their "180" on the calling vandalism a hate crime, they pitched in to offer "sensitivity forums," according to Faiza Ali of the Muslim Students Association.

Haseeb explains the larger success of the Pace MSA, in that, ‘”aside from the proper labeling of the crime (as a hate crime) and the ensuing investigation, the MSA is also working hard with the administration in starting an anti-hate campaign which “will include sensitivity training for students and senior administrators, a program to train people in the proper protocols for handling bias incidents, public forums to discuss the hate crimes that have taken place, and the issuing of wallet cards with phone numbers for people to call in emergencies.”

Nor do local MSA chapters ever seem to make a move without CAIR providing public relations services--consisting largely of reckless charges of “Islamophobia” against anyone who criticizes any MSA goals. From CAIR-NY's press release:

“On Tuesday, October 3, the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-NY) will participate in a town hall meeting at Pace University to discuss a recent incident in which a Quran, Islam’s revealed text, was found in the toilet in a campus men’s room. CAIR-NY is calling on the university to treat the incident as a possible hate crime….CAIR-NY sees this incident as evidence of the growing phenomenon of Islamophobia in the United States and will encourage Pace University to hold more town hall meetings for the student population in order to create a better understanding of Islam.”

Closer to home, CAIR-MI and the MSA chapter at the University of Michigan-Dearborn have revealed a similar cooperative strategy, pressuring the University to install Muslim foot baths as a sign of special status for Muslim students. While the MSA has carefully disguised its years-long pressure on the administration to install the foot baths, when the plan finally “came to light,” CAIR-MI executive director Dawud Walid suddenly appeared as the main spokesperson for the plan, defending the University, the MSA, and even the ACLU--none of which organizations he is formally associated with. And, of course, as spokesman, he is condemning all critics of the foot-bath plan as “Islamophobic.”

We at DU never thought the foot baths in themselves were serious enough to cause a fuss, though we have always believed they were unlawful. Instead, we have always seen them as symbolic concessions, just another step in preparing a cowed administration for provide greater and greater concessions to Islam as a religion with a special status--concessions perhaps even to soon include an “anti-hate campaign” for UM-Dearborn, including a mandatory world religion class to infuse students with a greater appreciation for the world’s most misunderstood world religion -- Islam.

Sound far-fetched? Well, Ms. Ali of the PACE MSA isn’t stopping with just charging a student with a hate crime. She “would like to see Pace do more, like hiring a campus chaplain.... She also wants a world religions course to be required for all students. Both are suggestions Pace officials say they will consider.

“’We have science, computers, public speaking as requirements,’ Ms. Ali said. ‘Especially in New York, you are exposed to so many people. A world religions course would be a great way to prepare students for what they’re in store for.’”

What they’re in store for is right.