Last night, Chris Matthews invited Alejandro Beutel, Government and Policy Analyst for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, on Hardball to discuss the fallout from the King hearings.
MPAC has been doing great work around this issue, including publishing a comprehensive report of all extremist plots that disproves the notion that terrorists only come from Muslim communities. It’s great to see them getting more coverage.
Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Christian liturgical season of Lent.
Millions of Christians observe the season by “giving up” something — a treat, indulgence, or a bad habit or practice — to help them re-focus on the ideals at the heart of their faith.
In this spirit, we at Faithful America are calling on the New York area Christian-owned stations WMCA and WNYM to “give up” Glenn Beck for Lent, and make a public commitment not to pick up his program.
It would be a very pragmatic Lenten observance. Every other radio station in New York has already promised to keep Beck off the city’s airwaves, and Beck’s caustic remarks, fear-mongering and bigotry have led to a national backlash. Radio stations from Philadelphia to Madison have already dropped Beck from their line-up, citing falling ratings and increasingly poor content. Over 300 advertisers have dropped his FOX News program. People of faith have responded similarly. Faithful America alone has already generated over 20,000 petition signatures and emails from people of faith calling for a stop to Glenn Beck’s craven attacks.
The pressure on Beck and his sponsors is building. And the bottom line is no responsible person or company should support programming that promotes menacing conspiracy theories and tells listeners to flee from churches that talk about social justice. This should go double for a company claiming to represent Christian values.
We invite WMCA and WNYM to use this Lenten period to reflect on their Christian values and make a commitment not to pick up Glenn Beck, during the next 40 days or anytime after.
Of Peter King’s two anecdotal witnesses for this week’s hearings on Muslim radicalization, one has a story that actually undermines King’s claims, and the second makes unsubstantiated terrorism accusations about Muslim organizations and possibly even Congressman Keith Ellison and the Democratic Party.
Abdirizak Bihi is a Somalian Muslim from the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. In 2009, his nephew Burhan Hassan was killed in Somalia after traveling there to join Al-Shabbab, a terrorist organization working to overthrow the Somali government. Hassan was one of approximately 20 Somali youth from the Twin Cities area who made this trip, raising red flags in the community and attracting attention from the FBI.
Despite lacking any evidence, Bihi became convinced that these disappearances were being orchestrated, or at least covered up, by the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations and began publicly attacking CAIR.
The anti-CAIR efforts attracted the attention of Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism, which wrote an article extolling Bihi’s protest in June of 2009. Emerson, of course, is the professional Islamaphobe whose fear-mongering was too extreme even for Congressman King, who specifically declined to invite him to testify despite having worked with him to plan them.
The article on the IPT website drew one comment, by a reader who identifies himself as Bihi. The commenter laments that the Somali community has been “kidnapped and hijacked” by a group of “wicked imams,” who are “working together to silence families.” In particular, the commenter alleges that these imams are:
“funded and supported by many elected officials like Congressman Keth Ellison and organizations like CAIR who have something to do with the missing kids.”
The alleged conspiracy only expands from there, incriminating the Somali American Coalition, the SEIU, and the Minnesota State Democratic Party at large.
Later, after an FBI investigation indicted eight individuals in connection with the disappearances, Bihi still refused to abandon his theories, reacting to the indictments by telling the Minneapolis Star Tribune that “this isn’t close anywhere to the big fish who were responsible for masterminding the recruitment of our kids.”
The FBI, however, seems to disagree. Contrary to Bihi’s claims, Ralph Boelter, the special agent who led the investigation remarked that the Muslim community couldn’t have been more helpful in the investigation. There have been no new disappearances since the indictments, and the investigation is being heralded by the FBI as a “model” for fighting terrorism without alienating Muslim-Americans.
The deliberate outreach went a long way toward reassuring a nervous Somali community:
Boelter said he is proud of the way his team worked on the case without damaging relationships in the Somali community, which was largely distrustful of law enforcement.
“Nothing came easy in this case,” Boelter said. “The victories came only after a lot of hard work.”
…
A big piece of the team’s work, he said, was understanding the dynamics of the Somali community and figuring out why the recruiting occurred. Boelter appeared on Somali television and radio shows and met with everyone from spiritual leaders to young people. Going forward, he said, that type of outreach should not be unique.
“If we have any hope of discerning threats, potential threats in the future or issues like this in the future, we’re going to have to do that hand-in-hand with the community,” he said. “We can never be fully transparent in the FBI, but if we are going to be successful in this new age of trying to defeat threats before they mature, we are going to have to be a little more transparent, and we are going to have to establish those public relationships.”
Saeed Fahia, executive director of the Confederation of Somali Community in Minnesota, believes Boelter’s work in the community helped. He said he thinks community members are more likely now to report troubles to law enforcement.
King appears to be calling Bihi to testify to prove his claim that Muslims aren’t cooperating with law enforcement, but again, the real story proves the opposite point.
Photo credit Marlin Levison, Star Tribune
UPDATE: This post has been revised since first publication to reflect that the identity of the IPT commenter has not been independently verified.
Bread for the World has compiled a list (pdf) of ten of the most damaging cuts in the continuing resolution the GOP-led House passed last week. You can view it here. A sample of the list:
| Program | Amount Cut (From FY10 Total) |
Percentage Cut (From Y10 Total) |
| Head Start: A national program that promotes school readiness. More than 200,000 disadvantaged children ages five and under could lose services. The cut would also mean 50,000 lost jobs and 16,000 empty classrooms. | $1.08 billion | 15 percent |
| Food Aid (P.L. 480 and McGovern-Dole): These cuts would eliminate feeding programs for 18 million of the world’s hungriest and poorest people, including 15 million people suffering from hunger due to natural disasters and conflicts and 2.5 million children who get school meals through the McGovern-Dole program. | $946.5 million | 46 percent |
| PEPFAR: The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief supports life-saving drugs and treatment for more than 3.2 million men, women, and children living with HIV/AIDS. PEPFAR also provides care and support to 11 million people in more than 30 countries, including approximately 3.8 million orphaned and vulnerable children. Nearly 33 million people receive HIV counseling and testing through PEPFAR. | $513 million | 10 percent |
| Peace Corps: Right now, 8,655 Peace Corps volunteers are serving in 77 developing countries in the areas of education, health and HIV/AIDS, business development, environment, agriculture, and youth development. Since 1961, more than 200,000 volunteers have served in 139 countries. | $69.2 million | 17.3 percent |
The total savings from these cuts add up to around $5.2 billion, which may seem large, but is really less than one-half of one percent (.35%) of the budget deficit “necessitating” these drastic reductions. In comparison, Congress spent $81.5 billion.
This week as Congress debates deficits and spending, faith leaders are speaking up to make sure our elected leaders remember that budgets are moral documents.
Today, a group of prominent evangelicals held a teleconference announcing their statement outlining principles for moral budget decisions. The statement, “A Call for Intergenerational Justice: A Christian Proposal on the American Debt Crisis,” calls for “fiscal frugality and compassionate action” and proposes concrete ways of cutting the debt while protecting the poor and making moral investments for the future of our nation and world.
Speakers on the call included Shane Claiborne, Michael Gerson and Jonathan Merritt, as well as Dr. Gideon Strauss and Stephanie Summers of the Center for Public Justice and Dr. Ron Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action.
Today’s call comes in the wake of larger religious mobilization around the budget debates. On Monday, a group of Christian leaders led by Sojourners took out a full-page ad in Politico imploring legislators to ask themselves “What Would Jesus Cut?” and saying:
The deficit is indeed a moral issue, and we must not bankrupt our nation, nor leave a world of debt for our children. But how we reduce the deficit is also a moral issue. Our budget should not be balanced on the backs of poor and vulnerable people.
And Wednesday, Sr. Simone Campbell, executive director of NETWORK, published an opinion piece in The Hill scolding representatives who identify as pro-life but support budget cuts that would harm women and children:
As a Catholic sister committed to defending the sanctity of human life, I support common ground efforts to protect life by helping pregnant women and preventing abortion. But it’s hypocritical and just plain wrong for lawmakers who tout their pro-life bona fides to then blatantly undermine life with budget proposals that will hurt pregnant women, mothers and children and likely lead more poor women to end their pregnancies.
As Congress moves forward in this debate, hopefully they will heed the advice of these faith leaders and keep the poor and vulnerable in the forefronts of their minds as they make tough decisions.
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