WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama has imposed stricter conflict-of-interest restrictions on his White House transition team than any president before him. But a list of transition team members that his office made public on Friday includes a complicated tangle of ties to private influence-seekers.
Among the full roster of about 150 staff members being assigned to government agencies between now and Inauguration Day are dozens of former lobbyists and some who were registered as recently as this year. Many more are executives and partners at firms that pay lobbyists, and former government officials who work as consultants or advisers to those seeking influence.
After campaigning on promises to end the influence of lobbyists in the White House, Mr. Obama has imposed rules that bar officials on his transition team from handling any issues in areas of policy where they have lobbied over the last 12 months or from seeking to influence the same agencies for the next 12 months.
The rules also bar officials from working on matters where family members or recent business associates may have a direct conflict of interest. In cases where there is even an “appearance of conflict,” officials must seek a waiver from the transition’s executive director, an Obama Senate aide and law school classmate, Christopher Lu.
At least one official initially involved in the transition appears to have been reassigned because of concern about his lobbying or legal work. Henry Rivera, a former Democratic commissioner on the Federal Communication Commission who was involved in planning for the agency’s transition, has dropped out of that role because he had represented clients on communications policy in the last year, the newsletter Communications Daily reported Friday.
Instead, on the list that was made public on Friday, Mr. Rivera was listed on the team handling science, technology, space and the arts. The rules permit people who have lobbied in one area to join an Obama transition team in another. (With Mr. Rivera is Jim Kohlenberger, executive director of an advocacy group for Internet companies.)
Representatives of the transition team declined to comment on the assignment, and Mr. Rivera did not return a phone call seeking comment.
Transition officials said that their policy went further than any previous White House to avoid self-dealing or influence-trading in the formation of the new administration, and that in the modern Washington it would be foolish to try to eliminate anyone who had worked in public policy for a private interest — or who had a family member in that business — from contributing to the transition. [more]
By Rick Rogers
STAFF WRITER, San Diego Union-Tribune
November 17, 2008
OCEANSIDE – Two years after his arrest, a former Marine gunnery sergeant is talking about the FBI, CIA and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement files he stole from Camp Pendleton for a civilian agency.
Gary Maziarz, a former Marine intelligence specialist, gave secret government files to an anti-terrorism watch group.
In interviews with The San Diego Union-Tribune, Gary Maziarz, 39, said “dozens of files” he gave the Los Angeles Terrorism Early Warning Group while serving as an intelligence specialist at the base were dossiers on Muslims and Arabs living in Southern California.
This marks the first time Maziarz has spoken to the media about the files since pleading guilty in July 2007 to mishandling classified material and stealing government property.
He agreed to the interviews despite signing a plea agreement with the government limiting his comments on the security breach, which might involve a decade’s worth of intelligence culled from domestic and foreign sources. The deal also requires him to testify if called on.
“Most of the (monitored) people were from Los Angeles. The ties they had to San Diego were, like, maybe they had a house down here or a relative or came down to visit or went on vacation here,” said Maziarz, who splits his time between North County and Arizona as he looks for work and tries to move on with his life.
Many of the stolen files centered on the meeting spots of “people of interest,” including places of worship, businesses and travel plans, he said.
Maziarz’s case could have repercussions well beyond Camp Pendleton.
The existence of CIA, FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement documents profiling specific minority and religious groups in the United States could undermine contentions by the FBI, the primary federal agency for domestic security, that no programs target upstanding Muslims and Arabs.
“The FBI does not monitor the lawful activities of individuals in the United States, nor does the FBI have a surveillance program to monitor constitutionally protected activities of houses of worship,” FBI spokesman Darrell Foxworth said in an e-mail.
Maziarz’s arrest in October 2006 sparked multiple investigations, including those by the FBI and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Federal agents testifying at his trial said the files found in his possession could not be shared legally with civilian law enforcement.
Essentially, Maziarz said, he used computer networks at Camp Pendleton to tap into classified information that he then passed along to a higher-ranking Marine or one of that person’s subordinates. Maziarz and federal investigative documents have identified that individual as reserve Col. Larry Richards, the base’s former intelligence chief and co-founder of the Los Angeles Terrorism Early Warning Group.
Maziarz said he and others broke national-security protocols out of concern that FBI officials were not sharing anti-terrorism intelligence with local law enforcement or were doing it slowly because of bureaucracy. There was a feeling that lack of cooperation prevented aggressive efforts to prevent future terrorist attacks.
The Los Angeles Terrorism Early Warning Group is composed of two dozen local, state and federal agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the Secret Service and the FBI. [...]
He was more tight-lipped about classified files known as TIGER documents.
TIGER, or the Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing system, is a database developed at the U.S. Census Bureau. It can be customized to identify special demographic centers, such as areas where certain ethnic groups live. [...]
Maziarz’s claims about profiling have raised concerns among some Islamic, Arab-American and civil-liberty groups. The organizations’ leaders said his statements underscore their longtime contention that government agencies are violating Americans’ privacy rights with little to no congressional oversight.
KABUL, Afghanistan (CNN) — Little Banafsha wakes up in her small mud home, has a cup of tea and braces herself for the day ahead.
Banafsha, learning in a center run by Aschiana, an Afghan NGO, says she wants to become a teacher. She is just 11 years old but she is the breadwinner for her family. Literally. Without the bread that she begs from strangers, she, her sisters, baby brothers and mom would all go hungry.
Banafsha desperate during a hard day of begging for food
Her father is a drug addict, focused only on his next high, her mom cares for the little ones and heavy responsibility falls on Banafsha’s young shoulders.
Every day she heads far from her home, trekking up and down steep hills to the wealthier parts of the Afghan capital where she can but hope richer people will take pity on her.
She is not bitter, explaining: “My two younger sisters also work. They beg for bread and sell gum — there’s no choice.”
When she gets to the Wazir Akbar Khan district, a hangout of diplomats and aid workers, she unwraps her folded rice sack.
“Sir, do you have some bread?” Watch Banafsha and other Afghan kids ask for help »
Crossing a graveyard to get where she can beg
Banafsha clutches the bag tight as she walks from building to building, eyeing who will help and who will not.
“Sir, do you have some bread?” she asks again.
This is her recitation for the next six hours, as she darts around in her worn blue plastic sandals, knowing that danger could be there at any turn, even in this more affluent neighborhood.
“A few days ago, some girls were kidnapped around here and many people have gone missing. The girls’ mother still comes around here looking for them but they still haven’t been found,” Banafsha says.
This time of the year the sun begins to set at 4:30 p.m. in Kabul. But Banafsha continues to roam the dark streets. The 6 o’clock rush hour is her peak business time.
Her eyes well up with tears, but she doesn’t allow them to fall, quickly wiping them away and biting her thumb like the vulnerable child that she is.
She prays everyday, “I say ‘God take me out of this poverty and have my father go work so I can go to school.’ “
She dreams of being a teacher and for three hours a day she gets to be a little girl with big dreams
[more]
If you wish to help, please inquire about the Aschiana Foundation at http://aschiana.org
World Leaders Discussing Global Financial Crisis Dine on $500 wine at White House
(CNN) – The global economy may be undergoing a significant downturn, but the White House’s dinner budget still appears flush with cash.
After all, world leaders who are in town to discuss the economic crisis are set to dine in style Friday night while sipping wine listed at nearly $500 a bottle.
Shafer Cafernet Hillside Select wine at $500 a bottle
According to the White House, tonight’s dinner to kick off the G-20 summit includes such dishes as “Fruitwood-smoked Quail,” “Thyme-roasted Rack of Lamb,” and “Tomato, Fennel and Eggplant Fondue Chanterelle Jus.”
To wash it all down, world leaders will be served Shafer Cabernet “Hillside Select” 2003, a wine that sells at $499 on Wine.com.
A website (www.change.gov) is designed to provide prospective applicants with information to help them apply for positions in the Obama-Biden Administration
This website is designed to provide prospective applicants with information to help them apply for positions in the Obama-Biden Administration. President-Elect Obama will make appointments throughout the federal government. Some positions will require Senate confirmation while others will not. Some appointments will be made during the transition process and others during the early part of the new Administration.Applicants for any of these non-career positions - whether in the White House or in any Federal Department, Agency or Commission - should use this website, as applying on-line is the fastest and most accurate way to get your information to us. (If you are interested instead in a career, civil service position with the federal government, you should proceed to the Office of Personnel Management website at http://www.usajobs.gov.)
If you apply for a position now, you will not need to apply again after January 20th. Applications submitted now to the Obama-Biden Transition Project will be retained and considered by the Office of Presidential Personnel after President-Elect Obama takes office.
Please go to the website for the application form: http://www.change.gov/page/s/application
For all the talk of change and hope, one of the first thing that Obama did after getting elected was appoint Sonal Shah, a right wing Hindu extremist figure, as a key advisor to his transition team. Folks may be aware that it is Hindu extremist groups such as the VHP and its student wing Bajrang Dal that have been responsible for the rape of hundreds of Muslim women, the massacre of over 2,000 Muslims and the ethnic cleansing of over 150,000 Muslims from Gujarat.
Further, for the last 3 months, the VHP and its student wing Bajrang Dal had been carrying out a sustained campaign of ethnic cleansing of Indian Christians in the Indian state of Orissa. Due to the violence they have unleashed with impunity, an estimated 30,000 Indian Christians have been driven from their homes into jungles and only those who are willing to accept Hinduism are being allowed to return home. More recently, Bajrang Dal members were arrested and charged with terrorist activity of making bombs and conspiring to explode them in mosques masquarading as “Islamic terrorists”.
Sonal Shah has been the national coordinator for VHP-America and her father has been associated with the Overseas Friends of the BJP. Further, her organization IndiCorps works with a VHP sponsored outfits called the Ekal Vidyalayas - which are single teacher schools with curriculum steeped in instilling hatred against non-Hindu religious minorities. These Ekal Vidyalayas have played a key role in anti-minority violence in the states of Orissa and Madhya Pradesh.
IndiCorps founders also have a close relationship with the notorious Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and have had their students felicitated by Narendra Modi. It is widely held by Indian and International Human Rights organizations that Modi was responsible for the massacres of the 2000 Muslims in 2002.
Modi has the distinction of being the only human rights violator whose diplomatic and tourist visas were revoked by the US State Department under International Religious Freedom Act on account of his egregious and systemic persecution of religious minorities.
US President-elect Barack Obama may have cultivated a left-of-center image for himself, but Sonal Shah, the Indian-American advisor in his transition team, has well established rightwing leanings.
The 40-year-old economist has been associated with the overseas activities of the Sangh Parivar. She was a national coordinator of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America campaign to raise funds for Gujarat earthquake victims in 2001.
Her father Ramesh Shah, a vice-president of the Overseas Friends of the Bharatiya Janata Party (OFBJP), had campaigned for LK Advani in Gandhinagar during the 2004 Lok Sabha elections. He had also briefly traveled with Advani during his Bharat Udaya Yatra, countrywide election tour.
Sonal’s brother Amit and sister Rupal are now based in Ahmedabad, running a voluntary organisation, indicorps. Its website says its aim is to “engage the most talented young Indians from around the world on the frontlines of India’s most pressing challenges”.
“I returned to India eight years ago,” Amit told HT before suddenly deciding not to talk any further. An SMS from Rupal said “no comments from here”, and added that Sonal be contacted through email for any queries.
A senior functionary of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), involved in the global activities of the Parivar, said only Ramesh is associated with its activities. “He works with the OFBJP and supports, among other things, the Ekal Vidyalayas,” the functionary said. Ekal Vidyalayas are single-teacher primary schools run by the RSS with the aim of inculcating Hindu values in children, mostly in tribal regions.
The Shah family hails from Sabarkantha in Gujarat but Sonal was born in Mumbai. Ramesh Shah moved to the US in 1970. Two years later, Sonal, Rupal and their mother joined him in New York. The family later moved to Houston. Sonal has worked as vice-president with Goldman Sachs and also in the US Department of Treasury. Currently, she is with the global development team of Google.org.
Volunteers at the indicorps office in Ahmedabad were under instructions not to speak anything.
(Inputs from Ahmedabad)
Obama’s Gujarati aide has RSS roots Times of India, India - 2 hours ago HIMMATNAGAR (SABARKANTHA) : Gujarati expat Sonal Shah (40), an eminent economist who heads Googles philanthropic arm and has now been appointed an advisory …
Obama team’s Gujarat link is Modi visa hope Khabrein.info, India - 5 hours ago 7: Modi loyalists in Gujarat feel that newly-inducted Barack Obama team member Sonal Shah, of Gujarati origin, will break the ice and ensure the right …
Note from Rafik Beekun: Obama has just appointed Raham Emmanuel as his Chief of Staff. He holds a dual US/Israeli citizenship, and has served in Israel’s army, the IDF. His father was a member of the Zionist organization, the IRGUN, led by Menachem Begin. Rahm is abrasive according to people who know him and Congressmen, and does not have a easy personality for working with Cabinet officers and Congress. The appointment of Rahm Emanuel introduces uncertainty for diplomacy and for a new era in international relations between the USA and the Muslim world.
US Congressman Rahm Emanuel, who was Clinton’s adviser after serving for the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) service, may be appointed chief of staff if Democratic presidential candidate wins elections
Israel may earn more White House representation than it bargained for, in the event that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama emerges victorious from the November 4 elections.
Congressman Rahm Emanuel, who has served in the Israel Defense Forces and even speaks a little Hebrew, could be appointed the White House’s next chief of staff.
Chicago-born Emanuel, 49, is currently representing the state of Illinois in the House of Representatives. He is also one of Obama’s most trusted advisors, and the presidential candidate has called him a friend as well as a political associate.
Emanuel’s father, Benjamin, is an Israeli-born doctor. His mother, Martha, is an American Jew who works for a Chicago civil rights organization. As a child, Emanuel received a Jewish education at a conservative school and spoke Hebrew with his father at home.
When Bill Clinton began his campaign for presidency, he appointed Rahm Emanuel to direct the campaign’s finance committee. But Emanuel left when the Gulf War broke out, in order to volunteer in the IDF.
He served in one of Israel’s northern bases until the war ended, and upon his return to the US became Clinton’s advisor in the White House for almost eight years. [more]
For the past few months, not a day went by without the words “Muslim” and “Obama” being mentioned in the same sentence. From the divisive shouts and jeers at McCain rallies to the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times to an interview with Colin Powell on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Muslims—or at least the mention of them—have been more prevalent this campaign year than Joe The Plumber.
But beyond the use of the term Muslim as a pejorative, and accusations by the far right that Obama was himself a secret follower of the Quran, what did real Muslim-Americans think of the Chicago senator? And how did they vote? The American Muslim Task Force on Civil Rights and Elections released a poll today of over 600 Muslims from more than ten states, including Florida and Pennsylvania, and it revealed that 89% of respondents voted for Obama, while only 2% voted for McCain. It also indicated that 95% of Muslims polled cast a ballot in this year’s presidential election—the highest turnout in a U.S. election ever—and 14% of those were first-time voters. The Gallup Center for Muslim studies estimates that U.S. Muslims favored Obama in greater numbers than did Hispanics (67% of whom voted for Obama)—and nearly matched that of African-Americans, 93% of whom voted for Obama. More than two-thirds who were polled said the economy was the most important issue affecting their decision on November 4th, while 16% said the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan informed their vote—numbers that put Muslims roughly on a par with the general population.
Many Muslim Americans also changed their party affiliations for this election. The country’s Muslim population, estimated at between 7 to 8 million, has traditionally voted along conservative, Republican lines. Today, more than two-thirds of American Muslims polled say they consider themselves to be Democrats, while only 4% see themselves as Republicans (29% identified as Independents.) The shift began in 2004—in part because of the GOP’s handling of civil liberties, from wiretapping American citizens to detaining Muslims in the US and Guantanamo without trail, and because of the war in Iraq. This year, many more were drawn into the Democratic party by Obama himself. Muslims across the country were captivated by the senator’s promise of unity and hope. On the Muslim-Americans for Obama website (or “Mafo2008.com”), their mission statement includes the following: “That we support Barack Obama because, among other reasons, he rejects the politics of fear, challenging our nation to embrace its collective identity, where each American has a stake in the success and well-being of every American.”
“All the Muslim Americans I know were excited and electrified by him,” says Salman Ahmed, the New York-based guitarist and singer of the Pakistani-American rock band Junoon. He’s dedicated several recent concerts to getting the vote out for Obama. “It was not like ‘Good, Obama gets the Muslim world.’ It was ‘Oh My God! Here’s a guy who understands the world, us, America.’ Voting for him was a no brainer.”
But many Muslims kept their presidential preference a secret in the months leading up to Super Tuesday, fearing that an endorsement from them might in fact work against Obama. [more]
I’ve only watched the 12-minute version of “Obsession,” the film sent to more than 28 million people in various swing states, apparently by associates and partisans of the Jewish movement known as Aish HaTorah, or “Fire of the Torah,” but it was enough for to understand that it is the work of hysterics. One of my favorite hysterics, the Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick, is featured prominently, pieces of the sky falling about her head as she rants about the End of Days.
Aish HaTorah denies any direct connection to the film, which is designed to make naive Americans believe that B-52s filled with radical jihadists are about to carpet-bomb their churches, and are only awaiting Barack Obama’s ascension to launch the attack. But the manifold connections, as laid out in this article, among others, make it clear that high-level officials of Aish are up to their chins in this project. The most disreputable flack in New York, Ronn Torossian, who represents Aish, makes an appearance in this story, which was to be expected: Torossian last made the news when he employed sock-puppetry in defense of one of his many indefensible clients, Agriprocessors, Inc., the Luvavitch-owned kosher slaughterhouse that treats its employees nearly as badly as it treats its animals, which is saying something, because Agriprocessor slaughterers have been filmed ripping out the tracheas of living cattle.
But I digress. It’s said of Ronn Torossian that he represents “right-wing” Israeli politicians, but this description does not do his clients justice. “Right-wing” is Bibi Netanyahu. Torossian represents the lunatic fringe. Several years ago, in one of my only encounters with him, he introduced me to Benny Elon, a rabbi and settler leader who was then Israel’s tourism minister, and who, at various points in his career, has more or less advocated the ethnic cleansing of Israel of its Arab citizens. At one point, when Elon had gone to take a telephone call, Torossian and I started talking about Israel’s right to reprisal for terrorist attacks. I was arguing in favor of some sort of proportionality (this was after Jenin, in which the Israeli army chose to root out terrorism block by block rather than bomb the city from the air) but Torossian interrupted: “I think we should kill a hundred Arabs or a thousand Arabs for every one Jew they kill.” I was somewhat taken aback, of course, because this is a Nazi idea, rather than a Jewish idea. I asked him to explicate: “If someone from a town blows himself up and kills Jews, we should wipe out the town he’s from, kill them all. The Israelis are suckers. They should have destroyed Jenin.” He went on like this for some time. I would only note that Torossian, to the best of my knowledge, never volunteered for the Israeli army, so he seemed to me by definition a chickenhawk.
Torossian’s attitude toward Arabs and toward the peace process are echoed in the approach of Aish HaTorah, which is just about the most fundamentalist movement in Judaism today. [more}
Which faith plays the market best when it seems headed for the financial equivalent of purgatory? That may sound like a whimsical question, but there are, in fact, mutual funds tailored to a number of religions and denominations. Their track records won’t answer the question of which investment strategy best ensures eternal salvation, but they have certainly had an impact on some believers’ nest eggs — and they provide a window into how each faith understands appropriate investment.
Muslim Investors
For centuries Muslims were either out of the Western stock market or burdened with a certain amount of guilt. The Koran states, “Whatever you give as riba so that it might bring increase through the wealth of other people will bring you no increase with Allah.” Since riba means “interest,” this was a powerful dampener on investment for the pious. In 1998, however, the influential scholar Yusuf Talal DeLorenzo released the so-called “Dow Jones Fatwa”, which allowed believers to invest in funds with a degree of what one of his sons termed “permissible impurity”.
Shortly afterward an Islamic-investment group called the Amana Funds made a mosque-to-mosque push for business. Amana’s funds avoid stocks with above 5% stakes in alcohol, pork or tobacco. None of these is tightly connected to a major market dynamic, and during the long-running bull market Amana’s success owed less to its distinguished Islamic legal team than to its head stock-picker, non-Muslim Nicholas Kaiser. But as Mohen Salam, Amana’s director of Islamic investing, points out, “during a bear market, and particularly during this credit crisis,” other Islamic restrictions have kept Amana away from the most radioactive issues. It avoids investment banks such as Lehman Brothers because of the limitation on interest-oriented business. Along the same lines, says David Kathman, a mutual fund analyst at the Morningstar research group, Amana “won’t own companies with too much debt on their balance sheets, because if you have too much debt you’re paying interest on it.” The top three holdings of its large growth fund are tech titan Apple, fertilizer giant Potash Corp. and freight railroad firm Norfolk Southern. [...]
The faith side of religious funds is aimed at decreasing sin rather than increasing profit, and doing that well doesn’t guarantee a strong return on investment. Amana’s Salam, observing that there are several other Muslim groups that have not fared as well during the crisis as his own, explains “After you’ve screened for the Islamic criteria, you still end up with 50% of the market available,” and from then on “it’s a matter of good stock-investment skills.” Kathman has written, “If you decide to invest in any of these funds, it should be because you agree with the moral principles underlying the fund,” not because you think those principles will be the ones that assure a good return.
About a decade and a half ago, I ran for the office of state assemblyman in District 31 of Nevada. My first name Rafik did not sit well with some, and one of my advisors (who happened to be a state assemblyman then) suggested that I change my name to “Rocko Beekun” from “Rafik Beekun”. I refused stating that if voters could not vote for me on the basis of what I could bring to the state, then I did not want their vote. Another person told me that I would not win because I was of “the wrong religion, the wrong sex and the wrong color”. Several people slammed the door in my face when I walked my precincts. A sign I had just put up was even torn up in front of me. At one point, I was threatened by the campaign director of one of my opponents. At the same time, the Muslim community itself in my area looked down on me, giving me very little help. Nevertheless, what gave me hope was that many day-to-day people welcomed me, walked for me, put up signs for me, and donated to my campaign. My campaign manager was the grand daughter of a former US Congresswoman, and worked tirelessly on my campaign for free. In spite of all that I went through and my eventual defeat in the general elections (I came in second), I enjoyed the whole process, especially walking each precinct in my district and talking to people about the issues that were on their mind. To this day, I can still remember some of the wonderful people I met, and what we talked about. The democratic process works, but it works even better when one participates in it, and when it includes everybody as our founding fathers wished it to be. The following article by Nafeez Syed resonates with what I experienced.
Rafik Beekun
Candidates should seek votes of American Muslims
Nafeez Syed, special to CNN
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (CNN) — During this election, we have seen the spectacle of two presidential candidates fighting over one voter while snubbing an entire segment of the American population worthy of their attention.
We in the Muslim-American community look wistfully at people like Joe the Plumber, wishing that we too could be courted for our vote by the presidential candidates.
At the same time, we look gratefully at figures like former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who reassure us that there is hope for greater acceptance of Muslim-Americans.
Over time, we grew to expect standoffish treatment from the Republican Party. Almost a decade ago, many Muslims, my parents included, supported President Bush for his humble foreign policy stances, strong family values and reaching out to the Muslim-American community.
Things have obviously changed since September 11, 2001, and we have grown used to anti-Muslim rhetoric from Republican candidates. We have run like refugees to the Democratic Party, only to find reluctant tolerance and hope that we will go somewhere else.
American civil rights activist and intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “[The American Negro] simply wishes it possible to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly on his face.”
Over a century later, I and many other Muslim-Americans feel the same, hoping that we can be accepted in America as both Muslims and Americans.
As a college student voting in my first presidential election, I have been inspired by Barack Obama’s call for change. My campus is full of Obama posters, and several of my classmates have taken time off to work for his campaign.
There is no doubt Obama has the Harvard vote, but my vote will not be cast as enthusiastically as others.
This campaign means to me what it means for my classmates. In the next few years, the economy and American foreign policy will affect my generation unlike any other, and those concerns are the primary influences on my vote.
However, as a Muslim-American, I see some issues as more personal. I don’t blame Obama for clarifying that he isn’t a Muslim; if someone misidentified my religion, I would likewise point out the facts, especially if it was part of a larger smear campaign. However, as the first Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison stated, “A lot of us are waiting for him to say that there’s nothing wrong with being a Muslim, by the way.”
Indeed, Obama’s responses to accusations that he is Muslim should be more than just denial; they should be a condemnation of the prejudices that lace such accusations.
When I discuss this issue with fellow Muslim-Americans, especially ones who have dedicated significant time to his campaign, I immediately hear that he’s just doing what he needs to do to win.
I respond skeptically to these arguments. Is it really politically necessary for Obama to avoid visiting mosques — something that President Bush has dared to do — while rallying support from churches and synagogues? Doesn’t his careful distance from the Muslim-American community contradict his message of unity?
A year ago, 138 Muslim leaders from 40 nations addressed a plea for interfaith dialogue to the leaders of the world’s Christian churches in a bid to diminish the influence of extremism around the world. That initiative, “A Common Word Between Us and You,” led to a conference between Muslim and U.S. Protestant leaders at Yale University last summer and another last week with Church of England leaders at Cambridge University, to be followed next month by a meeting with Roman Catholic leaders at the Vatican. Ali Gomaa, who as the grand mufti (chief Islamic jurist) in Cairo is the senior Sunni Muslim figure in Egypt, was one of the Common Word signatories. He presided over the Cambridge conference with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. newsweek’s Stryker McGuire interviewed Gomaa at a local hotel. At one point, their chat was interrupted by a carpenter’s power saw. “That noise,” joked Gomaa, “is from the sphere of terrorism.” Excerpts:
Newsweek: What signs of progress have you seen since the Common Word initiative was launched? Gomaa: Meetings such as this one at Cambridge, working with Muslims and Christians because they represent much of the world’s population, are a sign of progress. Our willingness to listen to each other is the first sign of the melting away of the iceberg between the two sides. It’s really something of a small miracle. We need to go step by step. The massiveness of the current economic crisis is something else that we must come together to solve. A crisis in the United States affects the street trader in Cairo. We no longer have the option to live in isolation. We Muslims and Christians must be successful so that we can be an example to the rest of the world. We hope that Common Word becomes a massive international peace movement.
One of your goals has been to reduce extremism, including terrorism, in the Islamic world. Are the radicals listening? We have two objectives here. The first is to reach young people. That is where the problems begin and where we must begin. I equate terrorism with cancer. If we leave it alone, it will affect the entire body. The second involves the actual terrorists themselves, and our effort is to dampen their negative effect. In that regard we have been successful, but it’s a partial success. We want to create boundaries for terrorism and restrict its activity. We’ve had a specific experiment in Egypt with the people who killed [President] Anwar Sadat [in 1981]. In Egypt there were about 16,000 members of the group [Islamic Jihad] that was responsible for Sadat’s assassination. We were able to discuss issues with them and convince them of their errors, and 14,000 of them ended up denouncing the principles of the terrorism they had espoused.
You are an eminent legal scholar, and as a religious judge, you issuefatwas, or religious rulings, in all kinds of disputes. You‘ve said in the past that ill-trained or manipulative Islamic pseudoscholars have misused fatwas for their own ends. How so? It is from these people that you get fatwas that endorse terrorism. That leaves the cancer to spread throughout the body. If Islam is not approached from a proper, scholarly point of view, we will see many problems. [more]
Note from Rafik Beekun:Very few commentators of an international stature like Maureen Dowd have examined at length Powell’s statement about the Islamophobic statements made by many in the Republican party over the past year. My wife is a Navy veteran. My son is now serving in the Navy. My father-in-law served in the Army. My sister-in-law was career Air Force. Are we less American because we are Muslims or related to Muslims? I commend General Powell for speaking out on this issue on National TV, and I thank Maureen for talking about this issue.
By MAUREEN DOWD, Op-Ed Columnist, New York Times
Published: October 21, 2008
Colin Powell had been bugged by many things in his party’s campaign this fall: the insidious merging of rumors that Barack Obama was Muslim with intimations that he was a terrorist sympathizer; the assertion that Sarah Palin was ready to be president; the uniformed sheriff who introduced Governor Palin by sneering about Barack Hussein Obama; the scorn with which Republicans spit out the words “community organizer”; the Republicans’ argument that using taxes to “spread the wealth” was socialist when the purpose of taxes is to spread the wealth; Palin’s insidious notion that small towns in states that went for W. were “the real America.”
But what sent him over the edge and made him realize he had to speak out was when he opened his New Yorker three weeks ago and saw a picture of a mother pressing her head against the gravestone of her son, a 20-year-old soldier who had been killed in Iraq. On the headstone were engraved his name, Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, his awards — the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star — and a crescent and a star to denote his Islamic faith.
“I stared at it for an hour,” he told me. “Who could debate that this kid lying in Arlington with Christian and Jewish and nondenominational buddies was not a fine American?”
Please click here to read the whole column from Maureen.
First Story: AP Investigation: Alaska Funded Palin Kids’ Travel
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS reported in the New York Times
Published: October 22, 2008
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Gov. Sarah Palin charged the state for her children to travel with her, including to events where they were not invited, and later amended expense reports to specify that they were on official business.
The charges included costs for hotel and commercial flights for three daughters to join Palin to watch their father in a snowmobile race, and a trip to New York, where the governor attended a five-hour conference and stayed with 17-year-old Bristol for five days and four nights in a luxury hotel.
In all, Palin has charged the state $21,012 for her three daughters’ 64 one-way and 12 round-trip commercial flights since she took office in December 2006. In some other cases, she has charged the state for hotel rooms for the girls.
Alaska law does not specifically address expenses for a governor’s children. The law allows for payment of expenses for anyone conducting official state business.
As governor, Palin justified having the state pay for the travel of her daughters — Bristol, 17; Willow, 14; and Piper, 7 — by noting on travel forms that the girls had been invited to attend or participate in events on the governor’s schedule.
But some organizers of these events said they were surprised when the Palin children showed up uninvited, or said they agreed to a request by the governor to allow the children to attend.
Several other organizers said the children merely accompanied their mother and did not participate. [more]
The governor’s daughters and husband charged the state $43,490 to travel, and many of the trips were between their house in Wasilla and Juneau, the capital city 600 miles away, the documents show. In separate filings, the state was billed about $25,000 for Palin’s daughters’ expenses and $19,000 for her husband’s. Flights topped the list for the most expensive items, and the daughter whose bill was the highest was Piper, 7, whose flights cost nearly $11,000, while Willow, 14, claimed about $6,000 and Bristol, 17, accounted for about $3,400.
One event was in New York City in October 2007, when Bristol accompanied the governor to Newsweek’s third annual Women and Leadership Conference, toured the New York Stock Exchange and met local officials and business executives. The state paid for three nights in a $707-a-day hotel room. October 2007, when Willow flew to Juneau to join the Palin family on a tour of the Hub Juneau Christian Teen Center, where Palin and her family worship when they are in Juneau. The state gave the center $25,000, according to a May 2008 memo.
Leighow noted that under state policy, all of the governor’s children are entitled to per diem expenses, even her infant son. “The first family declined the per diem [for] the children,” Leighow said. “The amount that they had declined was $4,461, as of August 5.” The family also charged for flights around the state, including trips to Alaska events such as the start of the Iditarod dog-sled race and the Iron Dog snowmobile race, a contest that Todd Palin won.
Meanwhile, Todd Palin spent $725 to fly to Edmonton, Alberta, for “information gathering and planning meeting with Northern Alberta Institute of Technology,” according to an expense report. During the three-day trip, he charged the state $291 for his per diem. A notation said “costs paid by Dept. of Labor.” He also billed the state $1,371 for a flight to Washington to attend a National Governors Association meeting with his wife.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/…
Gov. Sarah Palin…she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency. Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.
Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials.
Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records.
Professionals were either forced out or fired, Mr. Deuser said. Ms. Palin ordered city employees not to talk to the press. And she used city money to buy a white Suburban…also tended carefully to her evangelical base. She appointed a pastor to the town planning board. And she began to eye the library. For years, social conservatives had pressed the library director to remove books they considered immoral.
In addition to the trooper investigation, lawmakers in April accused her of improperly culling thousands of e-mail addresses from a state database for a mass mailing to rally support for a policy initiative.
Second Story: $150,000 to dress Sarah Palin
MSNBC
WASHINGTON - John McCain’s presidential campaign said thousands of dollars worth of clothing purchased by the Republican Party for running mate Sarah Palin will go to a “charitable purpose” after the campaign.
The Republican National Committee spent about $150,000 on clothing, hair styling, makeup and other “campaign accessories” in September for the McCain campaign after Palin, the governor of Alaska, joined the ticket.
The expenses include $75,062 spent at Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis Minn., and $41,850 in St. Louis in early September. The committee also reported spending $4,100 for makeup and hair consulting. The expenses were first reported by Politico.com.
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Third Story: Charging Alaska per diem for 312 nights sleeping in her own home
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has billed taxpayers for 312 nights spent in her own home during her first 19 months in office, charging a “per diem” allowance intended to cover meals and incidental expenses while traveling on state business.
The governor also has charged the state for travel expenses to take her children on official out-of-town missions. And her husband, Todd, has billed the state for expenses and a daily allowance for trips he makes on official business for his wife. Palin, who earns $125,000 a year, claimed and received $16,951 as her allowance, which officials say was permitted because her official “duty station” is Juneau, according to an analysis of her travel documents by The Washington Post.
Fourth Story: Gov Palin sold one state plane, and used another
By Aram Roston, NBC News Producer
Governor Sarah Palin used her state law-enforcement agency’s twin-engine plane to travel around Alaska, accounting for about 20 percent of its flying time, according to a document obtained by NBC News. The police plane is a King Air turboprop that is primarily used for police-related missions and search and rescue missions. [...]
On the campaign trail, Gov. Palin has touted her credentials as a reformer by discussing how she sold off the state’s other plane, a jet, and even listed it on eBay. Her predecessor, Gov. Frank Murkowski, had used that plane for travel.
But after Palin’s sale of the state jet following her inauguration as governor, the document shows, she did not stop flying on state planes. Gov. Palin used her Public Safety department’s prop plane for 110 hours, or 19 percent of its flight time, in 2007 and 2008. The Department of Corrections used it 28 percent of the time, and Alaska Wildlife troopers also used it 28 percent of the time. A spokesman for the McCain Palin campaign defended the flights, saying the governor needed to use the state Public Safety plane because of the remote geography of Alaska. “For the governor to perform her duty visiting rural communities the use of an aircraft was necessary,” a campaign spokesman said.
Tensions over Gov. Palin’s use of the plane first became public last month, with the release of an affidavit by her husband, Todd Palin. “It seemed like whenever Sarah needed this plane, it was unavailable,” Todd Palin wrote. The affidavit was submitted to investigators probing why Palin fired her Commissioner of Public Safety, Walt Monegan, earlier this year. That investigative report was released this month.
In his affidavit, Todd Palin complained that the state’s police agency was not allowing his wife to use the King Air plane. “We were concerned that the Department of Public Safety was retaliating against Sarah for selling the Murkowski jet that the Department of Public Safety officials enjoyed using,” he wrote.
Walt Monegan, in an interview with NBC earlier this month, said the plane was indeed a source of contention. “The governor would be upset if the plane was not at her disposal,” he said. “She would say, ‘I need the aircraft’ and it was at the shop.” [more]
“And when I hear a woman talk about the difficulties of starting her own business or making her way in the world, I think about my grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle management, despite years of being passed over for promotions because she was a woman..”
She’s the one who taught me about hard work. She’s the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life. She poured everything she had into me. And although she can no longer travel, I know that she’s watching tonight and that tonight is her night, as well.
Senator Barack Obama will suspend his campaigning for more than 36 hours this week to visit his grandmother Madelyn Dunham, who is gravely ill in Hawaii.
Mrs. Dunham, 85, all but raised Mr. Obama during his teenage years in Hawaii, and he has spoken of her often on the campaign trail. A campaign spokesman, Robert Gibbs, declined to specify the nature of her illness, other than to say it was quite serious. Mrs. Dunham lives in Honolulu.
“I think everyone understands that the decision that Senator Obama is making to go to Hawaii underscores the seriousness of the situation,” Mr. Gibbs said. “As he has said, she poured everything she had into him.”
The Obama campaign has canceled scheduled appearances by Mr. Obama in Des Moines and Madison, Wis. But the senator will make an unexpected stop in Indianapolis on Thursday, Mr. Gibbs said, since that aligns more easily with his plan to depart for Hawaii.
Mr. Obama will fly to Hawaii on Thursday afternoon, and likely depart back to the mainland Friday evening. Mr. Gibbs said he is expected to return to the campaign trail on Saturday.
To leave the trail at this juncture, when the bell lap is upon both Mr. Obama and his Republican rival, Senator John McCain, carries an element of risk. Mr. Obama is running ahead in every national poll, but his lead in some recent polls is not large.
But Mr. Obama has little family left. His father and mother are dead, along with his grandfather, Stanley Dunham. His grandmother raised him for many years, while his mother lived in Indonesia.
He and three other soldiers, including a corporal from Washington Heights, were killed in Baquba after a bomb detonated while they were checking abandoned houses for explosives. They served in the Stryker Brigade combat team of the Army’s 2nd Infantry Division, based in Ft. Lewis, Washington.
Mr. Khan graduated from Southern Regional High School in Manahawkin in 2005, and enlisted in the Army a few months later, spurred by his memories of the 9/11 terror attacks. “His Muslim faith did not make him not want to go. It never stopped him,” his father, Feroze Khan, told the Gannett News Service in a story printed shortly after his death. “He looked at it that he’s American and he has a job to do.”
Mr. Powell mentioned Mr. Khan’s death to underscore why he was deeply troubled by Republican personal attacks on Mr. Obama, especially false intimations that he was Muslim.
Mr. Obama is a lifelong Christian, not a Muslim, he said. But, he added, “The really right answer is, what if he is?”
“Is there something wrong with being Muslim in this country? No, that’s not America,” he said.
Mr. Khan’s death came to his attention, Mr. Powell said, when he saw a photo essay in a magazine about the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq. One picture showed a mother pressing her head against the gravestone of her fallen son in Arlington cemetery. It was the grave of 20-year-old Mr. Khan, engraved with his name, his military awards, and the Muslim symbol of the crescent and star.
Note from Rafik Beekun: When a Muslim dies, all Muslims who hear of his/her death are to say:
“To God do we belong, and to Him is our return.”
We say these words for Kareem R. Khan.
Some other Muslim soldiers buried at Arlington National are:
Finally, First Lieutenant, Ali Jivanjee, of USAF also made the ultimate sacrifice when he died this week in a mid-air collision while conducting training exercises outside Eglin Air Force Base.
KHOTAN, China — The grand mosque that draws thousands of Muslims each week in this oasis town has all the usual trappings of piety: dusty wool carpets on which to kneel in prayer, a row of turbans and skullcaps for men without headwear, a wall niche facing the holy city of Mecca in the Arabian desert.
Khotan’s mosque draws thousands of Muslims each week. In Kashgar, Uighurs prepared to break their daily fast during Ramadan last month. But large signs posted by the front door list edicts that are more Communist Party decrees than Koranic doctrines.
The imam’s sermon at Friday Prayer must run no longer than a half-hour, the rules say. Prayer in public areas outside the mosque is forbidden. Residents of Khotan are not allowed to worship at mosques outside of town.
One rule on the wall says that government workers and nonreligious people may not be “forced” to attend services at the mosque — a generous wording of a law that prohibits government workers and Communist Party members from going at all.
“Of course this makes people angry,” said a teacher in the mosque courtyard, who would give only a partial name, Muhammad, for fear of government retribution. “Excitable people think the government is wrong in what it does. They say that government officials who are Muslims should also be allowed to pray.”
To be a practicing Muslim in the vast autonomous region of northwestern China called Xinjiang is to live under an intricate series of laws and regulations intended to control the spread and practice of Islam, the predominant religion among the Uighurs, a Turkic people uneasy with Chinese rule.
The edicts touch on every facet of a Muslim’s way of life. Official versions of the Koran are the only legal ones. Imams may not teach the Koran in private, and studying Arabic is allowed only at special government schools.
Two of Islam’s five pillars — the sacred fasting month of Ramadan and the pilgrimage to Mecca called the hajj — are also carefully controlled. Students and government workers are compelled to eat during Ramadan, and the passports of Uighurs have been confiscated across Xinjiang to force them to join government-run hajj tours rather than travel illegally to Mecca on their own.
Government workers are not permitted to practice Islam, which means the slightest sign of devotion, a head scarf on a woman, for example, could lead to a firing.
After a press conference against the “Obsession” movie held by the Coalition for Renewing American Democracy, the Communications Director of the Clarion Fund confronted the coalition members. Here, Rabbi Steven Jacobs is shown talking to the Communications Director.
Interfaith leaders call ‘Obsession’ DVD hateful
Detroit News
Critics say film instills fear of Muslims with misleading claims; distributor says it’s meant to focus on terror issue.
A documentary film mailed to tens of thousands of households in Macomb and Oakland counties and distributed as advertising in local newspapers is being decried as bigotry by some Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders, who say it portrays radical Islam as a demonic force bent on world domination.
The film “Obsession” contains a disclaimer, asserting that it is not about most Muslims. But critics of the film say the remainder of the production, with rare exceptions, distorts Islam, compares radical Muslims to Nazis and says that it is not possible to determine how many Muslims are predisposed to terrorism, a claim the film makes. The sacred Islamic principle of jihad — a personal or community struggle against evil — is misidentified as a commandment to Muslims to make war against the United States and Europe, they say.
“After the film starts off with a very weak disclaimer that Muslims are a peaceful people, and the problem is so-called radical Islam, it goes through a barrage of images about Muslims and Islam that would scare the average viewer and make the average viewer suspicious of anyone who has any resemblance to figures shown in the movie,” said Dawud Walid of the Council on American Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group. [more]
