Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity....often promoting Islamophobia.....
their crime.....always pretending to have a discussion when there is obviously no intention of trying to find actual facts or information.
They both "pretend" they are discussing the issue when in reality their ploy of asking a "question" only serves to further their point of view.....especially when they attempt to force the guest to "just answer the question, why won't you just answer the question, I'm the host, it's my show, I'll ask the questions."
What a stupid game by these particularly ugly Americans.
If fox news, or these American embarrassments were truly interested in finding facts and information they would certainly conduct themselves differently..........
Recently, mr. o'reilly had a representative on from CAIR but instead of letting the man talk he proceeded to interrogate the individual. He must have felt embarrassed, if that is possible, but he continued to proclaim his innocense and the reasons for his vulgarity on the following shows.
There is a reason why Wesley Clark would not go on o'reilly...I wonder why.....
copied from wiki.... The Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) is America's largest Muslim civil liberties advocacy organization that deals with civil advocacy. It is headquartered on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., with regional offices nationwide.[1]
CAIR's mission statement
is "to enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect
civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that
promote justice and mutual understanding".[9]
copied from CNN opinion.......
Missing the best chance to prevent terror bombing
updated 8:10 AM EDT, Tue May 7, 2013
From left, Azamat Tazhayakov and
Dias Kadyrbayev went with Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to
Times Square in this photo taken from the social media site VK.com.
Tazhayakov and Kadyrbayev were arrested on Wednesday, May 1, on charges they tried to throw investigators off Tsarnaev's trail. See all photography related to the Boston bombings.
HIDE CAPTION
Suspects tied to Boston bombings
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Debate has ranged widely over how to prevent terrorist attacks
- Arun Kundnani says answer is not more and more surveillance
- He says mosque leaders are fearful of engaging in discussion with radicals
- Kundnani: Don't toss people like Tamerlan Tsarnaev out of mosques; confront them
Editor's note: Arun
Kundnani is author of the forthcoming book "The Muslims are Coming!
Islamophobia, extremism, and the domestic War on Terror," to be
published by Verso Press in January 2014. He teaches terrorism studies
at John Jay College, New York.
(CNN) -- Since the bombing of the Boston marathon --
in which three people, including a child, were killed and more than 200
injured -- attention has naturally focused on what could have been done
to prevent it.
Some, such as Rep. Peter King, the New York Republican who chairs the Homeland Security Committee, have argued for increased
surveillance of Muslims in the United States. Local police departments
"have to realize that the threat is coming from the Muslim community and
increase surveillance there," he says.
Others have asked whether
leads were properly followed and if better sharing of information
between agencies would have helped thwart the bombing.
Arun Kundnani
However, the government, with its $40 billion annual intelligence budget,
already amasses vast quantities of information on the private lives of
Muslims in the United States. The FBI has 3,000 intelligence analysts
working on counterterrorism and 15,000 paid informants, according to Mother Jones.
Exactly how many of them
are focused on Muslims in the United States is unknown; there is little
transparency in this area. But, given the emphasis the FBI has placed on
preventing Muslim terrorism, and based on my interviews with FBI agents
working on counterterrorism, there could be as many as two-thirds
assigned to spying on Muslims.
Taking the usual estimate of the Muslim population
in the United States of 2.35 million, this would mean the FBI has a spy
for every 200 Muslims in the United States. When one adds the resources
of the National Security Agency, regional intelligence fusion centers,
and the counterterrorism work of local police departments, such as the
New York Police Department (where a thousand officers
are said to work on counterterrorism and intelligence), the number of
spies per Muslim may increase dramatically. East Germany's communist-era
secret police, the Stasi, had one intelligence analyst or informant for
every 66 citizens. This suggests that Muslims in the United States
could be approaching levels of state surveillance similar to that which
the East German population faced from the Stasi.
Boston Imam: Suspect should be buried
Student visas under scrutiny post-Boston
The roots of radicalization
Yet, as the Stasi itself
eventually discovered, no system of surveillance can ever produce total
knowledge of a population. Indeed, the greater the amount of information
collected, the harder it is to interpret its meaning. In the majority
of terrorist attacks in recent years, the relevant information was
somewhere in the government's systems, but its significance was lost
amid a morass of useless data.
What is obscured by the
demands for ever greater surveillance and information processing is that
security is best established through relationships of trust and inclusion
within the community. The real missed opportunity to intervene before
the bombs went off in Boston likely came three months earlier, when
bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev stood up during a Friday prayer
service at his mosque - the Islamic Society of Boston, in Cambridge - to
angrily protest the imam's sermon.
The imam had been celebrating the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., which Tsarnaev thought was selling out. According to one report, Tsarnaev was then kicked out of the prayer service for his outburst.
Since 9/11, mosque
leaders have been under pressure to eject anyone expressing radical
views, rather than engaging with them and seeking to challenge their
religious interpretation, address their political frustrations, or meet
their emotional needs.
That policy has been
forced on mosques by the wider climate of excessive surveillance, which
means mosques are wary of even having conversations with those perceived
to be radicals, for fear of attracting official attention.
The fear is that every
mosque has a government informant listening for radical talk.
Unsurprisingly, this means most people are reluctant to engage with
young people expressing radical views, who instead tend to be ejected
from the congregation.
The Tsarnaev brothers were said to be angry
about U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, possibly drawing
parallels with their own experiences as refugees from Russia's brutal
wars of counterinsurgency in the Caucasus. But because discussions of
foreign policy have been off-limits in
mosques since 9/11, they were unlikely to have had their anger
acknowledged, engaged, challenged or channeled into nonviolent political
activism.
The heavy surveillance
of Muslims has meant there is no room for mosques to engage with someone
like Tamerlan Tsarnaev, listen to him, challenge those of his ideas
that might be violent, or offer him emotional support. Instead, Muslims
have felt pressured to demonstrate their loyalty to America by steering
clear of dissident conversations on foreign policy.
Flawed models of the so-called "radicalization" process
have assumed that the best way to stop terrorist violence is to prevent
radical ideas from circulating. Yet the history of terrorism suggests
the opposite is true.
Time and again, support
for terrorism appears to increase when legitimate political activism is
suppressed - from the French anarchists who began bombing campaigns
after the defeat of the Paris Commune, to the Algerian National
Liberation Front struggling to end French colonialism, to the Weather
Underground's "Declaration of a state of war" after state repression of
student campaigns against the Vietnam War.
Reconstructing the
motivation for the bombings is fraught with difficulty; there can be
little certainty in such matters. But pathological outcomes are more
likely when space for the free exchange of feelings and opinions is
squeezed.
As many community
activists and religious leaders argued in Britain in the aftermath of
the 7/7 terrorist attacks on the London transport system in 2005, the
best preventive measure is to enable anger, frustration and dissent to
be expressed as openly as possible, rather than driving them underground
where they more easily mutate into violent forms.
These activists put this
approach into practice, for example at the Brixton mosque in south
London, by developing initiatives in the community to engage young
people in discussions of foreign policy, identity and the meaning of
religious terms like jihad, in order to counter those who advocate
violence against fellow citizens. It is difficult to measure the success
of such programs. But many see them as having played an important role
in undermining support
for terrorism. In what must seem a paradox to backers of East German
levels of surveillance like Peter King, more radical talk might be the
best way of reducing terrorist violence.
No one could have
predicted from Tsarnaev's outburst that, a few months later, he would be
suspected of carrying out an act of mass murder on the streets of
Boston. And we don't know what would have made a difference in the end.
But a community able to express itself openly without fear, whether in
the mosque or elsewhere, should be a key element in the United States'
efforts to prevent domestic terrorism.
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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Arun Kundnani.
