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Meeting launches campaign against anti-Muslim bigotry, war

Published Jan 12, 2011 2:36 PM

More than 300 people met at the Islamic Center of Long Island in Westbury, N.Y., on Jan. 8. Muslims, Protestants, Jewish people, Catholics and political activists gathered there to denounce the rising bigotry against Muslims, the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and especially the hearings that Long Island Rep. Peter King has called that target Islamic communities.

The meeting, organized by the Muslim Peace Coalition, Majlis Ash-Shura of Metropolitan New York, was also their kickoff to mobilize for the United National Antiwar Committee Rally and March against War and Islamophobia in New York City set for April 9.

Peter King has called for hearings on what he called “the radicalization of the American Muslim community.” (Newsday, Dec 27) King was co-author of the anti-immigrant Sensenbrenner bill of 2006, is an ardent supporter of the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and of U.S. incursions into Pakistan. King once said President George W. Bush “deserves a medal” for authorizing the form of torture known as waterboarding. (Wall Street Journal, Jan. 1)

The New York Daily News recently compared King, now chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security, to the 1950s rightist demagogue, Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy. King has said that “there are too many mosques” in the U.S. and that “85 percent of American Muslim community leaders are an enemy living amongst us.” (The American Muslim, Jan. 8) This bigoted rhetoric has become part of the culture of divisiveness and violence that has encouraged attacks on mosques and Muslims in Huntington, Smithtown and other localities on Long Island.

Joe Lombardo, UNAC organizer from Albany, N.Y., noted that attacks on Muslims were a means to divide and conquer workers. Lombardo said taxes from people in New York state in the amount of $15 billion a year are used to help pay for the wars and occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Meanwhile an $8 billion budget cut cost state jobs and destroyed public services.

Angela Lampe, representing the Salvadoran Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front of Long Island, compared the racism she and other Latinos/as face on Long Island to the experiences of the Muslim community. She noted that all immigrants have been forced to migrate because of U.S. economic and military policies which made it impossible to stay in their homelands. “They exploit us at home and they oppress us here, and we have got to remain united. It is very hard to destroy people who are united,” she said.

Sara Flounders of the International Action Center spoke of the campaign of hatred that produced the terrible murders in Arizona. “Unity is the one force to fight this atmosphere of fear,” she said. The economic crisis was spurring the cuts of social services and pushing reactionary forces to “sow division and fear, marked by attacks on Muslims.”

Flounders, who had just returned from a visit with the people of Gaza 24 hours before the meeting, said, “Gaza is an example of the resilience of resistance. And the attacks on Muslims here are used as a justification for wars against Muslim people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine and Lebanon, and a threat to Iran. Our best protection is solidarity.”