I have always felt this quote to be true.
It's a sin of omission - not acting is the same as permission.
It is especially true for groups who have power in society.
It is especially true for groups who are known to use violence against American citizens.
It is especially true for groups who have a special influence on each other.
Please keep this criterion in mind as we will refer to it again.
In a video that debuted on Youtube last year (summer of '14), titled "Brigitte Gabriel gives FANTASTIC answer to Muslim woman claiming all Muslims are portrayed badly," Brigitte Gabriel, on a panel about a terrorist attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya, uses the sentiment of the above quote to chastise an audience member for asking why all Muslims were being portrayed badly.
"On 9/11, those peaceful Muslims became irrelevant" - Brigitte Gabriel
click here for link
I think she is applying the right idea to the wrong battle, for the following reasons:
1. Her complaint that not enough Muslims speak out against extremism is unfounded.
2. Her complaint that Muslims should speak out more against extremism is unfair.
3. Her statistics of the number of radical Muslims is not true.
4. Her complaint was to why there were not many Muslims in the audience does not make sense once you realize who was hosting this panel, who was on the panel, and what the panel was about.
5. Two narratives. (this last point will be in the upcoming part 2)
Her complaint that not enough Muslims speak out against extremism is unfounded.
It has often been claimed in the media that Muslims are "silent" and do not condemn terrorism. This page is intended to refute that claim by listing all the Muslim organizations in America and elsewhere who spoke up in the aftermath of 9/11. Muslims have not been silent. Not even close. See also How American Muslims Really Responded to September 11 for more information about the Muslim response to 9/11. And another listing is at Statements Against Terror. Also Muslim Voices Against Terrorism. Related commentary at Friedman Wrong About Muslims Again , by Juan Cole and The Myth of Muslim Condemnation of Terror by Ali Eteraz.
The first Muslim event I ever attended was the Muslims for Peace rally a year ago, which also included a Catholic on their panel. The masjid I attend, New Brunswick Islamic Center, hosted an anti-ISIS rally, featuring a descendant of Muhammad. Muslim leaders, in droves, have also condemned ISIS.
Her complaint that Muslims should speak out more against extremism is unfair.
In an article titled "Muslims Infiltrate the White House! Me Included!", Muslim comedian Dean O wrote about a Muslim-American summit with Obama "we have been requesting since Obama took office."
In another article on the same meeting, a Muslim lawyer named Farhana Khera, who attended the summit with Obama, said:
“The Paris attacks and Boston Marathon attacks underscore that we need law enforcement focusing where they have legitimate leads and known suspects,” Khera said. “Like every other community, we care about the safety of our communities, and if we learn about a criminal act, we should report it to law enforcement.”
But, Khera added, the idea that Muslim Americans have special influence in such situations is like saying an Irish American had special influence with the Irish Republican Army [a terrorist group in Ireland]. “It doesn’t add up,” she said."
That line I emphasized by bolding makes the most sense to me, it shows Muslims in general are not a specific enough group to meet the third criteria for applying the quote “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”.
It would be like asking my Dad to do more about right-wing extremists. My dad is a Republican fiscal conservative who does not like big government and taxes, and most right-wing extremists in America are, like him, fiscal conservatives who don't like taxes. And right-wing terrorists kill more Americans than Muslim terrorists. (note: my Dad was once flagged at an airport for having the same name as an Irish terrorist).
Muslims have been doing what they are supposed to, to my knowledge: speaking out against extremism, and calling the FBI on people who act like extremists. In one hilarious example, an FBI agent went to a mosque pretending to be a terrorist, to try and recruit and entrap Muslims, and they called the FBI on him:
Alarmed Mosque-Goers Turn FBI Informant over to FBI
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2010/12/06/alarmed-mosque-goers-turn-fbi-informant-over-fbi
An ex-FBI agent admitted recently in an article titled "There is no real hunt. It's fixed" that this tactic is all they are using to try and catch terrorists. And yet you have bigots like New York Congressman Peter King announcing things like "mosques are incubators for terrorists."
If my evidence to the contrary is not enough, in an article by Medhi Hassan titled "What the jihadists who bought 'Islam for Dummies' on Amazon tell us about radicalisation," he superbly quotes from Great Britain's equivalent to the C.I.A., MI5:
In 2008, a classified briefing note on radicalisation, prepared by MI5’s behavioural science unit, was leaked to the Guardian. It revealed that, “far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could . . . be regarded as religious novices.” The analysts concluded that “a well-established religious identity actually protects against violent radicalisation”, the newspaper said.
The article abounds with resources for further evidence that Islam is not to blame for radicals, including the research of forensic psychiatrist and former CIA officer Marc Sageman.
Her statistics of the number of radical Muslims is not true.
The Christian Science Monitor published this in response to the panel in the Youtube video:
How many Muslim extremists are there? Just the facts, please.
Brigitte Gabriel claims the 15-25 percent of the world's Muslims are plotting attacks in the West. Why that number is inaccurate.
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/terrorism-security/2015/0113/How-many-Muslim-extremists-are-there-Just-the-facts-please
Her complaint was to why there were not many Muslims in the audience does not make sense once you realize who was hosting this panel, who was on the panel, and what the panel was about.
Who is Brigitte Gabriel:
The part about the video that makes the audience applaud is when Brigitte Gabriel asks Saba Ahmed (the young Muslim woman)- after questioning Ahmed's citizenship, why she didn't bring more Muslims with her to represent Islam, and why she brought up negative portrayals of Muslims when they seemingly were only discussing the terrorist attack on an embassy.
perhaps Muslims didn't go to her meeting because she is a bigot and fear-mongerer. If anything, Muslims were probably outside protesting her event rather than inside. And they'd have every reason to:
She goes on FOX News and tries to revive the dog-whistle racism, fear-mongering myth that Obama is a Muslim ("the Other").
She is known for calling Arabs "barbarians" and says we are in a holy war of Christian good vs. Muslims evil
I read the reviews of the book she wrote, Because They Hate Us. One review says: "Her personal experience during the Lebanese war--bunkered down as bombs fall, eating weeds, using liquor as medicine--adds narrative punch, but can't support her thesis that all Muslims, in her words, ‘will unite in a hideous mass to achieve their common goal of imposing Islam on the world.’ "
"I quote the author: ‘What have the Arabs contributed to the world other than suicide bombing and terrorism. Where is their contribution to science, medication
and technology?’”
I know Arab Muslims contributed thousands of things to the West. They invented everything from algebra to the first university, promoted the scientific method before Christian did (ibn Haytham), and invented the chivalrous knight , and were using all six trigonometric functions (producing accurate sine and cosine tables and using the first tangent tables) while white Christian Europe was in the Dark Ages.
I also know that I was once jumped by a group of Black men, who beat the spit out of me and then robbed me. I did not wake up from this and say that Black men are barbarians, despite my fear of Black men. I did not see a racial motivation behind the attack. Just because Brigitte Gabriel was caught up in a civil war in Lebanon that involved Christians and Muslims fighting does not give her the right to generalize past her personal experience as a victim to speak with some authority on Islam. (the same goes for fellow bigot Ayan Hirsi, who undeniably suffered at the hands of a cultural - not Islamic practice - of female genital mutilation in an Islamic country.)
Who was hosting the panel?
The panel was held by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing conservative Republican think-tank.
It leader, Jim DeMint, is a Republican Senator from South Carolina
Known for his Southern Christian talk show revisionism of slavery in order to imply that the government never has and never should help Black people
as part of his ideology that a social justice equalize-the-playing-field-government cannot do anything right (stating that it was not government action that ended slavery, just a small group of committed Christians, arguably the same group he wants to see replace government spending on social programs with),
and for alienating Latinos in his state.
Notice that the audience was a bunch of white people, and the man on the far left of the panel, Frank Gaffney, Jr.,
Is a known anti-Muslim bigot who accused many Americans, even his fellow conservative Republicans, of being a part of a terrorist conspiracy because they have Muslim names.
The blonde woman on the panel, Clare Lopez,
previously described the Obama administration as having “switched sides” in the war on terror (i.e., Obama is with the terrorists against America)
and the other guy, on the right, Chris Plante, is a conservative radio show host who tried to prevent gay marriage
So I don’t expect a very diverse crowd of Latinos, Black people, Muslims, and liberal Democrats.
What the panel was about
This whole panel was part of a right-wing attack on Obama and the Democrats
For being too "soft on terrorism"
And implying all sorts of sinister motives
The underlying dog-whistle racism of the "birther" conspiracy, that Obama was not an American, had lost steam
But in the vacuum of this manufactured controversy, and racism abhors a vacuum,
Came a new attack on Obama
Not that he wasn't American, but that he was un-American
Conservative Republicans looked for a reason to blame the terrorist attack on the U.S. embassy on a conspiracy theory that Obama was covering up, with many conservatives outright decrying that Obama is a Muslim and siding with the terrorists.
Brigitte Gabriel chides the Muslim woman in the audience for bringing up Islamophobia when "we weren't even talking about that," but marginalized peoples can tell when the people in power use dog-whistle racism, coded speech that subtly implies race or ethnicity is the underlying target of outrage.
In the part of the video we don't see, words are said all to imply that the secretly Muslim Obama willingly allowed for this terrorist attack on a U.S. embassy to happen, going back to the idea that Obama is an Islamic terrorist:
As the evening progressed, Plante implied Ambassador Chris Stevens’ real cause of death was being hidden,
One audience member even suggested that the U.S. government (Obama) had placed the U.S. military commander in Libya "under house arrest” so as to allow the attack to occur.
Plante said he’d heard the same.
Brigitte's charge that the Muslim in the audience should have addressed the content of the speech- the deaths of U.S. personnel at the hands of terrorists - instead of defensively bringing up racism when it was not even mentioned, roused the audience into thunderous applause and even some standing ovation. The gist:
Why should this Muslim woman disrespect the fact we're here talking about an American killed by Muslim terrorists? How dare she? She's making this all about herself and the victimized Muslims, but they are irrelevant, the only victim here is dead Americans, like U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens!
But Ahmed, the woman in the audience, did not have to be the representative of Muslim concern for American lives. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was a popular figure in Libya, "and nowhere more than in Benghazi," where the attack took place. A reporter for New Yorker magazine traveled to Benghazi and stated "Friends and relatives there tell me that the city is mournful. There have been spontaneous demonstrations denouncing the attack. Popular Libyan Web sites are full of condemnations of those who carried out the assault."
Ahmed did not have to be among the peaceful, "moderate"* Muslims speaking out against the killing of American civilians; as we have already seen, Muslim leaders worldwide have already done that.
Ahmed was there to speak out against dog-whistle racism against Arabs and Islamophobia.
But,
she didn't even get a chance to respond
After she was told "I wish you'd brought 10 more Muslims to talk about questioning the government" (i.e., why don’t you join us in asking the government to see what Obama is hiding)
She was immediately told she was being too politically correct
And then drown out by applause
Why would she want to even come back after this?
Conclusion
In the video, Brigitte notes how the mostly good Germans didn't do anything to stop the killing of millions of Jews, so they are irrelevant unless they speak up. But history shows that, like most Americans, most Germans didn't know what was going on. "Even a prominent German-Jewish leader Leo Baek said that he did not know about Auschwitz until 1943, even though millions of Jews had already been killed by then." p. 107 of Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals.
Like the good Germans, good Americans don't know what America is doing in darkness, and it takes rebels like Julian Assagne and Chelsea Manning's wikileaks to let us know. Brigitte then claims that the peaceful majority of Muslims were irrelevant on 9/11...but how were they supposed to know what was happening? Muslims in New York City and elsewhere were killed by terrorists on 9/11 too...How are they irrelevant?
Brigitte sounds so self-righteous and smiles and asks "Please, save your applause", and the look on the guys face on the left is so smug it makes me angry as the handclaps go off. They all seem so self-congratulatory, using a a fallacy - that we can refute your problem with us that we portray all Muslims as bad by making it seem that Muslims are not doing enough - to jerk each other off in a scene straight out of a movie where the hero tells off the loser meanie bad guy in a dramatic (and seemingly well-rehearsed) way.
This video shows me how poignant sentiments like “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” can be misused to further false narratives which support the status quo.
in the upcoming Part 2, we will focus on the first two criterion for
"the only thing necessary for the triumph...":
It is especially true for groups who have power in society.
It is especially true for groups who are known to use violence against American citizens.
* "moderate" is a heteronormative term used by outsiders to describe peaceful Muslims. Peaceful Muslims prefer not to use this term, as they see it to imply that peaceful Muslims are "less Islamic",
that they are only moderately religious, and that only terrorists are really gung-ho about their Islamic faith.
In reality, most Muslims work very hard to pray five times a day, fast during Ramadan, and would appreciate their efforts not be seen as "moderate" but as highly enthusiastic and faithful.
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