Breast is Still Best

Despite widespread awareness of the importance of breastfeeding to the human child, mothers in developed countries demonstrate low rates of compliance with global recommendations. Nursing past six months is the exception rather than the rule. Bottle-feeding infants has become normal. Exclusive and extensive breastfeeding has become a pastime primarily for the rich with some interesting exceptions. Nordic countries exhibit the overall highest European breastfeeding rate with England ranking lowest. UAE ruling class mothers exclusively breastfeed the longest among Arabs while Iraq suffers the lowest breastfeeding rates. US Whites and Native Americans are most likely to breastfeed while Blacks and Hispanics are the least likely.

Class plays a large role in decision to breastfeed, for far fewer women belonging to the routine and manual labor socio-economic group nurse beyond six weeks than is typical of professional women and full time mothers. Yet, religion and philosophy also affect women’s decision to breastfeed. In Singapore non-Malay Muslim women are 6.7 times more likely to breastfeed than Buddhist women although Malays have the lowest rate. Urban babies receive half the breast milk of rural babies. The youngest mothers tend to supplement with bottles from birth.

The World Health Organization and UNICEF work hard to promote breastfeeding worldwide, but their success is undermined by factors such as free infant formula distribution, hospital practices and lack of personal support. Breastfeeding is a learned skill requiring effort and focus. Good intentions are not always enough to establish lactation. “Baby-friendly hospital” initiatives in many countries have significantly increased breastfeeding but rates are still well below optimum health guidelines.

Almost all new mothers attempt breastfeeding but few continue for the recommended period. According to UNICEF the early introduction of bottle-feeding and complementary food leads to premature weaning, which is the primary cause of malnutrition in children under age two worldwide.

Many women give up nursing in favor of bottle-feeding out of a sense of powerless over the situation. These mothers often wanted very much to nurse their child, but they lost their chance. Hospitals fail to promote exclusive breastfeeding of newborns. Most new mothers receive free samples of formula because of multi-million dollar deals between hospitals and pharmaceutical companies and come home with their babies already addicted to the bottle. Coaxing a newborn child to breastfeed after he has been bottle-fed even just once or twice can be a big struggle. Success may be impossible without the aid of a midwife or lactation counselor because unfortunately even the older generation of mothers lack sufficient knowledge.

When newborns reject the breast, mothers typically try for a while, then give up and supply a bottle. This teaches the baby that refusing to nurse will be rewarded. Parents must exercise “tough love” by declining to give the baby a bottle even if it takes several hours or even days for the baby to nurse willingly. (If the baby gets dehydrated, do give him water with a cup or medicine dropper, but introducing a bottle creates “nipple confusion” which is disastrous for the mother-child relationship).

Some women give up on breastfeeding because the husband insists. This tragedy reveals a stripping away at women’s postnatal rights and sets a dangerous precedent. Nursing a baby is an exhausting and time-consuming job requiring family help, encouragement, and support especially from the father to enable mother and child to be together undisturbed as much as possible particularly during the first 40 days of the baby’s life.

Many women manage to make it through those hardest days in the beginning and then stop breastfeeding after a few weeks out of fear of insufficient milk supply. These mothers need to increase their consumption of calories and to get adequate rest. Under no circumstances should they give their baby a bottle because this will only decrease the supply of breastmilk. Sometimes it is actually the doctor’s advice to start feeding their babies solids before 6 months that leads to premature weaning. A mother needs to weigh the fun of spoon-feeding her infant against the risk of premature rejection of the breast.

Thus bottle-feeding rates remain high despite awareness that breastmilk alone contains all the nutrients, antibodies, hormones and immune factors that a baby needs.

“Encouraging exclusive breastfeeding has to become a high priority in all sectors of society,” said Dr. Mahendra Sheth, UNICEF Regional Health and Nutrition Adviser for the Middle East and North Africa. Exclusive breastfeeding for six months followed by complementary feeding between 6-9 months with continued breastfeeding through the first year could save an estimated 1.5 million lives annually.

Women receiving adequate advice can often prolong nursing even after returning to work outside the home. Premature infants particularly need breast milk for the best odds in life.

Pregnant women should read books on how to breastfeed and understand fully the necessary commitment to avoid making a tragic mistake to be remembered with regret.


Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on Middle East affairs and US politics. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women.

US Charities Paying for Sending Aid to Palestinians

Khaleej Times

While US officials were dropping charges against former Senator Ted Stevens because of prosecutorial misconduct and against AIPAC operatives Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, Dallas US District Judge Jorge Solis handed Holy Land Foundation executive chairman Shukri Abu Baker a 65-year sentence, founding chairman Mohammad El-Mezain 15 years, former chairman Ghassan Elashi 65 years, former volunteer fundraiser Mufid Abdulqader 20 years, and former New Jersey representative Abdulrahman Odeh 15 years.

In an interview with Amy Goodman shortly after sentencing, Nancy Holder, attorney for HLF CEO Abu Baker, has pointed out: “There was never any allegation that any money went anywhere other 
than to charity. The government’s position was that these particular charities were associated with or controlled by Hamas. And it’s important to understand that the United States government, through USAID, continued to give money to the same charities for years after Holy Land was closed. But that’s what the allegation was all the way along. Although the government spent a great deal of time in the trial talking about and showing the jury horrific pictures of violent acts that Hamas did, our clients were not accused of nor convicted of one single 
act of violence.”

The first HLF prosecution ended in mistrial. The retrial conviction depended upon questionable translations and an anonymous Israeli Shin Bet agent, who provided evidence almost certainly obtained by torture. The case was noteworthy for vacuousness of charges, relentlessness of prosecution, and various levels of involvement of Bush administration officials, including Islamophobic propagandist Daniel Pipes, Defence Department adviser Rachel Ehrenfeld, Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis Matthew Levitt, and Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey, whose continued service under Obama betrays the absence of any genuine difference between Bush and Obama administrations in attitude 
toward Muslims.

These four form the inner circle of a complex but deadly serious conspiracy to destroy Islamic finance and charities as well as to dominate the flow of information about the Middle East.

Ehrenfeld, who has a noticeable Israeli accent, had the bad luck to start her book writing career by publishing a text focused on Soviet narco-terrorism involvement just before the Soviet Union collapsed, but she quickly found her literary niche in 1992 by attacking Islamic banking and Islam. Her unsophisticated book, Evil Money, crassly defames Islam while she publicly equates Islamic finance with “stoning a women or cutting off a head.”

Levitt generates more sophisticated propaganda than Ehrenfeld. Educated at the Brookline Maimonides Academy, an exceptionally fanatic high school yeshiva, he was a key witness during the HLF retrial. His book, Hamas, Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad, whose foreword was written by Dennis Ross, Obama’s US State Department Special Adviser for the Middle East and Southwest Asia, describes the prosecutorial logic: essentially, the HLF aided Hamas by providing rice and cooking oil to Palestinian civilians because Hamas might then shift money from social welfare into resistance. “In the absence of any serious examination of Israel’s occupation, Levitt’s portrayal of the rise of Hamas is completely detached from the context within which it was produced and shaped,” notes Harvard professor Sara Roy.

Levey slavishly follows Levitt’s analysis in designating groups and individuals as terrorism supporters. While receiving many accolades from the American Jewish Committee, Levey has predictably neither designated the IDF a terrorist organisation nor forced either closure of charities like Friends of the IDF or arrest of individuals like Irwin Moskowitz, who gives directly to IDF soldiers.

Since the late 1980s, Pipes has propagated the myth of a “worldwide Muslim conspiracy” in which Iran provides the fist of direct Islamic confrontation in coordination with “Saudi stealth subversion of the USA” via charitable and scholarly giving.

He claims that the major internal threat to America comes from “stealth or legal Islamists”: ordinary American Muslim citizens who respect and practise Shariah.

The infection of the US government with this pseudo analytical framework created and elaborated by this closely-knit conspiratorial team represents “the triumph of the Israeli mentality in American culture and politics”, according to Sephardic Heritage Center director David Shasha.

Because such thinking still permeates the highest US government levels, the FBI and Justice Department continue railroading Muslims into prison through paranoid prosecutions based on entrapment or ex-post facto applied laws.

While American Muslim, Asian or Arab defence organisations and individuals like Saudi businessman Khaled bin Mahfouz, who was libeled by Ehrenfeld, have occasionally resisted individual projects of Pipes or Ehrenfeld, they have yet to develop strategies to force Levey out of the US government or to counteract the hegemonic discourse that he is solidifying from his US Treasury office.

Unless Muslims and Asian and Arab Americans get their act together, their status in the United States will only decline while more Muslim populations suffer military assaults around the world.

Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on Middle East affairs and US politics. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women. Joachim Martillo contributed to this article

Industrialized Farming Endangers World Food Supply

Multi-national food corporations are increasingly using global food insecurity as a tool for political control. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) reports that “land grabbing” by foreign investors in developing countries has resulted in a new form of colonialism. Spanish NGO, GRAIN reports that rich countries are buying poor countries’ fertile soil, water and sun to ship food and fuel back home. IFPRI researcher Joachim von Braun states, “About one-quarter of these investments are for biofuel plantations.”

Agribusiness imposes a devastating toll on small farmers worldwide. Landowners in African countries, where there are no official land deeds, have no legal recourse against foreign companies that steal their farmland. In the United States ranchers and farmers lose their land to agribusinesses and end up working as employees. American cattle ranchers have the highest suicide rate among American professions. Similar humiliations have also led thousands of farmers in India to take their own lives.

The ‘Global Food Security Act’ [S384] recently introduced in the US Senate will give USAID $7.5 billion over five years. Arun Shrivastava of the Centre for Research on Globalization reports: “USAID is actually an arm of the US-Department of Defense; it serves US foreign policy interest and has little to do with humanism.” There are two other similar pending bills, HR875 and S425.

Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, points out that while purporting to address issues of global nutrition and health, “the US Congress is hell bent on introducing laws with global reach that would destroy the very basis of people’s food security and food sovereignty.”

HR 875, the Food Safety and Modernization Act of 2009, writes Barbara Minton in Natural News, “would effectively hand over control of America's food supply to such a nefarious giant as Monsanto and its lesser counterparts such as Tyson and Cargill.”

Monsanto GMO corn plants, which were designed with a built-in resistance to Monsanto's weed killers, have already devastated thousands of South African farmers. The corn plants look healthy, but inside the husks there are no kernels! This GMO crop failure highlights the dangers of agribusiness domination of the global food supply.

“To ensure the perpetuation of its near monopoly, Monsanto is helping to install the right people in the right places,” Minton continues. “To that end, Michael Taylor, the ex FDA head who approved the use of bovine growth hormone (rBGH), has just become ensconced in the Obama transition team where he may soon be overseeing food safety. He will join already well placed Tom Vilsack, the pro-GMO Secretary of Agriculture.”

South Africa repeats the pattern of Iraq and of Afghanistan, where new laws prohibit farmers to save or trade their own seeds. These laws being promoted within the US would also block access to non-GMO seeds.

“Iraq, it must be remembered, has the oldest history of farming and one of the longest traditions of cultivation in the civilized world,” writes Latha Jishnu in the Business Standard of India. According to the Institute of Near Eastern & African Studies (INEAS) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “Farm-saved seeds and the free exchange of planting materials among farmers have long been the basis of agricultural practice in Iraq.”

The Oil-for-Food program in Iraq forced the large-scale importation of food after the first Gulf War. Devastated Iraqi farmers then became the victims of USAID.

Under US occupation, Iraqi farmers must pay a “technology fee” plus an annual license fee to agribusinesses supplying the seeds and equipment. Similar policies exist in Afghanistan, which compel dependency on supplies from multi-national agribusinesses while industrial agricultural training courses provide the US military with opportunities to gather intelligence from the local population. A US Special Forces civil affairs manager in Afghanistan explains, “The presence of this agricultural center is a security measure in and of itself.”

GRAIN reports, “The war provides these corporations with both a lucrative short-term market in the blossoming “reconstruction” industry and an opportunity to integrate Afghanistan into their global production networks and markets in the long term.”

Industrial agriculture is based on mono-cropping, use of GMO seeds, fertilizers, lethal pesticides, and expensive farm machinery. Environmentalists say these methods cause topsoil erosion, depleted soil fertility, air and water pollution, loss of biodiversity, decreased nutritional value of food, and serious health risks. Iowa State University biotech researchers are putting flu vaccines into the DNA of corn, reports Bryan Salvage in the Meat and Poultry Journal. This genetic manipulation is likely to increase the rate of viral mutation, rather than to reduce disease as claimed.

French Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini, molecular endocrinologist at the University of Caen found that Monsanto’s GMO corn damages the liver and kidneys like pesticides. Hungarian biology professor Bela Darvas of Debrecen University discovered that Monsanto's corn endangers protected insect species. Spiegel reports that because corn is a wind-pollinated plant, GMO crops inevitably contaminate nearby farms. Because of these dangers, Germany has banned GMO corn.

Those wishing to avoid GMO should buy foods certified “organic.”


Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on Middle East affairs and US politics. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women.

Israel Steals Palestinian Heritage, History

Khaleej Times


Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayad has made a formal complaint to the Canadian government regarding the intention of Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum to collaborate with the Israel Antiquities Authority to host "Dead Sea Scrolls: Words that Changed the World" from June 27 to January 3, 2010.

Palestinian Archaeological Department Director-General Hamdan Taha explains,"The exhibition would entail exhibiting or displaying artifacts removed from thePalestinian territories... I think it is important that Canadian institutionswould be responsible and act in accordance with Canada's obligations."

The Israeli exhibition violates international conventions or protocols that Canada has ratified and that protect cultural property during armed conflict.

The State of Israel seized the Jordanian-owned Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem in 1967 to take possession of the scrolls and has continued to loot similar Palestinian cultural property from the Occupied Territories ever since. Under the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property and the 1954 Hague Convention along with its two associated protocols, Canada is legally obliged "to take appropriate steps to recover and return any such cultural property" at the request of the wronged party.

The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition is part of Israel's effort to re-brand itself.

According to The Economist, American Jewish groups and Israeli diplomats are trying to create the perception of Israel as "hip, cool, cultured, fun and creative." The campaign has included placing sexually suggestive advertisements in Maxim and other men's magazines.

Harvard Professor Stephen Walt suggests in his Foreign Policy blog that the re-branding effort is foredoomed to failure: "Restoring Israel's image in the West isn't a matter of spin or PR or `re-branding;' it's a matter of abandoning the policies that have cost it the sympathy it once enjoyed. It's really just about that simple."

The archaeological component of the propaganda campaign, however, uses subliminal suggestion to bypass such political arguments. A top Israeli re-branding advocate argues, "[Let's] get to that first stage when people associate Israel with science and music and archaeology...Then we'll take it from there."

In Facts on the Ground Columbia Professor Nadia Abu Al Haj writes, "In the context of Israel and Palestine, archaeology emerged as a central scientific discipline because of the manner in which colonial settlement was configured in a language of, and a belief in, Jewish national return." Even though asserting ownership to a country after absence of 2000 years is preposterous, Israel's theft of Palestine from the native population is popularly legitimised through the claim that today's Jews descend from inhabitants of Greco-Roman Judea.

According to New York Times Reporters Ethan Bonner and Isabel Kershner in "Parks Fortify Israel's Claim to Jerusalem," "[There] is a battle for historical legitimacy. As part of the effort, archaeologists are finding indisputable evidence of ancient Jewish life here."

This claim is nonsense.

Intellectuals of Jewish origin in 19th century Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, invented their folk narratives 'retrospectively,' out of a thirst to create a modern Jewish people, argues Tel Aviv University Professor Shlomo Sand, author of How and When the Jewish People Was Invented.

There is no single founder population for modern Jewry any more than there is a single founder population for modern Christians or modern Muslims. Late ancient and early medieval texts describe an ethnically diverse collection of communities associated with proselytizing pre-Rabbinic Judaism.

In English to use the word Jew is anachronistic before the 10th century when medieval Rabbinic Judaism crystallised thanks to the efforts of Saadyah Gaon (Sa`îd bin Yûsuf al-Fayyûmi) and his colleagues.

With the revolutionary codification of Rabbinic law these communities became part of a vast trade network that spanned the Christian and Muslim world and that extended into China and began to exchange members on a large scale. The main population-exporting region seems to have been located in territories near the Black Sea.

Current genetic anthropological findings based on DNA analysis indicate that the male ancestors of Yiddish Jewry were of Eastern European and non-Levantine Southwest Asian origin while the female ancestors were Eastern Europeans.

Sand admits, "[The] chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I [meaning Israeli Jews] are its descendents."

The Palestinians' ancestors created the Hasmonean Kingdom, composed the Hebrew Bible, followed Jesus, wrote the New Testament, compiled the Mishnah, and redacted the Jerusalem Talmud. The Palestinian people constitute the living link to the earliest beginnings of the heritage from the Torah and Gospel.

Zionists are almost pitiable, for they are so ashamed of their own history that they have usurped one belonging to another people. When the Israeli government sends the Dead Sea Scrolls to Canada, by its own law Canada must turn them over to their rightful owners — the Palestinian people.


Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on Middle East affairs and US politics. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women. Joachim Martillo contributed to this article

SPLC vs. Karin Friedemann

My response follows. -Karin
Demand for immediate retraction and publication of correction
Saturday, May 16, 2009 1:13 PM
From: "Mark Potok" mark.potok@splcenter.org


This is for Karen Friedemann and regards your May 16 "Letter From America"article in the Khaleej Times Online entitled "Americans Divided by HateCrimes Bill." http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/opinion/2009/May/opinion_May80.xml&section=opinion&col=


You make the following claim in your article:

"The ADL, along with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), is alreadyheavily involved in Homeland Security's locally based 'fusion centres,'which collect personal data for intelligence databases that synchronise national intelligence collection with local police. ADL and SPLC have arecord of illegally spying on American citizens and providing falseinformation to law enforcement officials."

The statements about the SPLC -- that we have a record of "illegally spying"on Americans and "providing false information" to authorities -- are both materially false and also libelous and defamatory. Both statements containno shred of truth -- apparently, you've attributed the ADL's problems in the Roy Bullock case to the SPLC. We have never been charged or convicted oreven accused of these things.

As I noted above, these statements arelibelous and false. As a result, I write to demand that you immediatelywithdraw these statements from wherever they have been published, including the Khaleej Times, and publish a correction making clear that SPLC has not done the things you falsely accuse us of. I have written a similar note to the editor of the Khaleej Times and expect action to be taken by this Monday afternoon at the latest.

Mark Potok
Director, Intelligence Project
Editor, Intelligence Report/Hatewatch
Southern Poverty Law Center
400 Washington Ave.
Montgomery, AL 36104

===

Response to Mark Potok
Karin Friedemann


The US Department of Justice released FBI documents indicating that the Southern Poverty Law Center engaged in undercover surveillance of Oklahoma militia groups in 1995 before and after the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The local FBI team, which should have obtained a warrant to dispatch real FBI agents, criminally conspired with SPLC agents to get around Attorney General Janet Reno’s legal limitations on domestic spying. Because the conspiracy was criminal, the espionage was illegal.

In “The Watchdogs: A close look at Anti-Racist ‘Watchdog’ Groups,” Laird Wilcox documents the SPLC’s extensive intelligence networks monitoring editorials, observing meetings, and compiling files on people they consider offensive. Wilcox told WorldNetDaily: “By alleging ‘dangerousness’ on the basis of mere assumed values, opinions and beliefs, they put entirely innocent citizens at risk from law enforcement error and misconduct.”

Mark Potok himself admits the SPLC criminally spied on the Animal Rights 2001 Conference by secretly recording attendees. “We were at that conference, we collected the quote ourselves, in person and on a videotape to boot,” he wrote in response to complaints from Friends of Animals President Priscilla Feral about misleading SPLC characterizations of her organization.

In an article libeling Muslim clerics, the online SPLC Intelligence Report links videos apparently made in violation of federal wiretapping and eavesdropping statutes.

Many organizations and individuals accuse SPLC of publishing false and misleading information and manipulating crime data and terminology. Federal law enforcement agencies and Homeland Security Fusion Centers were issued a warning against relying upon faulty and politicized SPLC research reports.

The Turkish American Legal Defense Fund is currently suing the SPLC for defaming an 85-year-old emeritus professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts.

Harper's Magazine accused the SPLC of scare mongering to fund relatively lavish lifestyles for the organization's directors.

Americans Divided by Hate Crimes Bill

Khaleej Times


Despite lingering concerns about threats to Constitutional protections such as freedom of religion and freedom of speech, the Federal Hate Crimes bill, HR 1913, passed recently in the House of Representatives.

If passed by the Senate, the legislation will expand the federal definition of such crimes to include those motivated by gender identity and permit increased federal power to investigate and prosecute crimes as “hate crimes.” The meat of the hate crimes bill is a $10 million grant for the establishment of a federally funded surveillance centre.

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R, NC) argued HR 1913 would move America “down a slippery slope” to loss of freedom as has happened in Canada and Europe, where imprisonment for “thought crimes” has become a regular occurrence.

Susan Fani of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights warns: “The problem in general with hate crimes legislation is that it invites the government to probe way beyond motive. And in instances like this, it trespasses on free speech and religious liberty.”

Although the bill “declares that nothing in this Act shall be construed to prohibit the exercise of Constitutionally-protected free speech,” it sets a dangerous precedent of punishing motivations rather than actions because the actions — stalking, assault, etc. — are already illegal.

Anisa Abd el Fattah, President of National Association of Muslim American Women (NAMAW) points out: “Before our Congress passes such a law there are many questions to be answered, the most important of which is ‘who’ will decide that a given act is a ‘hate 
crime’?” The Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) originally wrote this bill. Arab, Latino and African-American organisations support it because they hope that prosecuting “hate” will decrease racist attacks on their communities. Serious fears exist, however, about the government surveillance centre, given the highly politicised nature of hate crimes labeling.

The ADL, along with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), is already heavily involved in Homeland Security’s locally based “fusion centres,” which collect personal data for intelligence databases that synchronise national intelligence collection with 
local police.

ADL and SPLC have a record of illegally spying on American citizens and providing false information to law enforcement officials.

A fusion centre in Missouri recently distributed an “intelligence” document on “hate groups” to local police, which was written by the ADL and the SPLC. It instructed the police to look for Americans who were concerned about unemployment, taxes, illegal immigration, gangs, border security, abortion, high costs of living, gun restrictions, FEMA, the IRS, and the Federal Reserve, as well as supporters of third party presidential candidates! Mainstream Christian organisations that espouse a traditional orthodox view of homosexuality were lumped into a list filled with violent neo-Nazis and skinheads while Roman Catholic institutions were singled out as “encouraging anti-Semitism and ethnic and religious chauvinism.” The report also predictably vilified religiously observant Muslims and anti-war activists.

“There is no level of hate crime that is acceptable—period,” says Dan Stein, President of Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). “However, the SPLC’s calculated abuse of the term ‘hate group’ and manipulation of hate crime data for self-serving political interests is an affront to hate crime victims and those who advocate on their behalf.”

The Christian Anti-Defamation Commission declared, “If we were to apply the same twisted logic of the SPLC to the SPLC, it would have to label itself as a hate group because they are intolerant of conservative Christians.” Similarly, Hussein Ibish, a secular Arab-American lobbyist, could be charged with inciting hate crimes targeting Muslims and political activists, his compilation of anti-Arab hate crimes statistics for the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) aside.

Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) expressed concern about how the fusion system has been “monitoring the legal activities of American Muslims exercising their constitutional privileges” and the “use of McCarthy-era tactics, most notably dissemination of Islamophobic analysis by federally-funded 
‘fusion centres’ to local law enforcement agencies.”

Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC), a citizens group in Missouri, issued a national advisory to all local, state and Federal law enforcement agencies and officers, including all DHS fusion centres, “warning against any reliance upon faulty and politicised research issued by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Anti Defamation League (ADL)” that “cast suspicion on millions of Americans.”

Governor Peter Kinder took the advisory seriously and is now engaging in damage control.
He issued a public apology to Presidential candidates Ron Paul, Bob Barr, and Chuck Baldwin, and placed Missouri Public Safety Director John Britt on administrative leave pending an investigation of the absurd report.

America’s problems with intolerance do not result from the absence of hate crime laws but originate in structural problems associated with bigotries of government officials, and often involve conspiracies against rights.


Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on Middle East affairs and US politics. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women

White, European and Endangered: Is the Caucasian Race Dying?

Khaleej Times


Demographic predictions of increasing de-Europeanisation are becoming realised in playgrounds throughout America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

Some call this creeping multiculturalism “a Genocide against the White race.” While globalist strategy does appear to undermine local social cohesion first by encouraging immigration and then by whipping up anti-immigrant hysteria, such analysis ignores personal choice. White people have not been reproducing at replacement levels.

“Around the time that President Kennedy went to Germany and gave his ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech, Europe represented 12.5 per cent of the world’s population. Today it is 7.2 per cent, and if current trends continue, by 2050 only 5 per cent of the world will be European,” states Russell Shorto in the New York Times.

“We start to wonder about our identity at the moment when we are about to lose it,” notes Tom Sunic in the Occidental Observer, but the Pan-European identity is something quite new in history.

“Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanise us instead of our Anglifying them?” Benjamin Franklin complained in 1751.

“In the early 20th century, federal immigration officials classified the Irish, Italians, and Jews as separate races. Yet today all these groups are viewed collectively, and benignly, as ‘white,’” writes Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe.

Yet White identity has largely been defined collectively as the opposite of benign because it comes with the historical baggage of Southern Slavery, Segregation, Apartheid, and Colonialism. Throughout the Western world and its former colonies legal systems had separate laws for Whites and non-Whites. Even when such discrimination has been eliminated from codes, complaints persist of unfair enforcement and unequal protection alongside continuing structural inequalities.

“Whiteness” has been used as a weapon against non-Whites by the bankers and proprietors of capital to prevent working class solidarity, while simultaneously White Christian middle and upper classes have been subjected to decades of what Prof. Kevin MacDonald calls the “culture of critique emanating from the most prestigious academic and media institutions.”

Blogger Christian Lander summarises: “As a straight white male, I’m the worst thing on earth.”

In college I actually told my American history professor, “I wish I could rip my skin off.”

Jews are always exempt from collective White Guilt as their involvement in Bolshevik massacres, the American slave trade, and the conquest of Palestine is never mentioned at any level of the US public educational system while the Holocaust is taught starting in Kindergarten.

Although White Christians have been demonised as the Oppressor class, poverty is not specific to race in the United States. Representative Cynthia McKinney in a Congressional report concerning Hurricane Katrina points out: “In the greater New Orleans area, 65,000 minority residents lived in poverty before Katrina, compared with 
85,000 whites.”

Sinister plots to reduce non-white populations and sometimes white Muslim populations through promotion of birth control, instigating warfare, starvation and disease have however constituted a recurring feature of international politics.

In 1974, the US National Security Council under Henry Kissinger released a memorandum on the “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth” claiming that population growth in Lesser Developed Countries was a dangerous threat to US national security.

It has even become popular to view mass death as something positive. Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh, leader of the World Wildlife Fund said, “If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels,” according to a 1995 American Policy Center report.

Neoconservative commentator Mark Steyn writes in America Alone, “If you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ‘em.”

Likewise, abortion has been promoted as a way of reducing the population of the poor. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and member of the Eugenics Society wrote in 1922: “Those least fit to carry on the race are increasing most rapidly… Funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilisation are diverted to maintenance of those who should never have been born.”

Despite disproportionate use by African Americans of abortion services, their birth rate remains higher than replacement level while European Americans' population continues to decline.

Similar disparities exist in Europe. In 2005, 64,000 children were born in Norway of two foreign-born parents in comparison with only 13,800 children born to native Norwegian parents. Immigration in combination with higher non-European birth rates has resulted in projected transformation of majorities into minorities.

Journalist Eric Walberg blames the downfall of Europe on neoliberalism while author Michael Hoffman blames moral degeneracy. “The non-reproducing (i.e. self-exterminating) Whites of Europe and America live for luxury.”

Yet, Europeans have always been a global minority. Even pre-Christian Romans often recommended later marriage as a display of patience and chastity while in other cultures women typically produced their first baby at 14 or 15. In the 17th century, advances in medicine and hygiene resulted in increasing European populations. Other nations are now catching up.

Those who are panicked about disappearing European Christian culture should strive to address the socio-economic and emotional factors that discourage those of European ancestry from 
having children.


Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based political analyst. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women