Indigo Jo Blogs

Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective

Call for Muslim internment

by · 27th April, 2005

You never know what a Google news search may bring you up against. I went looking for news reports on the conviction of Ali al-Timimi on charges of encouraging Muslims in the USA to go and join the Taliban, and among the “news” reports is an opinion piece by a guy called Dave Gibson, a former deputy sheriff in Virginia Beach who “currently works for the K-9 New Life Center”.

I’m puzzled as to how this piece found its way onto Google News when that service is meant to be about news. If I want to find opinion pieces on hardline Republican websites and weblogs, I can use Google’s normal websearch facility. Google News is said to be choosy about which partisan false news sites it shows content from - Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs is said to have been miffed (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=15145) because GN briefly included the Nazi “news” site National Vanguard, but twice refused to include LGF, with its heavily anti-Arab bias and a comments section which is a cesspit of bigotry.

Personally, I would rather GN only include news. If they want to include commentary and blogs, why don’t they just set up a Google Commentary section? And it wouldn’t be so bad if the commentary was by people who knew what they are talking about. You can’t say this about Johnson, a web designer in California, or Dave Gibson at the dogs’ home in Virginia Beach.

Dave Gibson’s piece, He Is Merely The One They Caught, alleges that the Timimi case “brings to light once again the concern that there are terrorist cells operating inside America’s growing Muslim population”. Never mind terrorist cells, they “could very well have a terrorist army” over there!

His case is based on accusations presented as facts, among them the old chestnut of the US Muslim community’s “unwillingness to broadly condemn Muslim terrorism”. CAIR have a compilation of condemnations of the 11th September attacks on their site; they also condemned the attack on the school in Beslan last year. This may not be enough for some people, but then, you can’t expect a fresh outpouring of condemnation every time there is a demand for one from somebody who hasn’t bothered to find out whether one has already been issued.

The real absurdities in this article begin in the last three paragraphs, however. Here’s the first of them:

Dearborn, Michigan for instance has the largest Muslim community outside of the Middle-East. 300,000 Muslims call Dearborn and the surrounding area home. Can you imagine the threat that community would pose to this country if only a third of them decided to join the jihad against the U.S.?

Well, it may have escaped this writer’s attention, but there are entire Muslim countries outside the Middle East. The biggest mostly-Muslim country in the world is Indonesia, which is in the far east, just to the north and north-west of Australia. The majority of Muslims in the world are not Arabs. As for Muslim minority populations in mostly non-Muslim cities, the Muslim population of London - 607,153 according to the 2001 census (see Webstar’s data and maps) - easily exceeds Gibson’s estimate of 300,000 in the Dearborn area.

As for “only a third of them” joining his imaginary jihad, that’s laughable. Look at just about any Muslim country, and you’ll find that most people are not involved in any jihad - the various “jihad” groups have always been a small fringe group.

I would combat the problem in two ways: Any Muslim inside this country who is not a citizen, would face immediate deportation to their home country. Also, every Muslim American citizen would be required to take an oath of loyalty to the United States, as well as complete volunteer service outside of their own communities. Anyone who refused the oath or the service requirement would be sent to an interment camp, until the end of the war.

I wonder how he would get this proposition past the Supreme Court, given that it requires Congress to pass a law discriminating on grounds of religion. Perhaps the “non-activist” conservative judges he calls for will find some way of reconciling such a law with the First Amendment - even if the Amendment’s meaning is not extended to bar individual states from establishing religions.

His “solution” is bizarrely contradictory. He plans to summarily deport non-citizen Muslims to their country of origin, where those who so wish can go to wherever the jihad is and join it. Those who are citizens would be required to take a loyalty oath, no doubt similar to the one they said daily at school, with or without sincerity, and then to “complete volunteer service outside of their own communities”, as if no Muslims already do this. (Here, he peddles the stereotype of the Muslim who cares nothing about the welfare of anyone outside his community.)

And if they refuse, he plans to put them in an internment camp, “until the end of the war”. This, of course, means the “War On Terror”, which of course is indeterminate and could go on for decades. This no doubt includes anyone who refuses on the grounds that he does not care to “prove his loyalty” when he has, in fact, done nothing whatsoever to put anyone in doubt as to his loyalty, but rather, somebody he does not know has been accused of saying or doing something which makes the ignorant suspicious.

Frankly, I’m surprised that even this website has such poor editing standards that it allows space to this poorly-argued and, for that matter, poorly-punctuated article with its preposterous proposals. This is nothing but a load of irresponsible, dishonest scaremongering.

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