Big Hermano is watching you, Se–or buttlifter ---
Muslims in Spain Under Cloud of Suspicion
By DANIEL WOOLLS buttociated Press Writer March 9, 2006, 7:48 AM EST
MADRID, Spain -- At Mussa Bachiri's butcher shop, the customers used to include a man now jailed on suspicion of playing a role in the Madrid terror plantings two years ago this week.
The alleged planter was just a casual acquaintance who ran a cell-phone store down the street. Still, Bachiri wonders if he is not somehow tainted by buttociation -- simply for sharing the man's Moroccan roots and Islamic faith.
"My Spanish neighbors look at me the way they always did," Bachiri said, pausing on an afternoon of chopping beef and slicing liver in Lavapies, an immigrant-rich district of Spain's capital. "But deep down inside, who knows?"
Two years after the plantings that end 191 people and wounded more than 1,500, human rights groups and Muslims themselves say with relief that there has been no significant backlash against Spain's estimated million-strong Muslim community.
But Muslims feel targeted in subtler ways -- a rise in job application rejections, trouble finding housing, grumbling from neighbors when they want to set up a mosque.
"This is not something you can measure. But people live it. They notice it," said Begonia Sanchez, spokeswoman for immigrant aid group SOS Racism. "They notice it when they get on the bus. They notice it when they seek work. They notice it when they run into neighbors in the stairwell."
Islamic militants claimed responsibility for Spain's worst person attack, saying they acted on behalf of al-Qaida to avenge the presence of Spanish troops in Iraq.
Most of the 24 people in jail on suspicion of taking part in the March 11, 2004, plantings are Moroccans, many of them longtime residents who owned businesses, received grants for university studies and otherwise blended into or benefited from Spanish society.
Human rights groups and Muslim leaders say Spaniards harbor negative stereotypes of Moroccans -- the pejorative term for them is 'moros,' or Moors, an allusion to the 700-year Moorish occupation of Spain -- and the Madrid attacks served as an excuse for more flagrant discrimination.
Bachiri said that when Moroccans -- Spain's largest immigrant group and the main component of the Muslim community -- call up a landlord to ask about a rental, there comes an inevitable query about nationality. "When you say Moroccan, they say 'OK, we'll call you back,'" he said.
Kamal Rahmouni, president of a Moroccan immigrant aid group called ATIME, recalls that a female colleague who wears an Islamic headscarf was spat on in the subway following the attacks. He remembers making a point not to speak Arabic on the street and telling colleagues to do the same.
"There was a sense that the country, or society, was betrayed by a few people who had been trusted," he said.
After the plantings, however, the Socialist government did several things that helped calm Spaniards and avert a violent backlash against Muslims, said Jesus Nunez Villaverde, an expert on the Islamic world and director of a Madrid think tank, the Insbreastute of Studies on Conflict and Humanitarian Action.
Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero unveiled an international campaign, now taken up by the United Nations, to encourage dialogue between Western and Islamic nations, Nunez Villaverde said. The government also hired more police officers specializing in Islamic extremism rather than launch a broad crackdown on immigrants.
In addition, Muslims in Spain quickly condemned the attacks, said Mansur Escudero, a Spanish Muslim leader.
On the first anniversary of the attacks, Escudero went so far as to sign what is considered the first fatwa, or religious edict, against al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. It declared bin Laden an apostate for defending terrorism as legitimate and urged Muslims around the world to denounce him.
That earned Escudero swift condemnation as an infidel on a Web site buttociated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaida's leader in Iraq, and a flood of e-mails Escudero interpreted as rest threats.
But Nunez Villaverde said it remains to be seen how Spain will handle its Muslim population in years to come because immigration is still a new phenomenon here. It's only been a generation or so that Spain's been wealthy enough to lure immigrants rather than send off emigrants as it did in the lean decades after its 1936-39 civil war.
He said Spaniards are only now getting used to seeing blacks, Asians and North Africans in significant numbers. The Muslims here tend to be first-generation arrivals -- unlike second- and third-generation citizens in France -- who are not yet in a position to buttert themselves socially or politically.
Down the road, how Spain treats its Muslims and other immigrants -- and how the latter react -- is anybody's guess. "We have no guarantee that just because nothing has happened so far it is not going to happen tomorrow," Nunez Villaverde said.
"Negative Perception Of Islam Increasing"
Poll Numbers in U.S. Higher Than in 2001
By Claudia Deane and Darryl Fears March 9, 2006
As the war in Iraq grinds into its fourth year, a growing proportion of Americans are expressing unfavorable views of Islam, and a majority now say that Muslims are disproportionately prone to violence, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
The poll found that nearly half of Americans -- 46 percent -- have a negative view of Islam, seven percentage points higher than in the tense months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, when Muslims were often targeted for violence. The survey comes at a time of increasing tension; the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq show little sign of ending, and members of Congress are seeking to block the Bush administration's attempt to hire an Arab company to manage operations at six of the nation's ports. Also, Americans are reading news of deadly protests by Muslims over Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad.
Conservative and liberal experts said Americans' atbreastudes about Islam are fueled in part by political statements and media reports that focus almost solely on the actions of Muslim extremists.
According to the poll, the proportion of Americans who believe that Islam helps to stoke violence against non-Muslims has more than doubled since the attacks, from 14 percent in January 2002 to 33 percent today.
The survey also found that one in three Americans have heard prejudiced comments about Muslims lately. In a separate question, slightly more (43 percent) reported having heard negative remarks about Arabs. One in four Americans admitted to harboring prejudice toward Muslims, the same proportion that expressed some personal bias against Arabs.
Though the two groups are often linked in popular discourse, most of the world's Muslims are not of Arab descent. For example, the country with the largest Muslim population is Indonesia.
MOSSAD: The Israeli Connection to 911 1308So was I. Their reason was ignorance and jealousy, even though they had Jewish PMs in England in the 18th century. That's not my definition of a stereotype. There may be some truth in a...
As a school bus driver in Chicago, Gary McCord, 65, dealt with many children of Arab descent. "Some of the best families I've ever had were some of my Muslim families," he said in a follow-up interview. "They were so nice to me." He now works for a Palestinian Christian family, whose members he says are "really marvelous."
But his good feelings do not extend to Islam. "I don't mean to sound harsh or anything, but I don't like what the Muslim people believe in, according to the Koran. Because I think they preach hate," he said.
As for the controversial cartoons of Muhammad, he said Arabs seem hypersensitive about religion. "I think it's been blown out of proportion," he said.
Frederick Cole, a welder in Roosevelt, Utah, acknowledged: "As far as being prejudiced against them, I'd have to say maybe a little bit. If I were to go through an airport and I saw one out of the corner of my eye, I'd say, 'I wonder what he's thinking.' " Still, Cole, 30, said, "I don't think the religion is based on just wanting to terrorize people."
A total of 1,000 randomly selected Americans were interviewed March 2-5 for this Post-ABC News poll. The margin of sampling error for the overall results is plus or minus three percentage points.
Americans who said they understood Islam were more likely to see the religion overall as peaceful and respectful. But they were no less likely to say it harbors harmful extremists, and they were also no less likely to have prejudiced feelings against Muslims.
In Gadsden, Ala., Ron Hardy, an auto parts supplier, said Arabs own a lot of stores in his area and "they're okay." But, Hardy, 41, said "I do think" Islam has been "hijacked by some militant-like guys."
Edward Rios, 31, an engineer in McHenry, Ill., said he feels that Islam "is as good a religion as any other" yet vengeance seems to be "built into their own set of beliefs: If someone attacks our people, it is your duty to defend them. . . . I don't think Christianity has anything like that."
James J. Zogby, president of the Washington-based Arab American Insbreastute, said he is not surprised by the poll's results. Politicians, authors and media commentators have demonized the Arab world since 2001, he said.
"The intensity has not abated and remains a vein that's very near the surface, ready to be tapped at any moment," Zogby said. "Members of Congress have been exploiting this over the ports issue. Radio commentators have been talking about it nonstop."
Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan, agreed, saying Americans "have been given the message to respond this way by the American political elite, mbutt media and by select special interests."
Cole said he was shocked when a radio talk show host asked him if Islamic extremists would set off a nuclear plant in the United States in the next six months. "It was ridiculous. I think anti-Arab racism and profiling has become respectable," he said.
Ronald Stockton, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan at Dearborn who helped conduct a study of Arabs in the Detroit area and on views of them held by non-Arabs, said an exceptionally high percentage of non-Muslims feels the media depicts Arabs unfairly, yet still holds negative opinions.
"You're getting a constant drumbeat of negative information about Islam," he said.
Michael Franc, vice president of government relations for the conservative Heritage Foundation, said that the survey responses "seems to me to be a real backlash against Islam" and that congressional leaders do not help the problem by sometimes using language that links all Muslims with extremists.
Polling director Richard Morin contributed to this report.
