African Americans, Jews, and Islamophobia

Islamophophia, Intra-African-American Religious Tensions, and the Stealth Israel Lobby

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

The Nov. 28, 2007 Brown Daily Herald describes a medical school interview in which Albert Einstein College of Medicine interviewer Milton Gumbs, who is African American, asked Brown University applicant Qadira Abdul-Ali, who is also African American, inappropriate and Islamophobic questions (see below). Practically all Muslim Americans have begun to have such experiences since the Israel Lobby went into overdrive to incite Islamophobia in order to disenfranchise Muslim Americans (Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel: Updating "The AJC attacks").

Abdul-Ali's experience relates to some unique aspects of African American culture and of professions in which Jews play a demographically disproportionate role.

Religious Christian African Americans often have anxieties about Muslim African Americans even though the values and social attitudes of both groups are often extremely similar. Some reasons for concern may lie in competition for adherents, a (mostly false) belief that African American Muslims benefit in some way unfairly from connections to foreign Muslims, and fears of negative consequences of being associated with African American Muslims, who are often demonized along with other Muslims by the Israel Lobby and the organized Jewish community.

Gumbs also works in a profession, which is demographically disproportionately Jewish, and at a very Jewish medical school of Yeshiva University, which is the flagship self-identifying Jewish university in the USA. Sharing prejudices and bigotries with Jewish colleagues about Islam and probably about the State of Israel would make it a lot easier to function in such a Jewish environment. The finance industry exhibits a similar phenomenon where unofficial networks of Jewish professionals protect one another and share information. Very few non-Jews ever take part in such clandestine Jewish networking, and membership generally requires Zionistically-correct beliefs even from Jews.

Gumbs's bigotry is probably for the most part an incidental creation of Jewish social networks and of the ongoing pervasive efforts of the organized Jewish community and the Israel Lobby to normalize Islamophobia. The Israel Lobby has crafted a far more extreme counterpart to Gumbs in the Boston area. She is Reverend Dr. Gloria White-Hammond, who is a co-founder of the Beth African Methodist Episcopal Church. She has been involved with Charles Jacobs and the most racist anti-Arab anti-Muslim segment of the organized Jewish community since the early days of the American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG), whose president and founder Charles Jacobs has long made an effort to poison human rights, anti-genocide and anti-racism discourse in order to thwart criticism of the State of Israel.

Several newspapers have published accusations that the AASG along with Christian Solidarity International engaged in fraudulent slave redemptions to raise money that never actually went to aid people in the Sudan. Money raised in this ways may have provided seed capital for the David Project (DP), which is an extremist Israel advocacy organization that has a history of "conspiracy against rights" in its ongoing efforts both to disenfranchise the Arab and Muslim American communities and also to prevent Arab and Muslim Americans from exercising their fundamental rights as American citizens.

Extremist anti-Arab anti-Muslim racists associated with the DP currently fund Gloria White-Hammond's "human rights" organization My Sister's Keeper, which runs several aid projects in the Sudan but does nothing for the African American community except for marketing White-Hammond as heroic (apparently because she corresponds to the Israel Lobby's model of a proper African American leader and activist).

Coupling Zionist propaganda with tainted support for human rights is nothing new for the most racist and genocidal Zionist factions. In Militant Zionism in American, The Rise and Impact of the Jabotinsky Movement in the United States, 1926 -- 1946, Rafael Medoff describes on p. 159 how the American League for a Free Palestine (i.e., free of the British so that European Zionists could genocide the native Palestinian population) desegregated the Baltimore Maryland Theater for the 1946 showing the Zionist propaganda film A Flag is Born, which starred Marlon Brando.

While some Zionists may have genuinely supported the concept of equal civil rights for African Americans, in retrospect, Jewish civil rights advocacy within the American Jewish community appears to have been in many cases completely opportunistic except for those American Jewish groups and individuals with a background in the European Jewish Marxist tradition. The Marxist origins of the American Jewish tradition of social justice advocacy is currently undergoing a process of expungement from the standard histories of the American Jewish community.

In any case, the benefits to American Jews of equal civil rights for African Americans are fairly obvious. Once social and political exclusion of African Americans was delegitimized, similar treatment of American Jews became untenable. Once American Jews were fully integrated into the American white elite, American Jews associated with the organized Jewish community for the most part left the struggle against the structural disadvantages that African Americans experience because too many African American leaders except for the special pets of the Israel Lobby have shown growing tendencies to express sympathy for Palestinians suffering as a result of Zionist dispossession, aggression and ethnic cleansing.

As part of their ongoing projects to poison human rights discourse, the organized Jewish community and the Israel Lobby have recently put a lot of money into creating a star system for Muslim "human rights" advocates in order to create Western Muslim counterparts of White-Hammond. Irshad Manji is an example of a Muslim human rights activist that has been blessed by the organized Jewish community and the Israel Lobby. Manji is for the most part a creation of the Zionist Canwest Global Communications Corporation and the Jewish Asper family that controls it.

So far such Muslim rights advocates have been mostly focused on criticizing Islamic religious law as it applies to women to create an image of Islam as a barbaric religion that abuses and exploits women. At this point none of the Israel Lobby's pet Muslim activists have explained how voluntary Muslim observance of Sharia is more harmful than voluntary Jewish observance of Halakhah, which is the Jewish equivalent of Sharia and which hardly differs from Sharia in any major way, but the actions and successes of people like Gumbs, White-Hammond, and Manji show evidence of the effectiveness of the efforts of unofficial Jewish social networks, the organized Jewish community, and the Israel Lobby in normalizing Islamophobia and in distracting the American public both from Jewish racism and also from Zionist genocidalism.

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From Nov. 28, 2007 Brown Daily Herald (Religious insensitivity greets alum in med school interview - Campus News).

Religious insensitivity greets alum in med school interview

By: Michael Bechek

Posted: 11/28/07

Echoing allegations she made in a letter that has circulated via e-mail around campus in recent weeks, Qadira Abdul-Ali '06 told The Herald Monday that she was asked inappropriate questions about her Muslim faith when interviewing for admission at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, including whether she had been "radicalized."

Qadira Abdul-Ali '06.

A letter of complaint Abdul-Ali sent by e-mail earlier this month to Allen Spiegel, the top dean at Einstein, a Bronx, N.Y., medical school associated with Yeshiva University, was sent to the Brown Muslim Students' Association e-mail list.

According to Abdul-Ali, her interviewer, Milton Gumbs, a dean at Einstein, interspersed questions and comments about her Muslim faith throughout the interview that revealed "insensitivity and overt ignorance." In the letter she wrote to Spiegel, she said she had been subjected to "more than thirty-minutes of offensive and biting commentary on Islam."

"This is the last thing you expect to come up against," Abdul-Ali said Monday.

The first such comment from Gumbs, Abdul-Ali said, came after a discussion of her time abroad in Cairo, when the interviewer asked her if she had "become radicalized" as a result of the experience.

"I was like, 'Excuse me?' " Abdul-Ali told The Herald.

Feeling that she should maintain her composure, she said, she was prepared to overlook the comment. "I was going to give him the benefit of the doubt," she said.

But that was not the last of the off-color commentary, Abdul-Ali said, and Gumbs "began throwing out a number of other inapt comments."

In her letter, Abdul-Ali describes other statements made by Gumbs during the interview.

Of Ramadan, the monthlong holiday during which observant Muslims fast during the day, Abdul-Ali wrote that Gumbs said, "You Muslims are a bunch of hypocrites," because those observing the fast customarily break their fast at sundown and eat a light meal before sunrise.

According to Abdul-Ali's letter, Gumbs added, "That's easy. I do that sometimes myself. I drink coffee in the morning and nothing else until three or four in the afternoon."

Abdul-Ali also wrote that Gumbs repeatedly asked, "What do you do wrong?" with the intent, she claimed, of finding "discrediting or disparaging" information about her religious practices.

Additionally, Abdul-Ali wrote, when she discussed her brothers with Gumbs, he asked whether the brothers were practicing Muslims or "regular guys."

In an e-mailed statement, Noreen Kerrigan, assistant dean for admissions at Einstein, wrote that the school was "sorry and surprised" to receive Abdul-Ali's letter complaining about the interview and that the school had invited Abdul-Ali to return for a second interview at her convenience if she desired.

Kerrigan added that Gumbs was "saddened" by Abdul-Ali's reaction and that he had "only the highest respect for her personal history and beliefs." An e-mail sent to Gumbs Sunday was not returned.

Abdul-Ali, despite the disrespect she felt during the interview, said she maintained her composure throughout the interview. She hid her feelings so well that, in an e-mail sent to her in reply to her complaint, Kerrigan wrote that Abdul-Ali had been pleasant after the interview and that nothing had appeared to be wrong.

"He had interspersed the comments," Abdul-Ali said of Gumbs, explaining that the random and intermittent nature of Gumbs' commentary did not lead her to lash out in anger, "so it wasn't just a constant flow of rants and rage."

Abdul-Ali, who is black, said she had been additionally outraged at her treatment from Gumbs because he serves as the associate dean for the Office of Diversity Enhancement at Einstein, a position he has held, according to Kerrigan, since 1989.

"The irony would not have been lost on even the most obtuse," Abdul-Ali wrote in her letter to Spiegel.

Kerrigan wrote in her e-mail that Gumbs, who is also black, and the medical director of one of Einstein's affiliated hospitals, was "a deeply committed and strong advocate for increasing the numbers of minorities in the health professions."

Milton Gumbs is on the right.

Indeed, according to Abdul-Ali, she was told that she and other students of color present would interview with Gumbs because he valued being able to interview students of color himself.

Abdul-Ali, who has been living in Washington, D.C., and working as a research assistant in an asthma clinic, said she already has at least one acceptance in hand from the other schools she is applying to. Her plan, she said, is not to make noise about her experience beyond what she has already done.

"I'm just going to let it go," she said. "I'm at the beginning of my career. I'm sure this is a fight I'm going to be fighting the rest of my life, being a person of color, being a woman, being a Muslim."

"I don't want to make a bigger deal out of this than it needs to be at this point," she added, saying that it would be a bad strategy to make a name for herself in the medical community based on this experience and thus gain a reputation as a troublemaker.

"I know how medicine works," she said.

Her plan, she said, is to put her interview with Gumbs behind her and simply work hard so that she can one day have the power to change what is wrong with the medical community.

"I'm 23 years old - I know I'm not going to change the mind of this man," she said, "no matter how many e-mails and letters of complaint I write."

"At the end of the day, you do have to choose your battles," she added.

Noor Najeeb '09, a member of the Muslim Students' Association, said Abdul-Ali's story has been a topic of discussion since she forwarded Abdul-Ali's letter to the BMSA listserv after reading it in a Facebook note Abdul-Ali posted.

"There has been talk, among Muslims and non-Muslims," she said.

"At the same time," she added, "no one's really sure what to do about it. At the very least we can sympathize with her."

Abdul-Ali said a personal reply from Gumbs was promised to her in an e-mail she received from Kerrigan and that though she has not received one yet, she was going to allow "a little more time."

In the meantime, she said, she is focused on her future in medicine. "It's going to be a reality, it's just a matter of where," she said.

As for Einstein, Abdul-Ali said, "No medical school in the world is worth putting yourself through that type of treatment."

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© Copyright 2007 Brown Daily Herald

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