Islamic Thinkers Society hit the big times

Islam: As they are profiled in the NYTimes and the NYObserver where the story angle is they are growing menace to the gay community in New York. Both stories have people defending and in some cases making excuses for their actions.

"In the annals of New York City's political outspokenness and fringe-group culture, the Islamic Thinkers Society may seem unremarkable at first glance. But after 9/11, in the city most damaged and unsettled by the terrorist attacks, the emergence of this young, however limited, Muslim-American voice is strikingly bold. In its fliers and on its Web site, the group describes itself as an "intellectual and political nonviolent organization," but it bears a strong resemblance to Islamist movements in England that try to unite Muslims by inciting anger. "Wake up and realize that the line has been drawn between the camp of Emaan and the camp of Kufr and there is no middle ground as of right now," reads a glossy publication by the group that is titled "Islamic Revival." In Arabic, Emaan can be translated to mean "faith" and Kufr, "disbelief." "We are not afraid to speak against the unjust rulers of Muslim world and replace them," the statement reads. "To the Muslim scholars for dollar$: Speak good or remain silent!" The group's spokesman, Ariful Islam, said he was a 21-year-old student at La Guardia Community College who came to Queens from Bangladesh when he was 8. He said the group's purpose was promoting unity among Muslims and that the F.B.I. had been monitoring it for two years. The F.B.I. would not comment. "What they're worried about is, are we recruiting for jihad," Mr. Islam said. "Through our past couple of years we have never recruited anyone to go to a foreign land. We have always made that clear through our activities. We have always stressed nonviolent means. However, that does not mean that we don't address American foreign policy, and we strongly disagree with their policies." After years of quietly ignoring the group, the city's Muslim leaders began to speak out against it this week after reports of the flag desecration. Imams, activists and other leaders worry that the group is misrepresenting Islam, sending a negative message to Muslim youths and damaging a hard-earned, fragile trust between the Muslim community and those in law enforcement. "They do not sound like thinkers," said Mohammad Tariq Sherwani, the imam of the Muslim Center of New York, who said the group has frequented his Flushing mosque, brandishing fliers with bloody photographs from Iraq and Palestine. "We, as leaders, have to help them think. Islam does not believe in any extremism. Islam is not fanaticism. Islam believes in balance." "These are bad times for Muslims, he added. "We don't want to increase the problem."

From the NYObserver who sees similarities between this group and what is happening in Europe in cities like Amsterdam where liberals are questioning how they should deal with this conflict.

"....The dispute between an irascible lesbian conservative from Queens and a militant new group well on the fringes of the city’s Muslim community might appear to be a marginal conflict. But to New York’s gays and to some of its Muslim leaders, the scene in Jackson Heights bears a worrying similarity to communal conflicts that are challenging the idea of tolerance across Europe, with particular flashpoints in Holland and Scandinavia. There, young immigrants and the children of immigrants have been drawn to a more radical Islamic ideology than that of their parents. On the extreme fringes, these young men have committed acts of violence against Jews and gays, and in a case that shocked Europe, one young Dutchman of Moroccan origin murdered the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in an Amsterdam street. "It’s almost a cliché to define it like this, but in the end it’s a question of whether you can tolerate intolerance," said Leon de Winter, a Dutch novelist who has written on the Van Gogh murder. "We are defending the openness, the diversity of this society against tendencies from other cultures, in which this kind of openness which we celebrate is being regarded as a threat." In this conflict, gays have become canaries in the ideological coal mine. Western liberals have tended to cut Muslim groups slack on their ideological pronouncements, in part out of sympathy with some of their causes—the insurgencies in Chechnya and the Middle East, for example—and in part out of a sense that anti-Muslim sentiment in the West is a more pressing problem than anything Muslims themselves might do. But the rise of gay bashing on European streets has pushed the question of tolerance a step further and led some to question their reflexive defense of a put-upon minority. It has also opened up a heated debate within the gay community, and among liberals in general, over whether the proliferation of intolerant strains of Islam requires liberals in the West to take a harder line on issues like immigration and assimilation. For some conservative intellectuals, rising anti-gay violence on the streets of Amsterdam, for example, comes as a kind of vindication. "For liberals, the violent anti-gay hostility of their fundamentalist Muslim allies may be the first thing that really makes them realize they’re not on the same page," said the conservative gay writer Bruce Bawer, who lives in Oslo, and who is writing a book entitled While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within."