Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project

ISLAMOPHOBIA RESEARCH & DOCUMENTATION PROJECT (IRDP)

The Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project (IRDP) focuses on a systematic and empirical approach to the study of Islamophobia and its impact on the American Muslim community. Today, Muslims in the U.S., parts of Europe, and around the world have been transformed into a demonized and feared global "other," subjected to legal, social, and political discrimination. Even at the highest levels of political discourse, the 2008 U.S. Presidential elections, Islamophobia took center stage as a sizeable number of Americans expressed fear that Barack Obama, the first African American president, is somehow a closet Muslim. Newspaper articles, tv shows, books, popular movies, political debates, and cultural conflicts over immigration and security produce ample evidence of the stigmatization of Islam within dominant culture.

The challenge for understanding the current cultural and political period centers on providing a more workable and encompassing definition for the Islamophobia phenomenon, a theoretical framework to anchor present and future research, and a centralized mechanism to document and analyze diverse data sets from around the U.S. and in comparison with other areas around the world.


PROJECT GOALS

The Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project has the following goals:

1. Support graduate and undergraduate research and documentation focused on issues of Islamophobia through mentorship and intellectual exchange
2. Establish an advisory group of a diverse community of faculty working on issues related to Islamophobia
3. Provide seed funding for specific research projects on Islamophobia
4. Publish an annual report documenting the status of Islamophobia within the United States
5. Publish a bi-annual peer reviewed academic periodical focusing on emerging research on Islamophobia
6. Host an annual conference to discuss and analyze research outcomes

The research agenda is centered on Muslims in the Diaspora and the intersection between two categories of inquiry: 1) race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and religion, and 2) the global "war on terror," its impact on Muslim communities and American culture, and the use of the war to reintroduce long discredited Eurocentric paradigms.

from: http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia

Video: David Horowitz Speaks at UCLA

 

Kitman TV 20 May 2011

Last Wednesday, evening the Freedom Center’s David Horowitz gave a much anticipated and ferociously opposed presentation before a crowd of more than 300 people at Moore Hall at the University of California at Los Angeles
.



The event was hosted by the Bruin Republicans, self-described as "the only officially right-of-center organization on the UCLA campus” – which is a good, albeit disheartening, indicator of the very issue Horowitz has been addressing on hundreds of campuses across this country, and which was the evening’s topic: the fact that our institutions of supposedly higher learning are utterly dominated by intolerant progressive academics who are ill-serving and mentally straight-jacketing their students.

Horowitz’s speech was as blunt as the title of his presentation – "Intellectual Terrorism: The Left’s War on Free Speech.” Pacing back and forth at the front of the hall, he was revved up right out of the gate and became even more impassioned as he went on. He began the wide-ranging, forty-minute speech with a condemnation of academics who indoctrinate rather than teach ("The students who suffer most are those of you who are on the left, because your assumptions are never challenged.”) Among other topics, he went on to decry campus anti-Semitism and to identify Islam as the greatest oppressor of women and gays in the world today. He delivered a myth-busting history of "Palestine” and a concise explanation of his opposition to slavery reparations a hundred years after the fact. And he attacked the Muslim Student Association, ubiquitous on major college campuses, as a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood, a supporter of the terrorist organization Hamas and the sponsor of Israel Apartheid weeks across the country.

 

Posted May 20th, 2011 by pk

 

 

http://europenews.dk/en/node/43461

CAIR: UC Berkeley Conference to Address Islamophobia

Discussion of growing phenomenon to be streamed live online

WASHINGTON, April 20, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- On April 21 and 22, the University of California, Berkeley Center for Race and Gender will host a conference, called "Islamophobia Production and Re-Defining the Global 'Security' Agenda for the 21st Century," to address civil rights issues resulting from the alarming rise in anti-Muslim sentiment in American society.

Scholars, activists and experts, including representatives of the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), will take part in panel discussions on topics such as "Producing Islamophobia and Fomenting Fear," "Islamophobia, Citizenship, Patriotism and the Security State," "Race and Racism in US Elections: Wedge Issue and Who Benefits?" and "Clash of Civilizations Discourses and Muslim Otherness."


Full story:  http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cair-uc-berkeley-conference-to-address-islamophobia-120288059.html