Showing posts with label Agents. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Agents. Show all posts

Thursday, September 15, 2011

FBI teaching agents that “Mainstream” Muslims are “Violent, Radical”

Spencer Ackerman at Wired.com's Danger Room defense blog has a big story breaking tonight. It's a very upsetting read. If you had any doubt that racism against Muslim-Americans was institutionalized at the highest levels of our government, this should take care of that misunderstanding.

The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that “main stream” [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader”; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a “funding mechanism for combat.”

At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents are shown a chart contending that the more “devout” a Muslim, the more likely he is to be “violent.” Those destructive tendencies cannot be reversed, an FBI instructional presentation adds: “Any war against non-believers is justified” under Muslim law; a “moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.”

These are excerpts from dozens of pages of recent FBI training material on Islam that Danger Room has acquired. In them, the Constitutionally protected religious faith of millions of Americans is portrayed as an indicator of terrorist activity.

“There may not be a ‘radical’ threat as much as it is simply a normal assertion of the orthodox ideology,” one FBI presentation notes. “The strategic themes animating these Islamic values are not fringe; they are main stream.”

The FBI isn’t just treading on thin legal ice by portraying ordinary, observant Americans as terrorists-in-waiting, former counterterrorism agents say. It’s also playing into al-Qaida’s hands.

Read the full story here.


View the original article here


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Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Agents tell YA authors: lose the gay characters and I’ll get you a deal

Rose Fox from Publishers Weekly sez, "Authors Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith wrote a YA novel featuring five POV characters, all of whom are non-white, one of whom is a gay boy with a boyfriend. An agent offered to rep the book if they would turn the gay character straight. They refused, and are asking authors, agents, publishers, and readers to fight against policies and attitudes that maintain the status quo at the expense of minority voices."
An agent from a major agency, one which represents a bestselling YA novel in the same genre as ours, called us.

The agent offered to sign us on the condition that we make the gay character straight, or else remove his viewpoint and all references to his sexual orientation.

Rachel replied, “Making a gay character straight is a line in the sand which I will not cross. That is a moral issue. I work with teenagers, and some of them are gay. They never get to read fantasy novels where people like them are the heroes, and that’s not right.”

Authors Say Agents Try to “Straighten” Gay Characters in YA

Mirror

(Thanks, Rose!)


View the original article here


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