well i'm john berman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture earlier this week we told you about the islamophobia posters and york city subway stations unfortunately that's not just an isolated incident all across america islamophobia is rearing its ugly head from burning down mosques to fire bombing homes but who and what are at

the root of all the anti muslim son in america and what can we do to stop it that and more in tonight's bigger picture discussion islamophobia in america also as the eurozone nations continue to collapse under failed us therapy economic policies republican leaders in washington are saying hey let's try that appeared. why are republicans still stuck on austerity that and more into nights big picture rubble and republicans tried to destroy the obama presidency with fast and furious and they failed so the president obama is reelected how republicans try to sabotage a second term i'll tell you that and i still eat it. today we have a special bigger picture discussion on islamophobia in the united states in two thousand and ten there were one hundred sixty anti muslim hate crimes in america and between twenty one in two thousand and eleven twenty seven two thousand and eleven the rate of growth of anti muslim hate groups tripled and since july

nineteenth of this year the beginning of the muslim holy month of ramadan there have been ten reported anti muslim hate crimes ranging from graffiti on muslim graves to a mosque in joplin missouri being burned to the ground these sobering statistics make one thing very clear islamophobia has unfortunately become an epidemic in the united states from staten island new york to panama city florida to ontario california islamophobia has reared its ugly head but who and what are the roots of islamophobia in our country and what can we do as a nation and as americans to root out the ignorance and intolerance and to embrace muslims as americans and embrace islam as another mainstream religion for a bring in tonight's panel i want to start with the story of a muslim american who is an experienced firsthand the horrifying effects of islamophobia just days after the attacks on nine eleven america was filled with feelings sadness disbelief or but also running deep in the minds of some americans

with hatred hatred for anyone who looked like a muslim in the days following nine eleven muslim americans became targets of intolerance and bigotry and even violence one man who knows all about this is race . a muslim american who was the victim of a hate crime just ten days after nine eleven joining me now to talk more about his harrowing story is race brilliant race welcome to the program welcome thank you very much for having me thank you in fact i should say welcome back tell us your story and what happened to you just days after nine eleven. well i moved from new york city in two thousand and one in the month of may and me and one of my eyes in their firm from my high school we opened a gas station. in dallas and after nine eleven it was september twenty first two thousand and one i was working in that gas station it was friday around twelve thirty pm

a customer walked into the gas station wearing bandanas sunglasses baseball cap and holding a double barrel shotgun so from a previous robbery experience i thought better be on the robbery but once he came inside he was not looking at the cash which offer and he was looking at me and then he asked me what are you from i was very scared and i could feel a cold air flow through my spine that he is not here for the money and i was confused why he was asking me what i was from so i said excuse me and as soon as i spoke i still the sensation of millions of be stinging my face and then i hire an explosion i wasn't sure he shot me i thought i hung up i heard something outside and then i looked at the floor i saw blood was pouring like an open faucet from the right side of my head then i realized he shot me in the face matter of fact he shot me from four to five feet away with

a double barrel shotgun and i feel that i'm dog was dying that the i kept praying to god i was crime and i thought on our best that the end of my life so i thought i have to do something so that he doesn't shoot me again and so i jumped on the floor and i pretend i was dying and after a few seconds the gun middle of this store. and this is mark stroman right. the gunman name is mark stroman yes and. why was executing marc strawman the wrong salute not the right solution the wrong solution. well there's a very good christian after it was shot i went to a lot of disaster in my life a lot of painful situations and in the same time i also went through a healing process where i grew mentally psychologically spiritually and by seeing a lot of hate crimes and killing all over the world based on race religion skin color sexual orientation or mission ality it helped me to realize that hate and

killing is not a solution hate only cause more pain and sufferings the way i was raised by my parents and my son effed talk me that forgiveness is the best policy and islam doesn't allow for hate and killing that is the same message triggered by moses peace be upon him jesus christ be upon him mohammed peace be upon him by all of the messengers of god so that helped me to come to this idea that killing is not a solution here at the same time the effort to save the life of mark stroman was based on the hope that people can or will take a new narrative a narrative of compassion forgiveness and healing in this world and to work for a world without hate violence killing and these terrible ramifications so i thought killing is not a solution here if you kill him if we execute him we will lose simply a human being we're dealing with that would cause which is hate and violence but if

we could keep him alive he might become a changed person he might become a spokesperson and raising awareness of head crimes and that will help our society and who could target of the mark stroman the person who kill innocent people out of his aid and out of his ignorance so it would be very powerful if you could keep him alive and keep him behind bars so that he can talk to people outside and educate them not to follow his pap. raise thanks so much her sharing your story with a side and joining us. while you all can thank you very much now i want to turn things over to the the is. mama phobia in america handle on the panel tonight are corey saylor legislative director of the council on american islamic relations saying the director of law and policy at the american c. coalition and dr michael scheuer professor at georgetown university's center for peace and security studies and a former cia analyst and former guest on my radio show yes summer times over the

years thank you and you've been on the program before if you're new to us thank you for joining us or you have been here that with you ok and thank you very much let's let's first i want to start out with a clip from a major motion picture that glenn beck is making the i think kind of sets the stage for this this is from a movie that he's called the project based on the muslim brotherhood taking over the u.s. . the project is a document that was recovered after nine eleven the project a plan to infiltrate and defeat the west this is happened in history in fact it happened in recent history will judge this form i used a debug mental official is branded a common is by an american journalist. today it has happened again the united states government has been infiltrated as the project is implemented. they use political influence operations they use propaganda he said at one phase we're

supposed to be nice about a second phase we might be different but in the third phase all out war is necessary at the core of the project is civilization jihad. so. this this rhetoric first of all corey thoughts on the reality of this i mean is this is just a fantasy or is there something nasty going it's an unfortunate rebirth of a movement that's old to the united states if you went back a few years it was the catholics that were conducting operations to take over the united states before that japanese americans mormons have been accused of it it just happens to be that we're the hated minority of the day and therefore now the allegations are going to fall to us but the reality in all these cases in the past just like it is today is an absolutely false allegation. michael scheuer you've been involved in confronting there were muslims who attacked the united states do

you see any reality in this i mean is this or is this. what's your sense of what's called the one thing you can't explain away are the documents the muslim brotherhood is indeed like the saudi government. and offensive in imperialist system it does indeed see the muslim world eventually becoming or the entire world eventually becoming muslim i'm not sure violently or through conversion so does the pope well yes i mean for the record while sure i'm a roman catholic and we were discriminated in this country for ever that said that the main engine of islamophobia are the two political parties and the the israeli pro israeli community in the united states you know in this for political gain i mean you know trying to scare the american people you know we're at war with an increasing segment of the muslim world because of our policies and we consistently are told by president obama by just in the last two weeks president

bush senator mccain hillary clinton that it has nothing to do with our. foreign policy it has everything to do with muslims hate freedom. they hate liberty which is nonsense but that breeds fear in the american people. what what it how has this i mean the sikh community is not a muslim community how has this impacted the sikh community well there's no question that in the post nine eleven environment six have been targeted for hate crimes and other forms of discrimination because. the prevailing stereotype is that if somebody works a turban they're associated with al qaeda or other forms of extremism but i agree with corey this is islamophobia anti muslim bigotry is the latest manifestation of a problem that's been with us for centuries which is fear of the other xenophobia six have been in this country for more than a century and as early as nine hundred seven were targeted for violence and other

forms of discrimination because of who they work are there and look if any of you want to take a shot at this sir or maybe this is just the over the top. i live in germany for a year back in the eighty's i read the rise and fall of the third reich by sure with great fascination and i actually knew people who had been hitler's army and. the early the early thirty's that anti-semitism was going on there i'm i think i'm hearing echoes in some of this islamophobia anybody want to corey thoughts on well i think there's a lot of such as to what a bridge too far you know the attempts to smear minorities and inspire fear in the greater public of a minority is nothing new it wasn't the nazis that only did it it's all throughout history so the time it was kind of tactics are well known the current manifestation though is really looking to take advantage of the attacks that followed from nine

eleven you know horrific awful terrorist attacks and find a enemy to replace the soviet union and in this case it is muslims and what they do is they cherry. the worst images they can find and attempt to portray those as the overall most community but when you look at the statistics the reality is here in the united states in particular the community is very well off is very well integrated and is frequently involved in helping to catch people who are in the let's get to more of that in just a moment more of tonight's bigger picture discussion of islamophobia in america after the break. wealthy british style it's time to rise.

market why not. come to. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike stronger for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines kaiser report. coming up.

he. welcome back to the bigger picture discussion on islamophobia in the united states our panel tonight is corey saylor legislative director for the council on american islamic relations rajiv singh director of law and policy at the american sick coalition and dr michael scheuer adjunct professor at georgetown university's center for peace and security studies and a former cia analyst and corey just before we went to the break you were talking

about the profile the nature of the islamic community the united states don't just summarize the sure essentially when you remove the fear factor and look at the facts the american muslim community is well integrated and cooperating with law enforcement in many investigations against people who would commit violent acts against the united states in simple form it's is this what. you were mentioning in the survey two thousand and six you say certain surveys of american attitudes towards muslims you can you know we didn't see community actually or in solidarity with muslim community because we face many of the same issues and we look to attitudes popular attitudes about muslims as kind of a bellwether to see whether our communities in danger and in two thousand and six gallup conducted some surveys and one of the most frightening statistics that came out of those surveys was that about forty percent of respondents would favor

measures that would require american muslims to carry special i.d. cards naming their religion forty percent so it wasn't sort of a fringe minority of respondents in that survey who supported those kinds of measures and that. very troubling to us and in the post nine eleven environment given that six often are targeted as a result of as he was the bigotry and michael you made the point that are you know it's it's not that they hate our religions or our freedoms or whatever people of muslims outside the united states who are who are angry with us or even have attacked us it's that they hate our foreign policy it's very much the case tom you know that even the young american muslims who go to fight overseas. are not driven because they hate american culture or american society they're driven to respond to our activities in somalia for example in iraq as another example we have never arrested anyone in this country from the muslim community who is

a planning an attack on the united states who claim to be attacking us because they hated women in the workplace or elections in iowa it always has to do with our support for israel these are very substantive things but barack obama. mr romney mr bush and senator kerry senator mccain have lied to the american people and convince the american people that the muslim community in the united states is is hateful toward our culture and there are certainly things that in our culture aren't going to work for islam the paganism of our entertainment system it doesn't work for some catholics but the idea that muslims are just crazy people. and i'm going to blow things up because they don't like the fact that my daughter goes to university is nots but that's what you get from the presidents of both parties from the congress for much of the media and certainly from the jewish american community that supports israel and makes

a very important point there when he talks about the substance you know one of the deep things behind what's going on unfortunately the conversation of the united states too often doesn't look at those things it goes for caricature. so right now we see rioting in spain and greece and you don't see the pundits on t.v. going these people it is just that's just how they are they're savages people say there are reasons behind this writing the economic difficulties but in all the situation that we saw recently in many muslim countries many people just brushed it off as well they saw film they got offended and that was what was behind the riots it may have been a spark but there were certainly other more salient factors like what michael described behind the continuation of the rest of the middle east. do you think that if we had if there if we had taken the side of taiwan and you know some sort of hostility with china in the in the recent past and i mean we've. arguably that's

a possible scenario and then it had turned into an issue of race and confucianism or buddhism or something like that that we could you know it that we could just substitute asians for for. for muslims or arabs or people of wearing turbans or red darker skin or fill in the blank and. i hope no sir i hope not but is that not the history of this something always back to the roman empire even as we speak i mean this isn't islamophobia anti muslim bigotry doesn't sort of exist in a vacuum we're we're living in an environment that's been tainted by seeing a phobia anti immigrant rhetoric homophobic rhetoric racist rhetoric and i think that mexican anti hispanic neighborhood maybe you're a minority i mean there are plenty of groups out there that can be scapegoated very easily and fortunately muslims are under the gun right now i want to bring up a graphic here this is the islamophobia megaphone. type network of anti muslim anti

islam nations. are spreading misinformation the they have these misinformation experts and there's this list of a relatively small number of donors and over the last ten years. forty two point six million dollars relatively small amount of money and then you know they they've finalists through the experts who end up on the media talking about this stuff principally because the main i suppose mainstream media would be fox news and then that echo chamber then echoes into the religious right and this is michael you mentioned you know jewish americans who support israel as a protestants as well they have some of that huge i mean is a major thing it's actually two groups of americans who put every every country but there is first right but here's the islamophobia echo chamber and you've got the religious right pat robertson john ag ralph reed franklin graham and cetera you've got the media fox news channel the top of that and then the list goes on down through the right wingers the political players the small handful of members of

congress including king and west and bachmann brown and the grassroots organizations and some of which probably most people never heard of like a tennessee freedom coalition and the others the american family association that people are more more familiar with they amplify this into the public into the public sphere cory how do you how do you deal with this how do american muslims deal with this how do they respond to this it's not an american muslim problem anymore so david your show me one of the people on the list came up with a bill that essentially targets islamic practices to be treated differently under the law than others and the last two years we've seen seventy eight and bills introduced in thirty one states in the u.s. congress eighty five percent of those are the ones pushed by david you show me another reason that i say this is no longer just a muslim problem because this is clearly on its face a violation of the first amendment because you have the government targeting

a particular faith for particular shot sanctions so we're no longer in a discussion about you know forgive me for putting as we were mere discrimination we are now talking about changing the conversation to undermining the. to show because of the fear pushed by the people in this megaphone that you're talking about so how do we deal with it we fall back on the bill of rights and we go to court and we push back in that fashion and so far we have been successful but you can't just have a conversation in courts you have to have people of goodwill standing up and recognizing that what was done to the japanese after world war two putting them in internment camps was wrong and passing laws to target any religion in the united states is wrong and just as we got rid of the camps for the japanese we have to get rid of laws and things like those. be the one of the big talking points of this right wing machine is sharia law and there are observant jews who want more

clothing made out of two different kinds of fabric because it's outlawed in deuteronomy and wanted shellfish to keep kosher or kosher. ism my saying it correctly you know has an association with turbans and beard i mean there are rules religions have rules. at what point. by singling out a particular one in this case shari'a which in most versions as played out in the united states and in most european countries is not jihad or craziness it's simply rules for life at what point is does that become what korea was talking about the singling out of an individual religion and thus dangerous to other religions like yourself surely a lot of debate which is unfolding in several american courts is a red herring i mean that's a straw man we've got a supremacy clause in the constitution which affirms that u.s. law is supreme no other law can supersede american law and crackdowns on the right of most limbs to practice their religion affects six they affect observant jews

there's been measures in recent years and a couple states to prohibit people from wearing head coverings and driver's license photos and although that's been targeted at los lobos by and large. six stand to lose observant jews another stand to lose if those laws are of help. so michael from. me you were there early on at the cia as as nine eleven was happening and here we are now what is what is the arc that you see unfolding where do you think this is going and what should we be doing about. the there that's unfolding is that the war is going to spread if you took a map and don't war it's a war against islamic militancy is going to spread because there is an amendable reservoir of people who are willing to defend their faith against what they what they truly believe are the. imperial. activities of the united states and its

allies and the american people have not been acquainted with that because our president mr obama more than anyone has a lie about that what people are motivated by when they're attacking us those people that killed our ambassador in benghazi they weren't attacking us because they hated freedom they were taking us because those people were symbols of the united states government which is regarded in the muslim world as an aggressive islamic force or at least in that part in the past of the islamic world tom if you look at the polls seventy five to eighty percent regard u.s. foreign policy as an attempt to destroy islam or to harm islam there's a great difference in the muslim world although the many of our politicians speak as if muslims are too dumb to be able to draw the line between americans as people in the u.s. government when you travel in the muslim world in american person is generally treated with great cordiality but the destroy this taste and distrust for our

government is very great and i would say one thing for cory byrd suggest one thing i think this is directly in the hands of the muslim community i thought it was a travesty when. the leaders of the muslim community did not go up to those hearings that mr king or congressman king had and explained very clearly on television into the media that the problem that the muslim community has in how it's youngsters are influenced is your foreign policy so we have just twenty seconds corey your thoughts on if you watched the first hearing with peter king held the day before we were on c.-span essentially doing many of the things that you're talking about mark and i know peter king saw it because he attacked my organization throughout the first hearing so there was definitely a counterweight to what mr king was was saying unfortunately however during a congressional hearing he has the bullhorn we don't yet and he definitely did gentlemen thank you all for thank yous are an important conversation. to see to see

this conversation or for more of our conversations great minds check out our website conversations great minds dot com coming up after the break while president obama has been soaring in polls nationwide met romney has been having an awful few weeks first it was his libya speech then his forty seven percent comments and now his soon to be infamous harvesting comments surely this election has to be over all that and more and tonight's big picture rumble. mission free cretaceous three. charges free to make

amends three. three stooges free. media projects free. to the future. of the summer. truly fly. the float in the view of the bay below. board the plane it's only. part. of the world's most. technology.