Thousands of Muslims from across the New York region marched down Madison Avenue in Manhattan Sunday, waving flags and flashing peace signs to protesters.

The 22nd annual United American Muslim Day parade was a peaceful affair on a warm, bright day that drew hundreds of beaming children. Though few people gathered on the sidewalk to watch the parade, the street was filled with proud participants. A small but vocal contingent of hecklers taunted marchers at 41st Street, though police officers kept both groups apart.

A well-dressed elderly woman walking up Madison Avenue told a friend on a cell phone: “I’m the only one in the street without a schmata on my head,” using the Yiddish word for rag. A passerby who heard the remark muttered under his breath that she was also the only one with dyed hair.

Rita Thompson, 44, traveled with her boyfriend from their home in Redington Beach, Fla., to protest the parade. Thompson later shouted expletives at marchers and said, “They’re all going to be bin Ladens.” “I’m so appalled by this, two days before the anniversary of 9/11,” she said later in an interview, adding that she called City Hall earlier in the week to urge Mayor Michael Bloomberg to cancel the event.

Newsday, 10 September 2007

The organiser of the protest was Joe Kaufman of the laughably named group Americans Against Hate, who denounced the parade as “a pre-9/11 celebration” that posed “a threat to New York and a threat to national security”, and called for it to be banned.

This hysterical campaign was rejected by mayor Bloomberg who insisted that Muslims are a “vital part of our city” and that it would be “a terrible mistake for anyone to implicate a whole group of innocent individuals – no matter what their faith – with the terrible acts committed on September 11, 2001”.

See Newsday, 7 September 2007

See also Front Page Magazine, 17 August 2007

US comedian and political commentator Dennis Miller offers his take on racial profiling, in an interview with Fox News: “I’m going to say that I scope out the Norwegians on airliners when I get on. But I don’t. If there’s a shaky looking Islamic cat near me, I keep an eye on him. And it’s just like watching the in-house movie. I have all these scenarios running through my head where I’m James Bond and I come upside their right temple with a sugar block as they go up the aisle way. And I’m sorry. I’m a human being. You know, I do Islam a disservice when I don’t point out its failings to it. And the simple fact is, they’ve been blowing a lot of things up lately.”

Quoted by Abdiel, 7 September 2007

“That Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the leader of the Union of Reform Judaism, the country’s largest Jewish denomination, would not only speak to a conference of the Islamic Society, as he did last week, but do so specifically with the agenda of denouncing ‘Islamophobia’ rather than using it as an opportunity to denounce the rising tide of Jew-hatred in the Muslim world, is a development that is as astonishing as it is lamentable. ‘Islamophobia’ is a red herring, a false debating point which seeks to change the subject from the very real threat of the infiltration of Islamist extremism in the United States to a focus on the mythical discrimination to which American Muslims are supposedly being subjected.”

Jonathan Tobin in the Jewish World Review, 5 September 2007

Six years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans should distinguish between mainstream Muslims and the radical fringe, the leaders said. “Muslim Americans feel an increasing level of tension and scrutiny in contemporary society,” said Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, the largest Muslim organization in the United States and the convention organizer.

The image problems were among the topics most discussed by many of the 30,000 attendees. A fresh example cited was an open letter from two Republican House members, Peter Hoekstra of Michigan and Sue Myrick of North Carolina, that attacked the Justice Department for sending envoys to the convention because, the lawmakers said, the Islamic Society of North America was a group of “radical jihadists”. The lone Muslim in Congress, Representative Keith Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota, the keynote speaker here, dismissed the letter as ill informed and typical of bigoted attacks that other minorities have suffered.

Leaders of American Muslim organizations attribute the growing intolerance to three main factors: global terrorist attacks in the name of Islam, disappointing reports from the Iraq war and the agenda of some supporters of Israel who try taint Islam to undermine the Palestinians. American Muslims say they expect the attacks to worsen in the presidential election and candidates to criticize Islam in an effort to prove that they are tough on terrorism.

New York Times, 4 September 2007