An organization in Florida plans to educate what it perceives as an increasingly culture-tolerant public about the horrific dictates of Islamic law by purchasing billboard space with a simple, but confrontational message: “Sharia law is hate.”

The Central Florida chapter of the United American Committee, a nonprofit group that seeks to educate Americans on the threat of Islamic extremism, is raising money to purchase a six-month contract to display the billboard, which the group hopes will awaken the public to discussing the full extent of Islamic law.

“The UAC’s goal in this project is to raise awareness because most people have no idea what Sharia law is,” Alan Kornman, director of UAC’s Central Florida branch, told WND. “We are confident people will see the billboard and learn on their own what Sharia law is and come to their own conclusions. At the very least, we hope our billboard will spark public debate on this overlooked issue.”

The billboards will also include a link to UAC resources where people can learn more about Islam’s Sharia law, a set of religious codes – both moral and legal; Sharia law recognizes no separation of church and state – that bind both Muslims and Islamic nations.

“Under Sharia law if you are accused of stealing, a hand and foot from opposite sides are amputated. If you are caught having an affair, the woman is stoned to death and the man is given 80 lashes. If you change religions, you can be charged under apostasy laws and given the death sentence by a legal Sharia court. If you want to marry a nine-year-old child, Sharia law condones pedophilia, because Mohammad married Aisha at six and consummated the marriage at age nine. I find these and many more practices of Sharia law despicable and hateful,” said Kornman.

World Net Daily, 8 August 2008

The union that represents workers at a Tyson Foods poultry plant in Tennessee has negotiated a contract that substitutes a Muslim holiday for Labor Day as one of the eight paid holidays at the plant.

The provision, which was proposed by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, has delighted the plant’s Somali workers, who account for hundreds of its 1,200 employees. But it has infuriated many outsiders, leading some to denounce Tyson and the union alike.

“You are a union that is proud of achieving a Muslim holiday and prayer room?” one person wrote the union. “A union in the U.S.A., a country based on Christianity. You call yourselves Americans? Have you forgotten 9/11?”

Another wrote: “You had no right to drop Labor Day. Muslim employees must integrate Labor Day into THEIR lives if they are going to live in America.”

Stung by the criticism, Stuart Appelbaum, the union’s president, said the decision was fully consistent with the spirit of Labor Day.

“We in the labor movement have always understood that unions are only strong when we work to protect the dignity of all faiths, and that includes Muslims,” said Mr. Appelbaum, who also serves as president of the Jewish Labor Committee.

“What we negotiated was the will of the workers,” said Mr. Appelbaum, who added that his was the first union to negotiate a paid day off for a Muslim holiday and that he was sure Tyson would not be the last employer to agree.

New York Times, 6 August 2008

Over at Front Page Magazine Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch warns that this represents one more step down the slippery slope towards the Islamisation of the USA: “The problem is that the accommodation of Islamic holidays and practices abets, however unwittingly, an avowedly supremacist agenda that is directed toward supplanting American laws and mores and imposing Islamic law here.”

And the inimitable Debbie Schlussel writes: “Well, folks, here it is – the beginning (or maybe the middle) of the end of America as we know it…. Since I keep kosher, I don’t eat Tyson Foods products anyway, but I call on you my readers to boycott the company. It’s absurd to replace labor day with the holiday of those bent on our destruction. Any company that does that doesn’t deserve your business.”