POMPANO BEACH, Fla. — A coalition of ministers led by the Rev. O’Neal Dozier plan to distribute comic strip booklets about the Islam religion, which they believe “teaches evil and hatred,” in opposition to a zoning change that allows the Islamic Center of South Florida to begin construction on a new mosque in a predominantly black community.

The city council voted 3-2 in June to change the zoning of the proposed site from residential to commercial, allowing the Islamic Center to erect a larger mosque on undeveloped land on Northwest 16th Avenue.

Dozier, who is black, said he hopes the booklets he and his religious peers plan to distribute Saturday morning will “educate the public concerning the Islamic fascism.” Although the booklets are comic strips, the message they deliver is serious.

Altaf Ali, executive director of the Council of American Islamic Relations, called Dozier a “bigot” and “prejudiced.” “I think his information and knowledge of Islam is very limited,” Ali said.

Despite the ongoing protests, Islamic Center leaders said they hope to break ground on the new mosque within a year.

Click10.com, 19 September 2006

J. Peter Mulhern endorses Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus’s observation that “you will find things only evil and inhuman” in Islam, and draws the appropriate lessons:

“Almost nobody pauses to consider that Manuel might have something to teach us. Instead our conversation centers on whether the Pope is to blame for riling Muslims up and what he (and we) can do to mollify them.

“Our preoccupation with such trivial matters says something important about the chattering class – it is incapable of seeing our problem with Islam. Even the shock of September 11 failed to open many eyes, and the shock wore off long ago. Very few people who comment on public affairs for a living have the courage to face a long, bloody world war. Instead they pretend that our problem with Islam is vastly more manageable than it is.

“They pretend that terrorism is the work of a few demented individuals who have Hijacked a Great Religion for their own perverted purposes. That way they don’t have to deal with the grim reality that tens if not hundreds of millions of people want us all dead. Nor do they have to face the horrible truth that this urge to destroy us is as much a part of Islam as facing Mecca to pray….

“We are the heirs of a culture built on Christian foundations and we are not Muslim. Anything we do to placate our enemies will only make them bolder and more dangerous. Winning our war means nothing less than separating the Muslim world from one of the central tenets of its faith. We have to teach a proud culture a bitter lesson. We have to convince it that Islam can only survive in the modern world by adapting to the reality that the infidel calls the shots. Muslims have to accept that our culture is dominant over theirs.”

American Thinker, 19 September 2006

“Benedict’s speech is a work of enlightened genius. He has clearly laid out the differences between Christian culture and Islamic culture and the basis of the clash of civilizations we now experience as the War on Terror. His analysis also explains the underlying cause of the alliance between the western Left and the Islamofascist Right…. The Islamist reaction proves Manuel II’s 600-year-old point. The reaction is not one of anger but a calculated attempt to force the Pope to parrot the PC line on Islam….Islamists are not responding to any ‘offense’ to their non-existent morality. They are asserting the only ‘morality’ they have – the will to power. ‘Will to Power’ is a key element of Nietzsche’s philosophy – hence the root of the term, Islamofascist. Moreover the Western ‘Left’ is today guided far more by Nietzsche existentialist thought than by Marxist thought – hence the alliance between the Western ‘Left’ and the Islamofascist ‘Right’.”

Andrew Walden at Front Page Magazine, 18 September 2006

“Yesterday, the pope insisted that he did not agree with Manuel. But it is clear that he sympathized with this monarch of a doomed Christian civilization enough to use him as a mouthpiece through which he could pose his own implicit questions to Islam. Does the Muslim understanding of Allah allow rational debate about the morality of violence, given that the doctrine of jihad is a central pillar of Islam? If Allah is above reason, might violent jihad, including terrorism, be not merely justifiable but obligatory, as many Muslim scholars argue?

“By now, the answer to these questions is clear: churches firebombed in the West Bank and Gaza, a nun murdered in Somalia. Such persecution is, alas, routine in many Muslim lands, and Catholics are not the only victims. But it is clear that Muslim leaders – even those of ‘pro-Western’ countries such as Turkey or Pakistan – are not yet ready for the ‘frank’ dialogue proposed by the pope. By pointing out that violence is a part of medieval Islam, not a ‘distortion’, as Western liberals like to think, Benedict has touched a raw nerve.

“No, this pope is not naïve. It is our liberal, theologically illiterate politicians who are naïve. We are already at war – a holy war, which we may lose.”

Daniel Johnson in the New York Sun, 18 September 2006