Richard Bartholomew has the details.
Category Archives: USA
Dallas pastor says Islam is ‘a religion that promotes paedophilia’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wfb9p3qSRqA
It’s hard to know where to start in expressing dismay with the Rev. Robert Jeffress – for being uninformed, un-Christian or un-American. The pastor of Dallas’ First Baptist Church managed to squeeze all three into a recent rant against Islam.
On Aug. 22, First Baptist’s Sunday evening service featured the annual “Ask The Pastor” event. One of the written questions that Jeffress took that night asked about comparisons between Muslim jihad and the Christian Crusades.
Jeffress acknowledged terrible misdeeds by Christians, although he said many have been “overblown.” He went on to say that Christian atrocities were always contrary to the teaching of the New Testament. “But Muslims, when they commit violence, they are acting in accordance with what the Quran teaches,” he said.
He was just getting started. He went on to talk about Islam’s oppression of women and how it is “a violent religion.”
“And here is the deep, dark, dirty secret of Islam: It is a religion that promotes pedophilia – sex with children. This so-called prophet Muhammad raped a 9-year-old girl – had sex with her,” he said. “Around the world today, you have Muslim men having sex with 4-year-old girls, taking them as their brides, because they believe the prophet Muhammad did.”
Finally, his finger jabbing the air, he proclaimed: “I believe, as Christians and conservatives, it’s time to take off the gloves and stand up and tell the truth about this evil, evil religion.”
Who funds the Islamophobes?
Over at Politico Ken Vogel examines the controversy over the funding of the Park51 development and comes up with some interesting figures for the financial backing enjoyed by Islamophobic organisations like the David Horowitz Freedom Center and Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch:
‘Islamization’ of Paris a warning to the West, claims Pat Robertson
Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network makes its contribution to the hysteria surrounding the Park51 development with a scaremongering report about how Muslims are taking over Paris. Following the report, Robertson helpfully explains that Islam isn’t just a religion, it’s “a political system that is meant to achieve world domination”.
Republican candidate’s ‘Ground Zero mosque’ scaremongering succeeded in attracting right-wing funding
Republican Rick Lazio‘s underfunded campaign for governor of New York attracted big donors dedicated to anti-terrorism efforts after he called for a probe of funding for a proposed mosque near ground zero, according to state records.
State campaign finance records show Long Island real estate developer and philanthropist Lawrence Kadish and his wife, Susan, contributed $75,000 to Lazio’s campaign beginning July 26. Their donations were about a third of the total Lazio collected during the 30-day period.
Under the headline “Mr. Lazio’s Bid for Attention,” a New York Times editorial on Aug. 23 said Lazio was making “increasingly hysterical attacks” on the project and “had no shame about using images of the smoldering World Trade Center in a new political ad.” The editorial noted Lazio was far behind Cuomo in polls and fundraising and that may be the explanation for his “attempt to exploit ground zero images for political gain.”
Three of the four installments from Kadish and his wife came after the editorial. A few other contributors involved in pro-Israel groups provided thousands more after Lazio’s July 7 letter.
Abercrombie & Fitch sued over Muslim headscarf
A federal civil rights agency sued Abercrombie & Fitch on Wednesday on behalf of an 18-year-old woman who said she applied for her first job at the company’s store at the Great Mall in Milpitas and was turned down because she wore a Muslim headscarf.
Abe Foxman condemns Geller and Spencer’s 9/11 protest as ‘un-American’
“… this rally, on this very tragic day for Americans, but most tragic for those who lost their families, to use it and abuse it as a platform for bigotry, is not only tragic, it’s un-American”.
In an interview with Adam Serwer at The Plum Line blog, Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League condemns the SIOA’s “Ground Zero mosque” demonstration on 11 September. Foxman is particularly angry that Geert Wilders will be speaking at the rally and says of Pamela Geller that “part of her agenda is to help garner support for Wilders, who is a bigot, who has a long record of anti-Muslim bigotry”.
Foxman notes that the SIOA protest is part of “a campaign which is in many places directed against building mosques” and which he says exemplifies “the anti-Muslim bigotry that exists in this country”. Foxman observes that this is nothing new:
“Part of the landscape, unfortunately, of America is that we’re not immune to bigotry, to racism, to anti-Semitism. And part of what’s out there is a bigotry to immigrants. Jews experienced it, Irish experienced it. Part of our history is there was opposition to building Catholic churches and Jewish synagogues. Now there’s opposition to build mosques.”
In response, Geller denounces Foxman – director of one of the leading Jewish organisations in the US – as a “groveling, simpering lapdog panting to jihadists”.
But this is par for the course with Geller. In an interview with Jamie Glazov of FrontPage Magazine last December, after the Community Security Trust warned the Jewish community against supporting a Stop Islamisation of Europe protest against a new mosque in Harrow, she accused the CST of “aiding and abetting Islamic jihad and Islamic anti-Semitism”.
New York Muslim groups support Park51, condemn promotion of ‘ethnic and religious hatred’
It is “unethical, insensitive and inhumane” to oppose the planned mosque near ground zero, more than 50 leading Muslim organizations said Wednesday as they cast the intense debate as a symptom of religious intolerance in America.
Leaders of the Majlis Ash-Shura of Metropolitan New York, an Islamic leadership council that represents a broad spectrum of Muslims in the city, gathered on the steps of City Hall to issue a statement calling for a stop to religious intolerance and affirming the right of the center’s developers to build two blocks north of the site of the 2001 terrorist attacks.
“We support the right of our Muslim brothers who wish to build that center there,” said Imam Al Amin Abdul Latif, president of the Majlis Ash-Shura. “However, the bigger issue and the broader issue is the issue of ethnic and religious hatred being spread by groups trying to stop the building of mosques and Islamic institutions across the country.”
This is the first time that the council as a body has spoken out on the weeks-old debate over the proposed center. “When the issue became hotter and hotter, and people made more statements against the mosques, then we decided to get involved in it,” said Syed Sajid Husain, secretary general of the council. He said the process of bringing together the leaders to agree on a statement also took a handful of meetings.
Leaders of the council said they were calling attention to what they claimed was an anti-Islamic climate, and that the development of a center near ground zero is simply one example.
They also cited a suspicious fire that damaged construction equipment at the site of a future mosque in Tennessee that is being investigated by the FBI, and the successful opposition to the proposed conversion of a property owned by a Catholic Church into a mosque and community center on Staten Island, a New York City borough off the southern tip of Manhattan.
Islamic leaders on Wednesday said they would support a move to another location, if that’s what the imam and his supporters choose to do. But they emphasized that Muslims also were killed in the terrorist attacks and were first responders.
“We declare unethical, insensitive and inhumane, the notion that our co-religionists are not entitled to the respect of a place of worship according to their faith, near the location where men and women of our religion worked, lived and died – just like other people,” the group’s statement said in part.
The group is not associated with the planned Islamic center but is representative of a significant number of New York Muslim leaders.
Associated Press, 1 September 2010
See also ABNA, 2 September 2010
‘9/11 happened to us all’ – CAIR campaign challenges anti-Muslim bigotry
A Muslim advocacy organization has released public service announcements – including one featuring a Muslim firefighter who responded on 9/11 – as part of a campaign to fight recent anti-Muslim bigotry.
“Muslim Americans were among the victims and also Muslim Americans were among the first responders,” said Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations at a Wednesday (Sept. 1) news conference at the National Press Club.
“We also should acknowledge that 9/11 hit us all hard and we should not allow those who seek political and religious division in the United States to win,” Awad said.
One of the public service announcements features Hisham Tawfiq of the New York Fire Department, tearfully recalling how he learned his firefighting colleague was missing after the attacks on the Twin Towers. “I’m a New York City firefighter and I responded to 9/11 and I am Muslim,” he said in the ad.
Awad was joined by other Muslim organization leaders who decried recent attacks on Muslims and protests of a proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero and mosques in other parts of the country. They urged greater local police protection of Muslims in their communities.
Huffington Post, 1 September 2010
See CAIR press release, 1 August 2010
View all the PSAs here.
Update: See also “US Islamic center to fight Islamophobia”,PressTV, 2 September 2010
Islamophobes target reading list at Brooklyn college
In New York City this week, an institution is being accused of using Islam to subvert American culture – but this time, it’s on the other side of the East River.
The controversy over Brooklyn College’s Common Reader program doesn’t hold a candle to the Ground Zero mosque debacle – thankfully, Sarah Palin has yet to tweet on the subject – but it’s gotten more than a few people riled up in the past few days. The most riled might be Bruce Kesler: the conservative blogger and Brooklyn College alum wrote the college out of his will when they assigned Moustafa Bayoumi’s How Does It Feel To Be A Problem? Being Young and Arab in Americato all incoming freshmen.
Then there’s the National Association of Scholars, a conservative group that’s already leading an attack on college reading lists across the country. They were quick to support Kesler: “[the book] aims to establish Arab and Muslim Americans as victims and indict American society for making them so.” It all fits perfectly with the growing sentiment that Muslims – led by President Obama, of course – are working to destroy America, but it’s cloaked in the guise of a real academic debate.
It’s a shame that Moustafa Bayoumi’s book, a thoughtful and highly regarded portrait of the group living with this growing antagonism, has to be at the heart of it.
Elizabeth Minkel at the New Yorker Book Bench blog, 1 September 2010