Lu Gronseth listens regularly to WWTC, a conservative talk-radio station in Minneapolis, and even advertises his mortgage-loan business on the station. But when he learned that a nationally syndicated radio show host had told WWTC listeners that Muslims should be deported and made rude comments about what they could do with their religion, Mr Gronseth pulled his ads from the station.

So have at least two other Minnesota businesses, at the urging of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington, D.C., as have a handful of national companies, including OfficeMax, JCPenney, Wal-Mart, and AT&T. But the comments by host Michael Savage in October – and previous anti-Muslim speech – have not created the furor that knocked radio icon Don Imus off of MSNBC and CBS Radio after he denigrated a black women’s basketball team. That leaves many Muslims-Americans – and non-Muslims like Mr Gronseth – suspicious that Americans have a double standard when it comes to Islam.

“My sense is that you could say anti-Muslim comments that you could never get away with, saying for example, as anti-Jewish comments,” said Stephen Wessler of the Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence in Portland, Maine. “There’s a much greater public level of acceptance of denigrating Muslims.”

Christian Science Monitor, 4 December 2007

Meanwhile, Michael Savage is suing the Council on American-Islamic Relations for breach of copyright after the CAIR website rebroadcast excerpts from his show in which he called the Qur’an a “book of hate” and said Muslims “need deportation”.

San Francisco Chronicle, 4 December 2007

Presidential canidate Mitt Romney has discounted appointing Muslims to his cabinet on more than just the one occasion reported in a CSM op-ed yesterday.

TPM Election Central has learned that at a private fundraising luncheon in Las Vegas three months ago, Romney said a second time he would probably not appoint a Muslim to his cabinet – and on this occasion, he made other comments that one witness described as “racist.”

The witness, Irma Aguirre, a former finance director of the Nevada Republican Party, paraphrased Romney as saying: “They’re radical. There’s no talking to them. There’s no negotiating with them.” A second witness, a self-described local registered Republican named George Harris, confirmed her account.

The new accounts provided by the witnesses lend credence to the now-notorious account of a more recent private Romney event that appeared in the Christian Science Monitor yesterday that already caused an uproar. In that account, a Muslim businessman, Mansour Ijaz, claimed that Romney had said that based on the “numbers of American Muslims” in the country, “I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified” for a Muslim.

TPM, 27 November 2007