NEW YORK — A coalition of advocacy groups and political leaders held a rally on Tuesday linking the subway pushing death of a South Asian man to a broader anti-Muslim environment in New York City – inflamed, they said, by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the New York City Police Department.

“When our own government, our own police, our own institutions, our own media continue to engage in racial profiling or painting communities as suspect, we cannot expect the results to be any different than what they are right now,” said Fahd Ahmed, legal and policy director for the South Asian advocacy group Desis Rising Up and Moving.

The Queens rally centered around the death of Sunando Sen, a Hindu immigrant from India who was crushed to his death by a subway train after 31-year-old Erika Menendez allegedly pushed him on Dec. 27. Menendez, who has a history of mental problems, told investigators she shoved Sen because she thought he was Muslim and “I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers,” police said.

Continue reading →

Watching Randy Linn in court last month was unsettling. He pleaded guilty to defacing religious property, using fire to commit a felony, and carrying a firearm as he walked through the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo last Sept. 30. He accepted a binding plea agreement of 20 years in prison, without appeal or parole, for the arson.

His diatribe at the hearing was worse. He cited news media, especially Fox News, for inspiring his desire to avenge U.S. military deaths. He conceded he knew nothing about Muslims or Islam, other than that Muslims did not believe in Jesus Christ as savior.

America’s Constitution promises justice, liberty, and protection of citizens. Yet a wave of Islamophobia, reflected in incidents such as the Islamic Center arson, suggests that we are more intent on protecting freedom of speech than Americans’ lives and property.

In 2004, when he signed the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act, President George W. Bush said that “extending freedom also means disrupting the evil of anti-Semitism.” The law requires a specific federal agency to document acts of physical violence against Jews, their property, their cemeteries, and their places of worship. It also mandates monitoring of anti-Jewish propaganda and promotion of unbiased school curricula.

There is no similar law to respond to this country’s ferocious and well-funded Islamophobia industry, which relentlessly whips up anti-Muslim sentiment that can inspire disturbed people to destroy property, maim, and even kill.

Mahjabeen Islam in the Toledo Blade, 6 January 2013

Stand by for right-wing Islamophobes and self-styled secularists to denounce this excellent article as a demand for a blasphemy law and for the destruction of free expression in the US through the imposition of Sharia on the non-Muslim majority.