Anti-Muslim war being waged in U.S.?

By Askia Muhammad -Senior Editor- | Last updated: Jun 9, 2015 - 11:10:08 AM

Cyrus McGoldrick, Advocacy Director for Council on American-Islamic Relations, takes a photo with his cell phone of an anti-Muslim poster on, Sept. 24, 2012, in New York's Times Square subway station. A federal court forced the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to run the ad by Islamophobic Jewish activist Pamela Geller, executive director of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, saying it was protected speech under the First Amendment. "As civil rights advocates, we defend Pam Geller's rights as a racist and a bigot," said McGoldrick. "Muslims are tired of being targets while extremes feed their propaganda."

WASHINGTON (FinalCall.com) - Apparently not content that their xenophobic policies have only upended most of the militant Islamic countries in the Middle East—Iraq, Libya, and Syria—the leaders of this country’s Islamic-hate-lobby are now trying fervently to provoke an anti-Muslim, vigilante war in the United States. So far they have been unsuccessful.

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) announced that it will not allow any new issue-oriented advertising in the transit system after an Islamic hate group sought to place ads on buses and in subway stations featuring a slanderous cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), a drawing that was linked to deadly violence in Texas in early May. The ban will extend through at least the end of the year.

The unanimous decision by WMATA’s governing board reflects growing concern among the nation’s biggest transit systems over anti-Muslim-themed ads paid for by the American Freedom Defense Initiative, or AFDI.

Islamophobic Jewish activist Pamela Geller is escorted into The Associated Press headquarters for an interview, May 7 in New York. Geller is one of the nation’s most outspoken critics of Islam, taking the hard-edge view that extremism sprouts not from fringe elements but the tenets of the religion itself. She was the organizer of a controversial cartoon contest about the Prophet Muhammad in Texas where two men started shooting before they were killed by police.

Islamophobe Pamela Geller submitted the ad to the transit authority featuring the winning image from the “Draw Muhammad” cartoon contest held in Garland, Texas.

“Drawing Muhammad is not illegal under American law, but only under Islamic law,” Ms. Geller, head of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), said in a statement posted to Breitbart.com. “Violence that arises over the cartoons is solely the responsibility of the Islamic jihadists who perpetrate it.

“Either America will stand now against attempts to suppress the freedom of speech by violence, or will submit and give the violent the signal that we can be silenced by threats and murder. We cannot submit to the assassin’s veto,” the statement continued. Many Muslims consider any depictions of the Holy Prophet to be supremely disrespectful and offensive.

Ms. Geller—a lightning rod for public, anti-Islamic hatred for more than a decade—previously bankrolled bus ads in Washington, D.C., that featured photos of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler talking with a Muslim leader beside the message “Islamic Jew-hatred: It’s in the Qur’an.” In San Francisco, her group ran ads showing American Journalist James Foley moments before he was beheaded by the so-called “Islamic State” last year.

In order to avoid lawsuits which have forced transit authorities to publish the ads, WMATA followed the lead of New York and Philadelphia, which banned all issue-oriented advertising, rather than selectively prohibiting the Islamic-hate ads.

In 2013, during the 57-week-long “The Time and What Must Be Done” internet lecture series by the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, a group of members of Muhammad Mosque No. 4 in Washington, D.C. sponsored a month-long bus advertisement promoting that series, without incident.

Ironically, Islamic-hate-speech proponents, who mask their campaigns under the guise of “defending free speech,” are silent about incidents which tread on White, “patriotic” sensibilities. The Clothing firm PacSun, for example recently withdrew from its shelves, one of the company’s T-shirts with an image of an upside down American flag—an official maritime symbol of distress.

A Memorial Day backlash on social media, and shopper complaints in stores prompted the apparel giant to remove the item. In a Facebook statement, the Southern California apparel chain said it decided to immediately stop selling the garment “out of respect” for members of the armed forces. The announcement came after images of the garment were repeatedly posted on the social networking website, with people calling it “disgusting” and “disrespectful.”

There was little discussion or defense of the store’s “free speech right” to market the image. Unlike those who defend the defamers of Islam, many comments about the T-shirts said the company should not have sold the shirt in the first place.

Even as the transit authority “dodged” the proverbial “bullet” with its decision to ban all issue advertisements, and as the clothing retailer “ducked for cover,” an even more explosive confrontation involving real guns unfolded in Phoenix, Ariz., outside the mosque where the two Garland, Texas shooters attended.

Jon Ritzheimer, a former Marine, and peddler of a T-shirt which reads “F--- Islam,” organized a mob of some 250 vigilantes to rally at the mosque—openly carrying firearms.

The standoff took place at the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix, the mosque that Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi attended for a time. They are the men who drove from Arizona to Garland, allegedly to attack the cartoon contest there. Both were killed by police.

The anti-Islamic, hate-marchers were met by counter-protestors who called the confrontation, the “intersection of Islamaphobia and (the) gun culture, this according to Imraan Siddiqi, president of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) Phoenix chapter. “When we see these two things . . . then obviously it becomes more of a concern,” he said. “We’re advising people, it’s better to stay clear from the event, don’t engage with these people.”

“The Muslim community in America is here to stay and we are also well aware of the right to speak our mind and worship how we please,” Dr. Yasir Shareef, a board member of the Arizona CAIR chapter, said at a press conference. The White House agrees, saying there’s no justification for violence at the rally.

“Even expressions that are offensive, that are distasteful, and intended to sow divisions in an otherwise tight-knit, diverse community in Phoenix cannot be used as a justification to carry out an act of violence,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said at a press briefing May 29.

But even as the Islamophobes justify their hatred citing barbarous behavior by the Islamic State as it marches across Iraq and Syria, one prominent Republican senator blamed his own party for the rise of ISIS.

Kentucky senator and presidential candidate Rand Paul has blamed the GOP for the existence of ISIS. Speaking on MSNBC, Sen. Paul pointed the finger at war-hawks like Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

“ISIS exists and grew stronger because of the hawks in our party who gave arms indiscriminately, and most of those arms were snatched up by ISIS. These hawks also wanted to bomb (Syrian President Bashir al-) Assad, which would have made ISIS’s job even easier.

“They created these people. ISIS is all over Libya because these same hawks in my party loved — they loved Hillary Clinton’s war in Libya. They just wanted more of it. But Libya is a failed state, and it’s a disaster. Iraq really is a failed state or a vassal state now of Iran. So everything that they’ve talked about in foreign policy, they’ve been wrong about for 20 years.”

For her part, Ms. Geller has long been a lightning rod of anti-Islamic hate speech, and her organizations declared “hate groups” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). “The President of the United States is advancing jihad against the oath of office that he took,” Ms. Geller posted on her blog, Atlas Shrugs.

“President Jihad: Obama Encouraged Violent Palestinian Muslim Protests Against Israel,” she posted on April 1, 2010. In October 2008, Gawker found a Geller blog post in which, according to Gawker, she claimed that President Obama was the love child of Malcolm X. Ms. Geller’s addendum in 2009 refuted that it was her report, saying instead that it was from a writer who “did a spectacular job documenting Obama’s many connections with the Far Left.”

“How could Stanley Ann Dunham have delivered Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. in August of 1961 in Honolulu, when official University of Washington records show her 2,680 miles away in Seattle attending classes that same month?” she posted in October 2008.

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