The anti-Muslim rhetoric grew even more vicious in 2011. Today we look at the Islamophobia and other stunning ignorance demonstrated in quotes from the far right over the past year. Read other quotes from the far right in 2011 here.
[It is] the most likely and perhaps only community in America who will stand up to and ultimately help ensure the defeat of this seditious totalitarian political program.”
— Right-wing honcho Frank Gaffney, warning that Muslims are now trying to take over American conservativism by, in part, infiltrating the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the annual gathering of conservative political activists set. Salon, January 5, 2011
“Islam has no fundamental First Amendment claims, for the simple reason that it was not written to protect the religion of Islam. Islam is entitled only to the religious liberty we extend to it out of courtesy. While there certainly ought to be a presumption of religious liberty for non-Christian religious traditions in America, the Founders were not writing a suicide pact when they wrote the First Amendment.”
– Bryan Fischer, the director of issues analysis for the religious-right group American Family Association, making every freedom-loving American thankful that Fischer’s blog and organization don’t have the force of law. Renew America, March 24, 2011
“I don’t have my file in front of me.”
“I’m not in my office to look them up.”
– Two comments from state legislators — the first in Alabama, the second in Nebraska — when asked to define “Sharia” or to identify any cases in which Sharia law has been used in a troubling way in American courts. Despite their ignorance on the issue, both lawmakers had proposed bills barring the nonexistent threat of Islamic law in the United States. Salon, April 7, 2011
“I don’t know Dearborn, Michigan, but I heard it on the radio. Isn’t that true?”
– Texas state Rep. Leo Berman, R-Tyler, admitting he doesn’t know much about Dearborn, Mich., but insisting it is already under Sharia law. Think Progress, April 13, 2011
It is beginning to to like conservative is a synonym for stupid.
It would indeed be shocking to find Sharia as law in Dearborn, Michigan, since the majority of Dearborn’s large population of Arab-Americans are Christians.