UPDATE: We had hoped this could go without saying, but apparently we must make it clear: comments promoting anti-Muslim bigotry and, especially, violence against Muslims will not be approved. Sadly, there are plenty of forums for that kind of trash. This isn’t one of them.
Texas Eagle Forum’s website has posted an essay that calls for exempting Muslims from the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee for religious freedom, firing Muslims from government jobs, barring them from running for elected office and monitoring their houses of worship. The essay, written by Elijah Abraham, an evangelical Christian convert from Islam, is among the most strident, hate-filled pieces of paranoia that we have read. You can read the whole thing here. Excerpt:
In the U.S., there are Muslim training camps across the country actively planning attacks on American soil. Young Americans are being converted to Islam in our jails, our military, public schools and universities, and in churches that preach Liberation Theology. Muslims have gained two seats in the U.S, Congress and have won seats in state and local races. Public school textbooks are becoming pro-Islam and anti-Christian. Muslims are buying Fortune 500 companies and high tech companies. There is a Dow Jones Islamic Index. Islamic banks, insurance companies and mortgage companies are springing up across the country. Our open borders welcome Muslims.
The challenge to America is to stop the spread of Islam in the U.S. before it is too late.
SOLUTIONS:
- Congress MUST outlaw Shariah and international law
- Eliminate Muslim government employees
- Outlaw Muslim terrorist organizations, such as The Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR, etc.
- Muslims should be ineligible to run for political office
- All Muslim military personnel should be removed from the U.S. armed forces
- Monitor mosques
- Shut down terrorist training camps in the U.S.
The essay’s gross generalizations — “torture is a way of life” and “the sanctity of human life is meaningless to a devout Muslim” — are repulsive. And the writer absurdly tries to justify legal, government-directed persecution of Muslims in America because some Muslim-dominant countries do indeed have barbaric laws and punishments, such as stoning and the execution of gay people and adulterers.
We would note, however, that there are some fundamentalist Christian extremists who (based on their literal interpretation of Scripture) have called for barbaric laws, such as executing gay people. Some have even given aid and comfort to supporters of a Ugandan law providing for just that — killing people because they are gay. In addition, a number of far-right Christian groups call for requiring that civil laws in the United States pass a biblical litmus test. David Barton‘s WallBuilders organization in Texas is one of them. But to suggest that all Christians — conservative, moderate or liberal — support such extremism would be absurd and an example of outright bigotry. The same is true for people (who often know little about Islam beyond the smears and stereotypes in which they traffic) who try to demonize all Muslims.
The Texas Eagle Forum and other religious-right pressure groups claim to support religious liberty. The reality is that they support religious freedom only for those who share their fundamentalist beliefs. In short, they want government to pick and choose which religious beliefs to favor or disfavor in our laws and our society. Right now they want government to persecute Muslims. In the past they targeted Jews and Catholics. Who will be next?
What Texas Eagle Forum supports is tyranny — the same kind of tyranny that our nation’s founders fought and worked so hard to prevent.
Well, it was a tough Tuesday. However, we must pick up the banner and continue the battle against theo-fascism. I will stay in the battle.
These folks would have been right at home in 1930s Germany. Scary.
Well, Oklahoma voted to outlaw Sharia law on that side of the Red River on Tuesday.
Not that the Islamic version was even in the running for the Oklahoma legislature’s consideration…..
And, if we achieve what Elijah Abraham recommends, I’m sure we’ll see lemonade springs, soda water fountains, cigarette trees, and rock candy mountains in every town.
You know. This just goes to show you what many sensible people have said for many years now. Behaviorally, there is not a dime’s worth of difference between Christian fundamentalists and Islamic fundamentalists. They are both, by nature, totalitarian extremists. Neither one of them do humanity any real service. Both twist the central threads of their faiths into all sorts of difficult contortions that no sane Christian or follower of Islam would even recognize as being true. Their chief approach to scripture is to scratch whatever evil itch is in their hearts, then go to the Bible Or Koran to find verses that appear to support it and ignore all of the ones that do not. Theologians say that this is possible primarily because they practice an approach to scripture called “eisigesis.” Fundamentalists by nature have strong eisigesist tendencies.
Of course, I could just quit all of this intellectual evaluation and cut right to the heart of the matter:
FRUIT…C-A-A-A KES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I just did a little research. Marilyn Statler, the author of the article in question, is an administrative assistant over at the Texas Eagle Forum. Read that as “secretary.” No wonder it sounds so outlandish.
Sharia Law is unknown even in Dearborn, Michigan which may have the highest number of Muslim residents in North America. However, nothing of Sharia was or ever has been on the ballot – despite Republican propaganda to the contrary. (I am from Michigan).
The same words and phrases written above against Muslims have been written against Jews, that Jews have taken seats in Congress and state and local races, that Jews own all the banks and are taking over the world. (Actually, we own or founded just a few financial institutions, hee hee. And Jews number less than something like 0.01% of the total world’s population. If we were to “take over the world,” that would be somehing no less than miraculous).
Everyone of good will must band together to stop these anti-Muslim lies before the same lies are said of YOU.
Does your county have a sheriff? Is “algebra” required in your local high school? Are secret Muslim indocrtrinators teaching your children to count in “arabic numuerals”? If so, I would be afraid. Very, very afraid.
We should donate a translated edition of German laws and regulations from 1933-1945 to these people with ‘Jew’ replaced by ‘Muslim’ for the reader’s convenience. Why should they put all this effort into coming up with new ones when there is glorious precedent.
On the other hand, that would be foreign law and therefore impure. But the same could be said about the Bible. Noone mentioned in there has ever been to the US (unless you believe the Mormons). Also the beloved torture…eh. enhanced interrogation..manuals were in part direct translations from German and Red Chinese sources. But we know that Jesus condemned those that insist on consistency.
No matter who’s the target, bigotry is still bigotry. It’s an endemic disease that infects the right, especially those soaked in religious self-righteousness who have always sought out demons on whom to blame every failing or everything they didn’t understand. In the 19th century there were Roman Catholics, especially the Irish. At the time of the Civil War and for the next 100+ years it was blacks. Along the way Italians and Eastern Europeans (especially the Catholics) became targets. Then came the Communists with their superhuman powers and their first cousins, the socialists. Now Muslims and olive skinned immigrants have been elevated to demonhood. Then along comes Barack Hussein Obama who, no matter what he does, has confirmed their worst suspicions about “the other.”
Wait a minute. I just got a brain flash here. Why are these people so afraid of Islam—really? Are they afraid that Cytocop. David, and I would be oppressed? I doubt it. They would want them to take us over, wash us, oppress us, and sell tickets to the event.
No. No. No. No. No. They are so afraid because Islamic fundamentalism is so much like Christian fundamentalism. It is the closeness in belief that scares them. America is evil and dacadent. Men must control women. The list goes on and on. They have many of the same concerns, and they remember how the early Catholic Church easily absorbed followers of other religions into Catholicism by noting similarities between barbarian religious beliefs and their own, which made Catholicism more attractive.
I think the Christian fundamentalist leaders might just fear that many of their own members, and perhaps they themselves, could be drawn to Islam like a moth to a flame. Potential Christian fundamentalists could be drawn to it, thus decreasing their church memberships in the future.