Religious liberty for me …
by digby
The latest anti-Muslim event is scheduled for this Friday and Saturday and promises to feature protesters, many of them reportedly likely to be armed, outside 20-plus mosques in various states across the country. These anti-Muslim rallies are part of what right-wing organizers have dubbed a “Global Rally for Humanity” to encourage “fellow patriots” to unite in protest against the presence of Muslims in America.
Jon Ritzheimer, the guy who led the armed protest outside a Phoenix mosque in May, is apparently one of the leaders of these events. For those who have luckily forgotten about Ritzheimer, he had gone into hiding after the May protest, but not before reportedly creating a GoFundMe campaign hoping to raise $10 million off his anti-Muslim antics. However, after he failed to raise any money, Ritzheimer channeled his inner Anthony Weiner, claiming that he was victim of hackers, although media reports were very skeptical of this claim.
Anti-Muslim bullshit has truly been off the charts lately. In the last few weeks alone we have seen Ben Carson declare that Islam is not compatible with the U.S. Constitution. Also, we saw Donald Trump refuse to challenge a person at his event who announced, “We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims.”
A 14-year-old Muslim student, Ahmed Mohamed, was arrested a few weeks ago for bringing a homemade clock to school. And we have seen a spike in attacks on mosques, the latest being hateful graffiti sprayed on the walls of a mosque in Louisville, Kentucky.
Despite these incidents, just last Friday Bill Maher declared on his HBO show that the concept of Islamophobia was “silly.”
It may just end up being another fringey failure. They keep trying these things and they don’t get a lot of traction. Still, you never know. With the kind of rhetoric coming from Republican presidential candidates and gun nuts hanging on their every word …
This made me sad:
I must say that you really get a sense of the ignorance of the organizers when you realize that one of the mosques targeted, Masjid Muhammad in Washington, D.C., is headed by Talib Shareef, a man who is a retired chief master sergeant who served 30 years in the United States Air Force. I wonder if Shareef ever thought he would be called to defend his own freedom of religion on U.S. soil.
A lot of these people would say it isn’t his soil.