Tag Archives: CAIR-Chicago
Muslim leaders push for comprehensive immigration reform
By Rhys Leahy
On Thursday May 30th, the Chicago chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations hosted a press conference in their office on State Street, with leaders of Muslim communities in the Chicago metropolitan area, in an attempt to garner support for immigration reform.
After revising a security fault in the Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013, found after the Boston Marathon bombing, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted on May 9th with a bipartisan majority of 13 to 5 to move the bill to the senate floor. The bill – should it be passed into law – would provide a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants. The senate vote is scheduled for June.
Greeting card turns children’s “Muslim” doll into “Terrorist” doll
By Ahmed Rehab
We missed the humor: CAIR-Chicago spotted this troubling greeting card (pictured below) in a local store.
The card features a photo of a Muslim doll with a Hijab (headscarf) that many Muslim women wear out of religious observance. The The talking bubbles placed on top of the doll’s photo read, “The Talking Doll, Pull string for message, if you dare,” and “She’ll Love You To Death! She’ll Blow Your Brains Out!” The inside of the card reads “Hope your birthday is a BLOW OUT!”
The card is produced by NobleWorks Inc. with credit for its design given to “Ron Kanfi” according to the company’s website, www.nobleworkcards.com. The motto of the company printed under their logo on the back of the card is “modern cards for modern people.”
Notice that nothing identifies this doll as a terrorist in the minds of the card designers other than that she wears a Hijab. Moreover, she – like many Muslim girl who choose to wear the Hijab – is a smiling, non-threatening normal-looking female wearing a pink Hijab and a flower-patterned dress. The unmistakable message behind the “humor” is that even the most peaceful looking Muslims are synonymous and exchangeable with terrorists.
Pamela Geller’s self-defeating quest to “defeat” jihad
By Matthew Barry
I recently joined the rarefied heights achieved by The Children’s Museum of Manhattan and Butterball Turkey in being recognized by Pamela Geller as an imminent threat to the survival of Western Civilization, thanks to my recent piece in the Monitor about the #MyJihad campaign. Rather than sitting back and basking in my honor, I would like take this opportunity to respond and correct some of the most egregious insults that the truth suffered in it.
The Not So Innocent
There is no doubt that the short film entitled “The Innocence of Muslims” left a bitter taste in the mouths of Muslims, American Muslims, and every other reasonable person worldwide. There are still many debates as to who was behind it and what its direct purpose was, but the gauche representation and false depictions succeeded to outrage, confuse, and humiliate across the board.
AFDI ad campaign: Another toxic initiative
“IN ANY WAR BETWEEN THE CIVILIZED MAN AND THE SAVAGE, SUPPORT THE CIVILIZED MAN. ✡ SUPPORT ISRAEL ✡ DEFEAT JIHAD”
This message was displayed on buses throughout the San Francisco metropolitan area in the form of pro-Israel advertisements, which caused some disturbance among the neighborhood spreading nation wide. The infamous anti-Islam group American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and main supporter/sponsor Pam Geller, was granted the permission to exercise her first amendment right to display controversial advertisements on the side of MTA and MUNI public transportation. If the first amendment is synonymous with belittlement then Geller’s was well applied.
The Children of Syria: A History of Violence
Recently, I read an article in the New York Times, titled “Syrian Children Offer Glimpse of a Future of Reprisals.” In it, David Kilpatrick wrote of the hundreds of Syrian children in Jordan’s Zataari camp who are forced to spend their days in tents, away from home, without the food, shelter, and education they desperately need. Mr. Kilpatrick’s thesis was that all of the Sunni children he met in this camp were overwhelmed by their hatred of President Bashar Al-Assad, his government, his supporters, and most importantly, the Alawites – members of a Shia sect of Islam which makes up ten per cent of its population.
The inequality of hate
By Matthew Barry
Recently, Fox News ran a piece with the headline “Did mental illness fuel Wisconsin massacre-or was it terrorism?” Read the headline again. You might find the unspoken implication: the conscious decision to commit terrorism, to kill and maim innocent people, has to be the act of a sane man. Not meaning to kill people but doing it anyway makes one insane. A strange conclusion, isn’t it?
The media’s silence on the genocide of Rohingya Muslims
Genocide remembrance in the United States follows a dispiriting pattern. We read in horror the accounts of Armenians, Jews, Rwandan Hutus and others who were slaughtered by the millions, shudder, and promise to ourselves and the world “never again.” Yet when the time comes for each generation to stand up and to do the right thing where others once stayed silent, we shirk our duties to humanity and let history repeat itself yet again.
The media’s (false) dilemma: Word choice
By Sarah Goomar
Tom Krattenmaker, a member of USA Today’s Board of Contributers and a writer on religion and the public sphere recently wrote an opinion piece titled “Use ‘terrorist’ label carefully and consistently”. Krattenmaker begins his piece by highlighting an important disparity between two recent events that received a fair amount of media attention: in the first, he details Nidal Hasan’s shooting spree at Fort Hood, where 13 were killed and 30 wounded. In the second, he recalls the death of six people including a U.S. District Judge and the injury of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, among others, at the hands of Jared Loughner.
What’s in a name: Challenging the word “Islamist”
By Isamar Mendoza
The word “Islamist” is used constantly when reporting news about Muslims all over the world; usually in contexts that demonize Islam and Muslims. Reporters misleadingly use the term out of accurate context and use it to describe anyone from political parties to faith-based civil rights organizations to average American citizens. Rather than becoming more informed of what’s happening in the Muslim world, readers are left even more confused and one of the most misunderstood and inaccurately portrayed regions in the world becomes even more vilified, and even more mysterious.
