1. Greeley CO and Grand Island, Nebraska: JB Swift
meat packing plants. Muslims get special break
times. Non-Muslims protested because of the
inconvenience caused to them.
2. DELL Computers: Nashville. In February 2005,
thirty-one Muslims working at the Nashville,
Tennessee plant of the computer firm Dell walked off
the job after they were denied permission to leave
their workstations and pray. Dell fired the Muslim
workers, but CAIR took up their cause and began to
pressure Dell to change its practices in order to
accommodate Islamic prayer during the workday. Dell
quickly caved. Within a month the corporation had
agreed to reinstate the employees who had walked
out, give them back pay, and allow them time on the
job for Islamic prayer. Dell also agreed to give its
managers training in accommodating Muslim demands in
the workplace.
3. TARGET: in March 2007 Muslim cashiers at some
Target store outlets in Minneapolis began to refuse
to ring up pork products, causing delays as they had
other cashiers handle the untouchable items or even
told customers to ring them up themselves. Target
Corporation finally opted for the path of least
resistance, offering to allow the Muslim cashiers to
wear gloves while operating the cash register, so as
to avoid touching any of the offending pork, or to
shift the recalcitrant, pork-hating cashiers to
other jobs within the store.
4. FIRED for EATING BACON: Lina Morales, who for
ten months held a job at Rising Star, a telecoms
company in Florida. One fateful day in 2004 she was
eating a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich at
work, and was summarily fired for violating a
company rule against eating pork products on company
premises. However, Morales said that she had never
agreed to comply by any such rule, and indeed, When
I got hired there, they said we don't care what
religion you are.
Special accommodation for Muslims:
5. In September 2007, the Indianapolis Airport
announced that, as part of a $1.07 billion terminal
renovation scheduled to be completed by November
2008, footbaths would be installed in a restroom
used by cab drivers -- so that the drivers, almost
all Muslims, could easily perform the rituals
required before Islamic prayers. The floor-level
sinks, which cost $400-600 each, would be financed
through airport revenue. An airport spokesman, David
Dawson, insisted,... These facilities are for
everybody's use.
In schools:
6. In 2007 a public school, the Minneapolis
Community and Technical College, announced plans to
construct full preparation facilities for Islamic
prayer despite having prohibited a coffee cart from
playing Christmas carols on campus the previous
year. New York University followed suit in October
2007, as have many other public colleges and
universities. Seventeen universities have announced
plans to install footbaths, including Boston
University, George Washington University and Temple
University. And all of this is going on at the
instigation of the MSA -- a Muslim Brotherhood
organization.
7. Ridgeland School District 122 “ comprising five
schools in Oak Lawn, Illinois “ blazed a trail when
it banned pork from school cafeterias, so as to
avoid offending Muslim students. (The possibility
that non-Muslim students might be offended by having
to conform their eating habits to Islamic dietary
regulations was apparently not considered.) The pork
ban even included Jell-O, since gelatin is made from
pork products.
8. In San Diego's Carver Elementary School, when
over one hundred Somali Muslim students enrolled
after a charter school closed in 2006, school
officials scheduled breaks so that Muslim students
could pray during school time, and even introduced
sex-segregated classes to conform to Islamic
sensibilities. Pork, of course, vanished from the
school cafeteria, and Arabic classes were added to
the curriculum. Investor's Business Daily
editorialized,... In effect, Carver administrators
have carved out a school within a school expressly
for Muslims, elevating them above Christian and
Jewish students. They've had 15 minutes of
instruction time taken away from them, so Muslims
can roll out their prayer mats. It amounts to a
special privilege afforded a specific religion,
which plainly does not have our best interests at
heart.
Sharia finance
Barclays, Citibank, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank,
Dow Jones, Goldman Sachs, HSBC Bank, Lloyd's,
Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Standard
&Poors have created “Sharia Advisory Boards,
staffed with Islamic clerics and scholars, in order
to help them bring their financial practices into
line with Islamic norms “ so as to attract Muslim
investors and help Muslims in the West find ways to
avoid breaking Islamic law in their financial
transactions.
A journalist who has exhaustively documented Sharia
finance initiatives, Alyssa A. Lappen, reported that
among the perils of shariâ finance, according to a
January [2008] analysis by Moody's Investors Service
are: A central role in investment decisions for
sharia scholars who are actually Islamic clerics;
investors being forced to accept weak positions;
short track records of major investors; multiple
complex asset types; risky interest rates and new
ventures; plus a lack of transparency combined with
corporate management and risk control in the hosting
Third World countries.
