Muslim and anti-Muslim groups go to war in bus, print ads
Cathy Lynn Grossman ("The Washington Post," May 21, 2014)
Washington — A public opinion war on Middle East politics is playing out
this spring in new advertising campaigns on public buses and in newspapers.
It began when the American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) launched bus ads
during the April Cherry Blossom Festival condemning U.S. aid to Israel because
of that country’s continuing occupation of Palestinian territories.
Then on Monday (May 19), Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense
Initiative countered by deploying 15-foot-long ads on 20 buses in the
Washington,
D.C., system that equate opposition to Israel’s policies with Nazism. One ad
shows the grand mufti of Jerusalem meeting Hitler during World War II.
“The bus system is considered public space, so speech has First Amendment
protections,” said Caroline Laurin, a spokeswoman for the Washington
Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. “We have no grounds to refuse ads due to
their content.”
AMP board member Osama Abu Irshaid, who lives in northern Virginia, has
seen the Hitler-mufti ad and finds it offensive and off point. “We don’t
condone what was inflicted on the Jews by Hitler,” Irshaid said. “We condemn
it as a crime against humanity. We denounce any crime against any human for
their religion or ideology.”
Finally, Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism took direct
aim at Muslim groups in a full-page ad Wednesday (May 21) in The New York
Times. Emerson’s group claims organizations such as the Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) “deny the truth behind the religious
motivation of
Islamic terrorists.”
Like Geller’s ads, the IPT ad is designed to circumvent the national media
that, the ad said, enforce a “censorship agenda of Islamist groups.”
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for CAIR, brushed off both Geller’s ads and the
IPT campaigns as the ongoing “Islamophobia industry that seeks to blame
Islam for any violence or terrorism anywhere in the world.” The goal of such
ads, he said, is to “demonize Islam and marginalize American Muslims.”
Meanwhile, Hooper said, his group, which will mail anyone a copy of the
Quran on request, has been quick to condemn outrages such as the Boko Haram
kidnapping of schoolgirls in Nigeria and the death sentence issued in Sudan
to a woman who converted to Christianity. Neither outrage, Hooper said, has
anything to do with true Islam.
“These are acts by extremists who misuse Islam for their own violent ends.”
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