US anti-Islam group incites tension through publishing addresses of Muslims

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Thursday 26 Nov 2015 - 10:01 Makkah mean time-14-2-1437 Image from The Dallas Morning News Dallas, US (IINA) - The organizer of a recent armed anti-Muslim protest at an Irving mosque published the names and addresses of dozens of Muslims and “Muslim sympathizers” online Wednesday, The Dallas Morning News (DMN) reported. An anti-Islam group, which staged an armed protest outside a Dallas Islamic centre, has posted names and addresses of Muslims and “Muslim sympathizers” on its Facebook page, adding to growing tensions in north Texas following the Paris terror attacks, The Guardian reported. The group, which calls itself the Bureau of American Islamic Relations, staged an armed protest outside an Islamic centre in the Dallas suburb of Irving last Saturday. “We’re here protesting Syrian refugees coming to America, protesting the Islamization of America,” David Wright, a spokesman, told local FOX4 News. The list of more than 50 names is taken from a record of people who spoke or signed up to express an opinion at an Irving city council meeting in March where the council voted to endorse a planned state bill emphasizing the already enshrined primacy of domestic laws above foreign laws. Many Muslims in the community felt targeted by the event, which came after the Irving mayor, Beth Van Duyne, made waves in the rightwing media by making references to an Islamic dispute mediation panel that wrongly became characterized as an “illegal Sharia court”. Commenting on the incident, Alia Salem, executive director of the Dallas-Fort Worth branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said the atmosphere at last week’s protest was “very threatening. They had AR-15 rifles, they had their faces covered.” The open carrying of long guns is legal in Texas. Since the Paris attacks on 13 November, Salem said, CAIR has “gotten a large increase in hate-crime reporting”. She said that she herself had twice been verbally abused. Feces and torn pages of the Qur’an were thrown at a mosque in the Austin suburb of Pflugerville. CAIR’s national headquarters in Washington issued a statement saying it “has received more reports about acts of Islamophobic discrimination, intimidation, threats, and violence targeting American Muslims (or those perceived to be Muslim) and Islamic institutions in the past week and a half than during any other limited period of time since the 9/11 terror attacks”. Another rally is planned Saturday at the Islamic Center to protest Wright’s group and show support for area Muslims.“ The mosque in Irving receives a lot of hate and ugliness,” said Tonya Cadenhead, an Irving resident who is organizing the event. “I decided to do something nice for them and show them not everyone has an ugly heart,” DMN reported. SM/IINA