Islamophobia Watch

A Muslim advocacy organization has released public service announcements – including one featuring a Muslim firefighter who responded on 9/11 – as part of a campaign to fight recent anti-Muslim bigotry.

"Muslim Americans were among the victims and also Muslim Americans were among the first responders," said Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations at a Wednesday (Sept. 1) news conference at the National Press Club.

"We also should acknowledge that 9/11 hit us all hard and we should not allow those who seek political and religious division in the United States to win," Awad said.

One of the public service announcements features Hisham Tawfiq of the New York Fire Department, tearfully recalling how he learned his firefighting colleague was missing after the attacks on the Twin Towers. "I'm a New York City firefighter and I responded to 9/11 and I am Muslim," he said in the ad.

Awad was joined by other Muslim organization leaders who decried recent attacks on Muslims and protests of a proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero and mosques in other parts of the country. They urged greater local police protection of Muslims in their communities.

Huffington Post, 1 September 2010

See CAIR press release, 1 August 2010

View all the PSAs here

Update:  See also "US Islamic center to fight Islamophobia", PressTV, 2 September 2010

It is "unethical, insensitive and inhumane" to oppose the planned mosque near ground zero, more than 50 leading Muslim organizations said Wednesday as they cast the intense debate as a symptom of religious intolerance in America.

Leaders of the Majlis Ash-Shura of Metropolitan New York, an Islamic leadership council that represents a broad spectrum of Muslims in the city, gathered on the steps of City Hall to issue a statement calling for a stop to religious intolerance and affirming the right of the center's developers to build two blocks north of the site of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

"We support the right of our Muslim brothers who wish to build that center there," said Imam Al Amin Abdul Latif, president of the Majlis Ash-Shura. "However, the bigger issue and the broader issue is the issue of ethnic and religious hatred being spread by groups trying to stop the building of mosques and Islamic institutions across the country."

This is the first time that the council as a body has spoken out on the weeks-old debate over the proposed center. "When the issue became hotter and hotter, and people made more statements against the mosques, then we decided to get involved in it," said Syed Sajid Husain, secretary general of the council. He said the process of bringing together the leaders to agree on a statement also took a handful of meetings.

Leaders of the council said they were calling attention to what they claimed was an anti-Islamic climate, and that the development of a center near ground zero is simply one example.

They also cited a suspicious fire that damaged construction equipment at the site of a future mosque in Tennessee that is being investigated by the FBI, and the successful opposition to the proposed conversion of a property owned by a Catholic Church into a mosque and community center on Staten Island, a New York City borough off the southern tip of Manhattan.

Islamic leaders on Wednesday said they would support a move to another location, if that's what the imam and his supporters choose to do. But they emphasized that Muslims also were killed in the terrorist attacks and were first responders.

"We declare unethical, insensitive and inhumane, the notion that our co-religionists are not entitled to the respect of a place of worship according to their faith, near the location where men and women of our religion worked, lived and died – just like other people," the group's statement said in part.

The group is not associated with the planned Islamic center but is representative of a significant number of New York Muslim leaders.

Associated Press, 1 September 2010

See also ABNA, 2 September 2010