Out of office for less than two months, former state Republican Party Chairman Shawn Steel is still on the hustings, trying to pitch that "big tent" of inclusion the GOP covets to return to relevancy in California.
In two appearances at campus pro-troop rallies, Steel took dead aim at Islam, referring to it as "a diseased religion" at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
At the University of Southern California, he was more specific.
"The Islamic community has a cancer growing inside it, which hates Jews, hates freedom and hates Western society," Steel said, as reported by the Daily Trojan, the campus newspaper. "The disease of Islam must be rectified. It's kill or be killed." ---
Evangelical charities with an overt hostility to Islam are preparing to distribute food, water, medicine and building materials in Iraq, all in the name of Jesus.
One of the charities, Samaritan's Purse, is run by Franklin Graham, the son of the evangelist Billy Graham, who declared after the 11 September attacks that Islam was "a very evil and wicked religion". Another is the Southern Baptist Convention, whose former president once described the Prophet Mohamed as "a demon-possessed paedophile". About 800 of SBC's volunteers are reported to be on their way to Iraq to deliver food packages labelled with a verse from St John's Gospel, in Arabic, saying that "grace and truth were realised through Jesus Christ".
Such insensitivity is viewed by some as playing into the hands of those to whom the "war on terrorism" is a religious crusade. But what really riles Muslim groups all over the world is that these activities are overtly supported by the Bush administration. Franklin Graham, a long-standing friend of the President, was invited to participate in this year's Good Friday prayer service at the Pentagon, angering many in the Defence Department. Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the invitation "sends entirely the wrong message to the Muslim and Arab world ... This kind of incident can undo any kind of bridges built by a hundred public affairs officers at the Pentagon."
Franklin Graham has a record of hostility to Islam and unabashed proselytising, even where it is illegal. After the 1991 Gulf War, he infuriated Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of Operation Desert Storm, by shipping tens of thousands of Arabic-language New Testaments to Saudi Arabia in defiance of Saudi law and the US-Saudi military alliance.
In two appearances at campus pro-troop rallies, Steel took dead aim at Islam, referring to it as "a diseased religion" at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Мне кажется что болен человек, который так говорит, и общество, если оно поддерживает такого человека...
