UPDATE #2 (6/20): See the article today at FrontPage, “Not In Our Name, Gov. Strickland”.
On Sunday, Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland spoke at the annual banquet for the Ohio chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). According to a press release on the CAIR website, Gov. Strickland said:
“On behalf of all Ohioans, [my wife and I] appreciate your vision to promote justice and mutual understanding. We gather under CAIR-Ohio’s theme this year, ‘American Muslims: Connecting and Sharing,’ to do just that, to connect and share and get to know each other better.”As mentioned in an article back in March, “CAIR’s Blood Money”, last year’s CAIR-OH banquet featured as its keynote speaker Siraj Wahhaj, who has been in the news recently for his fundraising efforts for Hilliard’s Sunrise Academy (see the previous post, “Sunrise Academy’s Fundraising Friends”).
One example of CAIR-OH’s efforts to “promote justice and mutual understanding” in the past year were the efforts last July of its Cincinnati chapter, whose spokeswoman, Karen Dabdoub, began inciting religious hatred of non-Muslims, accusing the Xenia, Ohio community of the dreaded “Islamophobia” following the bombing of a Muslim-owned restaurant in that community. She told the local news media:
‘Anytime an attack like this happens, the perception in the Arab and Muslim community is that it is ethnically or religiously motivated. Especially in the absence of perpetrators being caught by law enforcement, that’s the fear. Until that (motivation) is discovered, people speculate, rightly or wrongly.’The problem was, of course, that several days before police discovered that the restaurant’s Jordanian-born owners were behind the multiple blasts. Even though Ms. Dabdoub was aware that non-Muslims were not behind the violence, she contiued to issue indictments against the non-Muslim community. CAIR-OH never apologized. (For more information on the incident, see the American Thinker article, “Kafir-phobia: Americans as Violent Anti-Muslim Bigots”.)
All that to say: You don’t speak for all Ohioans in your praise of CAIR-OH, Gov. Strickland. Many Muslims and non-Muslims alike are concerned about CAIR-OH’s extremist agenda, and you do nothing but buttress the public credibility of an organization whose sole purpose is to incite ethnic and religious hatred and create barriers to “promote justice and mutual understanding” between Muslims and non-Muslims. When you praise CAIR-OH, Governor, it is not in our name.
