Monthly Archive for September, 2008

From Chris Rodda (author of Liars for Jesus exposing the “Christian nation” moosechunder being pushed on history classrooms, and research director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation):

[A] ‘chemical irritant’ was sprayed through a window of the Islamic Society of Greater Dayton, where 300 people were gathered for a Ramadan prayer service. The room that the chemical was sprayed into was the room where babies and children were being kept while their mothers were engaged in prayers.

As I understand it, no one was badly hurt. However, Rodda quotes an email she received from a friend of one of the victimized families:

“She tells me that her daughters slept with her last night, the little one in her arms and sobbing throughout the night. She tells me she is afraid, and will never return to the mosque, and I wonder what kind of country is this where people have to fear attending their place of worship?

“The children come into the room, and tell me they want to leave America and return to Syria, where they had fled to from Iraq. They say they like me, … , and other American friends — but they are too afraid and want to leave. Should a 6 and 7 year old even have to contemplate the safety of their living situation?

The incident coincided with:

This week, 28 million copies of a right-wing, terror propaganda DVD are being mailed and bundled in newspaper deliveries to voters in swing states. The 60-minute DVDs, titled Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West, are landing on doorsteps in a campaign coinciding with the 7th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Funding is coming from a New York-based group called the Clarion Fund, a shadowy outfit whose financial backers are unclear.

Rodda notes:

The presidential campaign edition of the Obsession DVD, currently being distributed by the Clarion Fund, carries the endorsement of the chair of the counter-terrorism department of the U.S. Naval War College, using the name and authority of an official U.S. military institution not only to validate an attack the religion of Islam, but to influence a political campaign. For these reasons, this endorsement has been included in MRFF’s second lawsuit against the Department of Defense, which was filed on September 25 in the Federal District Court in Kansas.

The incident took place on Friday; Rodda’s post was promoted to the front page of DailyKos on Sunday; there has at the time of this post still been almost no media coverage of this outside of the local Dayton paper.

Read it. It isn’t the same thing over and over. It spells out how not to be a hack. It spells out what it means to have some sort of integrity and not argue like you are a 14 year old flaming your enemy on Usenet, or perhaps writing a column for the HuffPo, or just blathering to fill up airtime, or happy to be on TV. Do the work.