Yes, it’s true. We beat the mosque. The above tweet by Eboo Patel, an influential Muslim who writes in the Washington Post and elsewhere, shows just how powerful and effective the American Freedom Defense Initiative’s Stop Islamization of America program has been over the past year.
Patel, like many other Islamic supremacists these days, is trying to get Muslims and Leftists to boycott Lowe’s for dropping advertising on the deceptive and misleading All-American Muslim reality TV show. He calls strong-arming American businesses into advertising where they don’t wish to “pluralism.” But most importantly, he warns that “American Muslims will never be Ground Zero Mosque-d again.”
Patel knows that the Ground Zero mosque controversy was a huge defeat for Islamic supremacists in the U.S. And he knows it came at the hands of SIOA. Daisy Khan, wife of the Ground Zero Mosque Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf and one of the chief organizers of the project, said last year:
We were expecting some sort of, um, you know, resistance, but not an organized resistance. We were expecting that some families might need some hand-holding, we might want to speak to them. But what we did not expect is a national coalition of people coming together, the majority of them coming from outside New York. Pamela Geller is a lady, and Robert Spencer — together the two of them have formed something called Stop Islamization of America, and that is the group that is leading this.
We led the resistance, and we won. 70% of Americans oppose the Mosque. Mosque organizers have dropped plans for a 16-story mega-mosque. They did not break ground for their new building on September 11, 2011, as Daisy Khan initially announced that they would. They”re holding soirees in the old Burlington Coat Factory building that was severely damaged in the 9/11 attacks, and that they had planned to tear down, and are pretending that their “community center” is already open.
But it is nothing like what they had planned. With Obama behind them, and New York Mayor Bloomberg doing everything he could to get them past all legal and procedural hurdles, and with the media and government elites solidly in their corner, we still prevailed. Our rallies (here and here and here) as well as our conferences, Action Alerts, and ongoing protests and information pieces at Atlas Shrugs and Jihad Watch ultimately ground the Islamic supremacist machine to a halt.
They may be back to fight for their Islamic supremacist mosque — and so will we.
We got a great deal more done this year as well. We showed our documentary film on the Ground Zero Mosque to packed houses all over the country. This film informs people like no other resource about what’s really at stake in this controversy. We fought and will continue to fight against the outrages at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, where they”re planning to place human remains of victims seven stories underground, charge admission to see them, and include lavish profiles of the 9/11 hijackers. Not surprisingly, Daisy Khan is on the Board of the commission putting together the memorial, charged with making sure the Muslim perspective is represented in every aspect of the memorial.
But we will keep fighting.
This year we also continued our work exposing the human rights abuses of Islamic law and putting Islamic supremacists on the defensive in other arenas as well. We went to Jerusalem to dedicate the Aqsa Parvez Memorial Grove in memory of victims of honor killings worldwide. This was the first-ever recognition by anyone in the West that we would not allow the barbaric practice of Islamic honor killing to spread in free societies. We will continue to remember and memorialize the victims, whom their families all too often would prefer to be forgotten.
In line with this, please join us in Dearborn, Michigan on April 29 at a conference dedicated to another victim of honor killing in North America: the Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference.
We”re also continuing to pursue our long struggle for our First Amendment right to freedom of speech in the Dearborn and Detroit. in our eighteen-month struggle against Detroit’s SMART Transit after they refused to run our ads offering help to those threatened with death for leaving Islam. Don’t they have a right to live, also? Yet despite the fact that we won our case, Detroit Transit is appealing the ruling and still refusing to run the ads. But here again, we are not giving up.
AFDI/SIOA also started fighting back against the Leftist/Islamic supremacist control of the narrative and manipulative, propagandistic use of the term “hate group” to marginalize organizations that are defending freedom. Our organization created and published the AFDI Threats to Freedom Index. This is the first-ever compilation of groups such as Hamas-linked CAIR, International ANSWER and many others that are working to restrict Americans” freedoms and enable the imposition of Islamic supremacist and/or authoritarian Leftist restrictions upon our thoughts and behavior.
No one is doing the work we are doing and accomplishing what we are accomplishing. No one else is putting the Islamic supremacists on the defensive and calling attention to the human rights abuses that they”re excusing and justifying the way we are.
Yet we have done all this and much more with almost no resources. Contrary to fallacious and defamatory Leftist media reports, we don’t have a lavish budget. We don’t have big foundations or generous endowments behind us. We don’t even draw salaries from AFDI/SIOA. For every initiative, we have to go begging to the few donors who see the value of our work for freedom.
And make no mistake: the enemies of free speech made great gains in 2011 as well. The lines are being drawn, the walls are closing in, and we have to push harder than ever before, work faster than ever before, and do more work behind the scenes than we ever did before. Otherwise the forces of darkness will certainly prevail, and freedom of speech and resistance to Islamic supremacism will become dim memories in the United States.
Our work influences the culture. You can see it in the Ground Zero Mosque victory, in the attention we have called to the deceptive lack of labeling of halal meat, in the success of our bus and taxi ad campaigns calling attention to Islamic honor killing and Islam’s death penalty for apostates, and so much more.
But we can’t do it without your help.
In this great struggle, we are all the soldiers. There is no army, no law enforcement agency, no government official who is going to save our freedoms for us. We have to do it ourselves. Please think about the work AFDI/SIOA has done, and all the things we would be able to accomplish if we only had the resources. Please consider giving $100 to our work — every bus ad campaign costs $10,000 or more for just a handful of buses, so that is a minimal contribution, but every little bit helps.
We are fighting for America. We are fighting for freedom. We are fighting for you. Please join us. We have plenty more planned. And we need you. Contribute to the fight. Paypal writeatlas@aol.com or director@jihadwatch.org (tax-deductible).
We cannot do anything without your activism and your contributions.
Yours in liberty,
Pamela Geller, Executive Director
Robert Spencer, Associate Director
American Freedom Defense Initiative/Stop Islamization of America