Our AFDI/SIOA Jessica Mokdad Human Rights conference is this Sunday in Dearborn, and the defenders of honor killing are planning a rally to oppose our stand for freedom. We also fully expect they’ll be trying to disrupt ours, as they increasingly are adopting the tactics of Hitler’s brownshirts.
“Pro-honor killing”? Yes. Remember: these groups are playing the usual Islamic supremacist Orwellian game, claiming to represent human rights and freedom and demonizing us as hatemongers, when in reality, by doing so, and by ignoring and denying the Islamic justifications for honor killing, they are running interference for the practice, and making sure that more girls will be honor-killed in the United States in the future.
These Islamic supremacists and Leftist tools are claiming that Pamela Geller and others originated the idea that Jessica Mokdad was the victim of an honor killing. In reality, Darwin Jiles, a close friend of Jessica, has said this: “Jessica was someone who wanted to have liberties, like every other young lady that is born in America outside of the traditions of Islam are able to do, to pursue her own happiness and to pursue her own dreams.”Jessica would wear [the Islamic headcovering, the hijab] it when she was with her family, and when she wasn’t with her family, she let it be very known that she didn’t want to wear it, that she did not want to be a part of this forced Islamic religion. She was very clear with that to me. And so Cassandra really is portraying a false picture. And Pamela has every right to place the conference to be named after Jessica in regards to this, because it was Islam that caused her death.”
“Local, National Groups to Host Islamophobia Town Hall Sunday in Dearborn,” by Jessica Carreras for the Dearborn Patch, April 25 (thanks to Pamela Geller):
Local and national Arab American and Muslim groups will gather this Sunday at the Doubletree Hotel just outside of Dearborn in hopes of counteracting an anti-Islamic conference being held at the same time.
In a statement sent out Wednesday, the Arab American Institute announced that they will host a community town hall on Islamophobia at 1 p.m. on Sunday with a slew of local and national speakers–including religious leaders, media representatives, and political leaders.
The event they seek to fight is the Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference, also taking place Sunday at Dearborn’s Hyatt Regency Hotel. Hosted by political commentators and outspoken critics of Islam Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, the conference aims to expose what they claim is blatant evidence of the persecution of women in the Muslim faith.
Jessica Mokdad, for whom the conference was named, was murdered in 2011 in Warren, MI. Police arrested her stepfather for the crime, and some–Gellar included–have speculated that the shooting was an “honor killing” due to her rejection of Islam.
Mokdad’s family told Fox News Detroit that “absolutely it was not.”
Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute, said in a statement that the community should not stand idly as the conference takes place.
“They are exploiting the tragedy of a young Arab American girl to promote a bigoted agenda,” she said. “It is shameful.
“And unlike the irrelevant (Quran-burning Pastor Terry) Jones, Geller and Spencer have thousands of followers, and are given airtime to spew their hate on major American news networks,” she added. “This group, we cannot ignore.”
The Islamophobia Town Hall will include multiple speakers, including AAI President James Zogby, journalist and blogger Sara Posner, Executive Director of the Council for American-Islamic Relations of Michigan Dawud Walid, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee of Michigan Director Imad Hamad, Imam Sayed Qazwini, state Rep. Rashida Tlaib and several others.