Groups planning nationwide protests Saturday against the importation of Muslim refugees are being vilified by Muslim civil rights groups and major media outlets.
The “Global Rally for Humanity” has included calls by some organizers for protesters to show up Saturday in front of mosques, armed.
While the protests are in most cases targeting specifically the U.S. government’s refugee resettlement program, which involves refugees hand-selected by the United Nations and imported directly from the Third World into more than 175 U.S. cities and towns, the establishment media are portraying the protests as “anti-Muslim” with little or no mention of the refugee program and how it works.
CNN, CBS, the Washington Post and other media giants have all done stories this week about the planned protests, quoting “Muslim civil rights” leaders from the Council of American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, the Southern Poverty Law Center and other left-of-center organizations.
Protests are planned for Dearborn, Michigan; Amarillo, Texas; Phoenix; Murfreesboro, Tennessee; Oklahoma City; Jacksonville, Florida; and about a dozen other cities, all organized through Facebook. The Oathkeepers, various biker groups, an array of veterans and everyday Americans appear to be involved based on the Facebook posts. The group’s national Facebook page encourages each state to form its own Facebook group and rally against “radical Islam,” which it says makes daily attacks against humanity on a global scale.
A similar rally was held earlier this year in Phoenix, organized by Jon Ritzheimer, a U.S. military veteran whom Southern Poverty Law Center calls a “white nationalist.” Ritzheimer, a U.S. Marine who fought in the Middle East, says he has had to go into hiding because he has been targeted by “lone wolf” Muslim attackers.
Watch video of Ritzheimer speaking at Muhammad cartoon rally in Phoenix in June:
[jwplayer phN46UwL]
Pamela Geller, author of “Stop the Islamizatin of America,” addressed the issue Thursday in a blog titled, “The Media Frenzy on a News Story That Hasn’t Even Happened,” in which she accused the media of whipping up “vicious propaganda” ahead of the rallies, which she has played no role in organizing.
“The media is in a constant state of frenzied panic to advance and promote the lie of Islamophobia and Muslim-victimhood myth. Despite a complete lack of any real evidence, the media frames opposition of jihad terror, FGM (female genital mutilation), creed apartheid, gender apartheid as ‘islamophobia’ or this pearl ‘anti-Muslim extremists’ as if one should support those things. They take their marching orders from terror-tied groups like the U.S. front group for Hamas, CAIR, and Muslim Brotherhood organization, ISNA.
“And the media mania to advance this complete fiction is at fever pitch this week. There have been a number of news stories, crafted from whole cloth, about armed Islamophobes descending upon poor, victimized Muslims this weekend. Protests against jihad terror are rational response to the unspeakable carnage in the cause of Islam. But rest assured the media will be at these protests looking to capture a plant or infiltrator to splash across their front pages. The same pages that never print the word jihad.”
CAIR has put out alerts urging mosques to take extra security measures ahead of the rallies. CAIR has its own history of violence and providing material support to terrorist organizations (see WND’s Rogue’s Gallery of terror-connected CAIR officials), but the anti-Muslim groups give groups like CAIR and SPLC an opportunity to do their favorite thing, play the victim, said William Gheen of ALIPAC, an anti-illegal immigration group.
Gheen’s organization announced Friday that it has adjusted its platform to include refugee resettlement among the policies it opposes. But he said his group did not plan to join in Saturday’s protests.
Geller said she would advise against coming to a protest with an open display of weapons.
Gheen, who helped organize the more than 300 anti-illegal immigration protests held nationwide in July 2014, agreed.
The reason is simple, he said.
“The American public is always going to side with the underdog and is not going to side with anyone taking up arms,” he said. “I think Americans should protest the refugee resettlement program, but I don’t think they should take guns. Americans are the innocent defenders here trying to defend our country, but anything that involves taking up arms would be viewed as offensive and thus hand a victory to our liberal counterparts. Anyone who would take a gun would be unintentionally assisting the Muslim refugee resettlement supporters. You’re handing a victory to the people inside the mosque and the people who support the refugee resettlement. It’s counterproductive.”
Gheen said one of the reasons his group, ALIPAC, decided to add refugee resettlement to its list of policies to oppose is because, after researching the issue, he discovered it’s the same people backing the resettlement of Middle Eastern Muslims into U.S. communities who are backing the influx of illegal immigrants crossing the Southern border.
“The socialists and Muslims are working together. They are the invaders, they are the colonizers and any protest should be no camouflage, no open display of guns and exclusively American flags,” Gheen said.
While no true American patriot would fire a gun at anyone at a protest rally, Gheen and Geller both mentioned that agents provocateur could easily infiltrate and do something ugly while the national media cameras are rolling.
That could then be spun in such a way as to demonize law-abiding Americans who are merely exercising their First Amendment rights, he said.
“Large numbers of American flags, and then the most powerful thing people can do is, take a shower and shave, but show up as you are. If you’re a soccer mom show up looking like a soccer mom, if you’re a farmer show up looking like a farmer, if you’re an attorney show up looking like an attorney. Come as you are, and let that be seen by America and hold American flags. Make it clear that any type of protest of refugee resettlement is a defense of your homeland, defensive, defensive … because we are responding to aggression; we are not engaging in aggression. I’m a big believer that with the powers we face, that we need to be like lambs among wolves. We need to be Christ-like and lamb like.”
James Neighbors, a Southern California-based activist who heads up Overpasses for America and was also involved in last year’s protests against Obama’s immigration policies, is also skeptical of any protest that invites people to “come armed.”
“It’s gonna have unfortunate side effects if they do that,” he said. “Americans fought for the underdog in the Civil War. World War II was fought to stop the Jews from being exterminated. So if they turn this around in a way that we’re the aggressors, then 10 years from now the problem with Islam is going to be much worse than it is now. I do what I can to expose the truth, but you have to be careful about how you do it. We don’t go protesting off in the hood against Obama for a reason; we’re not trying to provoke a violent confrontation, and telling people to show up outside of a mosque armed, that’s pretty blatant. That’s unnecessarily confrontational. ”
Gheen, who is a fierce supporter of the Second Amendment, says protesters are hurting their own cause by taking arms to an event like this.
“The people causing the problems are the refugee resettlers, Obama and the ones helping him bring them in, but by bringing arms, you’re shifting the focus, or allowing the resettlement community to shift the focus,” Gheen said.
The other problem of coming armed to a protest is it might scare away others who would otherwise like to come out and protest, Gheen said.
“I believe Americans want to protest refugee resettlement, and the American media is blocking the coverage of that,” he said, at least with any honest type of coverage.
