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 Watch Live: Rejecting Islamophobia: A Community Stand Against Hate 
 
 Community town hall will be held in Dearborn, Michigan 
 
 Today, April 29th at 1PM 
 
 Rejecting Islamophobia: A Community Stand Against Hate 
 
 It’s not news to anyone in our community that anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias remains a problem. Arab Americans have mobilized to combat this trend both because it is wrong and because it undermines core American values, including religious freedom. We work against it in Washington when it takes the form of bad policies, and we responded to it when policymakers joined in the media circus around the manufactured crisis of Park 51 in lower Manhattan. Since then, we have seen the threat of Quran burnings, mosque protests, and anti-Sharia bills in multiple states across the country. 
 
 The Arab American community in Michigan is perhaps more familiar with these challenges than anyone else. From the politicizing of a fun, family-oriented Arab community festival to Terry Jones' visits to Dearborn, the community has faced these challenges with dignity and courage. With Terry Jones in particular, Dearborn’s Arab Americans did the right thing by keeping him marginalized and organizing an interfaith response that affirmed our values. 
 
 This week, we’re faced with the latest challenge when Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer bring their so-called “Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference” to Dearborn on Sunday. By presumptuously donning Ms. Mokdad's name on their conference, they are exploiting the tragedy of a young Arab American girl to promote a bigoted agenda. It is shameful. Unlike the irrelevant Jones, Geller and Spencer have thousands of followers, and are given airtime to spew their hate on major American news networks, as if they are respected analysts with just another viewpoint. This group, we cannot ignore. This is the time for our community to take a stand, along with all those who value America’s commitment to diversity and freedom of religion, against the politics of division and bigotry promoted by the Islamophobes. 
 
 Along with a tremendous group of local organizations, AAI has organized a community town hall on Islamophobia on the same day as their conference this Sunday, April 29 at 1pm at the Doubletree Hotel in Dearborn (5801 Southfield Road). AAI President Jim Zogby and Executive Director Maya Berry will be there, along with Eli Clifton, the co-author of a groundbreaking report on Geller and friends called Fear Inc., and prominent journalist and blogger Sarah Posner. The town hall will also feature community, interfaith, and religious leaders as well as Michigan public officials. We will directly challenge the narrative that will be presented by their conference and, more importantly, we will have a community conversation about how to respond to these continued attacks. This community will not leave bigotry and Islamophobia unchallenged. 
 
 Tagged as Issues, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Islamophobia, Profiling, Park 51, State Specific, Michigan 
 
 Disqus ||||| From staging a Texas competition to draw the prophet Muhammed to the protests against the so-called 9/11 mosque, Pamela Geller has led anti-Muslim campaigns for years. So who is she? (Jorge Ribas/The Washington Post) 
 
 From staging a Texas competition to draw the prophet Muhammed to the protests against the so-called 9/11 mosque, Pamela Geller has led anti-Muslim campaigns for years. So who is she? (Jorge Ribas/The Washington Post) 
 
 Pamela Geller, the woman behind the Texas cartoon contest attacked by two gunmen late Sunday, knew what she was doing when she staged the controversial event featuring irreverent depictions of the prophet Muhammad in Garland, Tex. 
 
 The Dallas suburb had hosted a pro-Muslim conference in January, about the time Islamist terrorists killed a dozen journalists with the satirical French publication Charlie Hebdo. Geller, a blogger and fierce critic of what she calls the “Islamization” of America, wanted to make a statement. 
 
 So she sponsored the Jihad Watch Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest in the same exhibition hall as the earlier conference. She and her associates invited 200 people and hired 40 heavily armed off-duty police officers and security guards to protect them. 
 
 And then they unveiled the pictures: A drawing of Muhammad on a unicycle. A picture of the prophet with a beard of snakes. An angry Muhammad wearing a turban, holding a sword and yelling: “You can’t draw me!” — a reference to the fact that depicting the prophet is considered blasphemous by many Muslims. 
 
 If the contest was intended as bait, it worked. Police say two men drove 1,000 miles from Phoenix, shot at a police car outside the event and were quickly killed by one of the hired guards. The shooting has been condemned by Muslim leaders, and Geller, too, has come under fire for staging an event many viewed as purposely provocative. 
 
 “Pamela Geller has every right to hold this event. And she should be able to do that — as ugly as others, including me, think it is — without facing any type of violence,” said Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has Geller on a list of extremists. 
 
 Still, “I think decent people would say: ‘Why would you need to do that?’ ” Beirich said. 
 
 In an interview Monday on CNN, Geller defended the cartoon contest, the latest in a series of her incendiary campaigns against Muslims in America. 
 
 “My event was about freedom of speech, period,” she told host Alisyn Camerota. “We need to have this conversation, and the fact that we have to spend upward of $50,000 on security speaks to how dangerous and how in trouble freedom of speech is in the country.” 
 
 That “those that were going to be slaughtered” by the gunmen are being maligned by critics “speaks to how morally inverted this conversation is,” she continued. 
 
 In an interview with The Washington Post, Geller said she and her fellow organizers were “prepared for violence” this past weekend. In tweets immediately after the shooting, Geller appeared almost gleeful that she had been right. 
 
 As one of the nation’s fiercest online critics of Islam, Geller, a housewife from Long Island, has long embraced her role as a provocateur. Her inflammatory rhetoric has landed her organizations, the American Freedom Defense Initiative and Stop Islamization of America, on a list of “hate groups” maintained by the Southern Poverty Law Center. 
 
 On her blog and in interviews, Geller has accused President Obama of being beholden to “Islamic overlords,” according to the center. She was a leading opponent of a mosque planned for construction near Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. 
 
 And last month, she drew headlines and an unsuccessful lawsuit for sponsoring an ad campaign that featured a quote her organization credited to the Palestinian militant group Hamas: “Killing Jews is Worship that draws us close to Allah.” 
 
 Geller insists that she is not an “Islamophobe” and that she does not believe all Muslims are violent. But critics note that some of her associates are bluntly anti-Muslim. The keynote speaker at Sunday’s event, for instance, was Geert Wilders, the Dutch parliament member who has called for the Koran to be banned in his country and suggested a tax on Muslim headscarves. 
 
 Why the cartoon contest? Geller said it was a direct response to a January conference in Garland, titled, “Stand With the Prophet in Honor and Respect.” The purpose of that event was to raise money to combat negative depictions of Muslims and their religion in the media. 
 
 In the past, the conference had been held without incident, said Alia Salem, executive director of the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. This time, however, the event triggered protests. 
 
 Salem said the local Muslim community has been on edge ever since. Controversy has also flared around a private arbitration service for Muslims that opened in Dallas last year — called an Islamic “tribunal” — and in connection with the shooting death of an Iraqi immigrant shot outside his Dallas apartment in March as he photographed his first snowfall. 
 
 “The North Texas Muslim community has been very nervous and scared,” Salem said. “Tension has been very high since January.” 
 
 Lindsey Bever, Marice Richter and Alice Crites contributed to this report. ||||| An outspoken opponent of the so-called ground zero mosque in Manhattan is also taking on Islam in Chicago.Pamela Geller, leader of a movement called Stop the Islamization of America, asserts that Muslims are increasingly taking over schools, financial institutions and the workplace.Geller's latest campaign against "Islamization" has appeared in ads this summer on top of 25 Chicago cabs. Beside pictures of young women who were allegedly killed by their Muslim fathers for refusing an Islamic marriage, dating a non-Muslim or becoming "too Americanized" is the message: "Is your family threatening you?" and the Web address of LeaveIslamSafely.com.Though the placards appear to offer a haven for young women who want to leave Islam, critics contend the signs stoke fear among passengers and passers-by about the way an estimated half of the city's taxi drivers worship, and seek to suppress the religious liberty on which the nation was founded."We've tried to build a movement that respects others and to respect ourselves and work for our human rights," said Fayez Khozindar, chairman of the United Taxi Drivers Community Council, whose membership is mostly Muslim. "This isn't right."The ads and the campaign against building the Park51 mosque near the site of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York show that nearly nine years since radical Muslim hijackers flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, a number of authors and activists have stepped up to tell Americans that they believe Muslims are waging a surreptitious offensive to supplant the U.S. Constitution with Islamic law."If you're devout, you believe in the Shariah," Geller said. "I don't believe in the institution of foreign law. I believe in the separation of church and state or mosque and state."But many Muslim scholars and civil rights advocates say Geller and other self-proclaimed truth-tellers are malicious activists who have capitalized on the terrorist attacks to create a cottage industry bent on bashing people of goodwill and championing religious freedom for all Americans except Muslims.John Esposito, a professor of international affairs and Islamic studies at Georgetown University , said religious defamation and Islam-bashing have become more acceptable in the U.S. since the Sept. 11 attacks."People like Pam Geller have a horrendous record," he said. "It's a track record of not distinguishing between forms of religious terrorism and Islam itself."The ads sponsored by Geller's group come during a tumultuous time for Muslim Americans. The proposed mosque has drawn support from President Barack Obama and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg that has been loudly countered by criticism from much of the national Republican leadership and a few high-profile Democrats . Last week, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn came out against the location of the mosque.Geller said the LeaveIslamsafely.com ads in Chicago are the first in a nationwide campaign to raise Americans' awareness that honor killings are happening in their own country. She said surveys show that 91 percent of honor killings around the world — and 84 percent of them in the U.S.— are carried out by Muslims.Esposito said religion has nothing to do with it. Honor killings are a cultural phenomenon, not religious, and they are not endorsed anywhere in the Quran, Islam's holy book."This ongoing jihad watch distorts the primary drivers here," Esposito said. "Unless you understand where it's coming from, it will not be addressed correctly. … This should be understood the way we address violence against women. … We offer them as much protection as we can, but we don't jump to say this simply goes on among a particular religious group."The Council on American Islamic Relations is considering legal action regarding the ads. Ahmed Rehab, executive director of CAIR -Chicago, said organizations such as Geller's are not qualified to lead domestic violence initiatives.But Rehab suspects that's not their primary goal. Instead, he said, they are intentionally creating an uncomfortable work environment for Chicago's cabdrivers.Geller said the faith of the cabdrivers never crossed her mind."I thought about the mobility of the cab," she said. "The ad is not directed at Muslims. In this particular case, it's directed at Muslim girls in trouble, living in fear of their lives, struggling to find resources to help."But Jeff Feldman, president of Taxi Medallion Management, the company that manages Yellow Cab in Chicago, said drivers have a right to request another cab or remove the sign."I can see where moderate Muslim men would be upset by that type of ad," he said. "It casts a terrible impression over all of Islam."
– A Michigan conference called to discuss a possible "honor killing" and women in Islam has triggered an uproar from local Muslims and civil rights groups who say it's an excuse to bash Islam. The "Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference on Honor Killings" in Dearborn—home to a thriving American Muslim community—was immediately countered with a "Rejecting Islamophobia: A Community Stand Against Hate" town hall meeting in Detroit, notes MSNBC. Both meetings took place yesterday. Mokdad, 20, was killed last year by her Muslim stepdad, according to police. Though initially reported as a suspected honor killing, investigators now believe Mokdad was killed because she was about to tell police her stepfather was sexually abusing her, according to the Detroit Free Press. "The evidence shows the motive really was not a cultural issue," said a lead investigator. "It's about power, control, and rape." The honor killing conference immediately raised suspicions because it was organized by Pam Geller, critic of Islam and nationally known foe of the proposed Ground Zero Mosque. Geller insists Mokdad's death was an honor killing, and one more example of "stealth enforcement" of Islamic shariah law. Geller's group Stop the Islamization of America has been classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Organizers of the rival meeting said in a statement it's time for "our community to take a stand, along with those who value America's commitment to diversity and freedom of religion." Said a female speaker at the town hall meeting: "As a Muslim woman, I stand with pride in my faith."