Saturday, November 05, 2011

Revival Gets Rile Welcome, or, Your Fast Is My Furious

Muslim Brotherhood envoy Dawud Walid is directing area mosques to step up security.  A lot of Crusaders are coming to town!

As reported in Thursday’s The Detroit News (“Christian call to prayer riles Muslims”):

Dearborn — The local head of a national Muslim civil rights group says a Christian prayer summit to be held at Ford Field next week promotes anti-Muslim sentiment and is warning local mosques to step up their security.

Dawud Walid, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations — Michigan, met Wednesday with Muslim activists to voice his concern over the rhetoric he fears could be at the center of the event Nov. 11.

"There's a bigger force or movement behind this prayer summit and how they're literally demonizing Muslims," he said.

But Metro Detroit pastors involved in the event say the gathering is merely meant to help Detroit, not target Muslims.

"I don't know anything about that," said Bishop Edgar Vann of Second Ebenezer Church. "People are coming here to pray for our city and that's what I'm concerned about. Christians will be praying, but it's open to anyone."

The Call is being promoted as a 24-hour long prayer event aimed at lifting the city out of its "greatest darkness." Its website says attendees will "gather to this city that has become a microcosm of our national crisis — economic collapse, racial tension, the rising tide of the Islamic movement, and the shedding of innocent blood of our children in the streets and our unborn."

Senior pastor Jerry Weinzierl of Grace Christian Church in Sterling Heights said the event is not anti-Muslim."It's not to pray against anybody," he said. "It is a very positive movement of Christians gathering together to pray."

Walid advised the heads of local mosques to "maintain security at all entrances, and make sure to notify the police immediately if suspicious persons congregate on mosque property."

Thursday’s headline that all this “riles Muslims” overstates the reported facts. The only one who appears riled is Walid.  And he’s just faking it.

Walid knows perfectly well that area mosques haven’t a thing to fear from “suspicious persons” congregating on their property. According to the legal giants who recently brought us the Terry Jones debacle, subjects of Wayne County already face arrest if they even dare to congregate on public property in a mosque’s vicinity. 

I don’t know much about The Call.  It sounds like a movement with Pentecostal roots, which places a lot of emphasis on demons and Old Testament prophecies and such.  This particular group also embraces goals that are multi-racial, pro-life, and include “Reaching Muslims with the love of Christ.”

What’s so bad about that? It’s not as if they’re moving in with tents, sleeping bags, and pet ferrets, the way Occupy [“Your Town Here”] has done.

Evangelistic calls to conduct spiritual warfare by fasting and prayer is hardly the stuff of a violent movement. Even Walid realizes he’d sound foolish to say otherwise.  He admitted in a recent article on a CAIR website that “The Call can pray for Muslims or other non-Christian group [sic], which they deem to be heathens to be guided aright; that is no problem.” (“The Call: Connecting Radical Theology With the Islamophobia Network”).

But never mind all that fasting, praying, and Psalm-singing at Ford Field.  Walid sees right through all that:

The direct issue is The Call in its theological crusade could be endorsing, perhaps even inciting zealous persons to go onto mosque and Islamic school properties, which are private properties, to commit provocative acts. Moreover, The Call and its direct supporters are bigots, who actively engaged in attempting to marginalize American Muslims from the socio-political fabric of their own country, America.

The Call is not uplifting Detroit or uplifting America with its rhetoric. It is actually feeding into the current divisive climate, which America has not seen since the heydays of the White Citizens' Council in the turbulent 1960’s.

Provocative acts?  Trespassing? All these people and all their supporters are bigots? 

The White Citizen’s Council?!

Is it only me or does Walid sound as if he’s getting weaker by the day?

Maybe it’s all those prayers.

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