TEMPERS FLARE OVER LOUD ISLAMIC PRAYERS IN 'MUSLIMVILLE, USA'
Pamela Geller: 'Americans must begin organizing and fighting back'
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Two Muslim women walk down the streets of Hamtramck, Michigan, where the population used to be dominated by the Polish.
Residents of Hamtramck, Michigan – the area dubbed “Muslimville, USA,” by one newspaper after its population shifted from 90 percent Polish to mostly Muslim – complained at their most recent city council meeting the community center’s blasted calls to prayer were simply too loud.
Four of the six council members are Muslim, as WND reported.
“Just turn it down a little bit,” said one resident, Jeanette Powell, telling the Hamtramck Review the prayer calls start at 6 a.m. and the sound level was “overbearing.”
Another resident said Ideal Islamic Center officials “lied” when they assured nearby residents, including those at the Hamtramck Senior Plaza apartments, the facility would not be used as a mosque.
“We were lied to,” said Carol Marsh, telling the local newspaper the calls to prayer belong in a mosque, not a community center. “We were told it would never be turned into a mosque.”
Sakrul Islam, with the center, said Marsh was mistaken, that an Islamic center “covers everything,” and that if she continued to make such claims he would file a defamation lawsuit, the newspaper said. He also accused Robert Zwolak, a city council member who lives in the senior apartment complex, of fueling complaints because “he’s against Muslims,” he said, the Hamtramck Review reported.
This isn’t the first time the Muslim community’s faced such complaints. In 2015, in a story that opened with “Welcome to Muslimville, USA,” the New York Daily News cited several residents as complaining about the early morning Muslim calls to prayer.
“You try reading a book in your backyard while your dog is barking to that,” said resident Susan Dunn, during the November 2015 interview with the New York Daily News.
Hamtramck became the first city in the nation to elect a Muslim majority to its six-seat council, underscoring the shift in demographics of the city from Polish Catholic dominance. The city’s demographics now break down to about 24 percent Arab, 19 percent black, 15 percent Bangladeshi; 12 percent Polish; and six percent Yugoslavian, USA Today reported, citing Census Bureau statistics.
And according to at least one analyst of Muslim affairs, the shift in Hamtramck is likely to replicate at communities around the nation.
“Yes, much, much more of this is coming with Obama’s reckless refugee resettlement policies,” said Pamela Geller, the president of American Freedom Defense Initiative and the editor and publisher of AtlasShrugs.com, in an email to WND. “I have been sounding the alarm on this for years.”
For those who revere the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom, Hamtramck should serve as a warning, she continued.
“I don’t think there is a direct or specific jihad terror threat coming from Hamtramck any more than from any other Muslim community. Anywhere that the Quran is read and Muhammad revered, a Muslim might decide to wage jihad,” Geller said. “[But] the main problem with Hamtramck is that it manifests Islam’s inherent authoritarianism and contempt for those of other religions.”
She gave an example, writing in her email: “When they got the noise ordinance amended to allow for the call to prayer, one local imam said just before the city council voted, that it didn’t matter how they voted, they were going to blast the call to prayer over loudspeakers anyway. Now they have a majority in that city council and the first thing one of the Muslim leaders said after they won that majority was that ‘we showed the Polish’ – adopting a confrontational and hostile attitude right out of the box.”
And her final thoughts?
“It is very hard with Obama and his [Department of Justice] on the side of the Muslims” to stop a Hamtramck from coming to a community near you, she said. “But Americans must begin organizing and fighting back, or we will lose our freedoms. The First Amendment is only as strong as its defenders are.”
In 2007, then Sen. Barack Obama recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them with a first-rate accent in an interview with the New York Times.
Obama described the call to prayer as “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”
Copyright 2016 WND
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/02/tempers-flare-over-loud-islamic-prayers-in-muslimville-usa/#FeqmylcKf4T4puZV.99
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