Courtesy of Pam Martens
President Obama Addresses the Nation on Terrorism Threat to the U.S., December 6, 2015
Last evening, in his speech to the nation from the Oval Office, President Obama reminded Americans that “Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes — and, yes, they are our men and women in uniform who are willing to die in defense of our country.” In his concluding remarks, the President told viewers that our nation was “founded upon a belief in human dignity — that no matter who you are, or where you come from, or what you look like, or what religion you practice, you are equal in the eyes of God and equal in the eyes of the law.” (See full video of the speech below.)
What the President didn’t say is that while the recent mass killing in San Bernardino, California was conducted by a married couple who were Muslim, the Muslim community itself has been under relentless assault by homegrown religious extremists since the attacks on the World Trade towers on September 11, 2001.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), mosques in 31 states in America have been the targets of firebombs, arson, acid attacks, gunfire, hate speech or other forms of religious intolerance since 2005. In Joplin, Missouri, a mosque’s sign was torched in 2008. Four years later, its roof was set on fire with the perpetrator caught on a surveillance video. One month later, in August 2012, the mosque was burned to the ground.
In 2008, Chris Rodda, reporting for the Huffington Post, wrote about Muslim babies and children being gassed in an attack on a mosque in Dayton, Ohio during the same week that a DVD of the race-baiting, anti-Muslim documentary Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West was mailed to thousands of households in Ohio and inserted into newspapers around the state. Quoting an email she had received with an eyewitness report, Rodda relayed:
She told me that the gas was sprayed into the room where the babies and children were being kept while their mothers prayed together their Ramadan prayers. Panicked mothers ran for their babies, crying for their children so they could flee from the gas that was burning their eyes and throats and lungs. She grabbed her youngest in her arms and grabbed the hand of her other daughter, moving with the others to exit the building and the irritating substance there.
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