SIOA Advertising on Taxis in Chicago

Stop Islamization of America is now advertising on taxis in Chicago, using photos of  girls and women murdered in honour killings to promote its “Leave Islam Safely” website . Similar ads have featured on buses, as I blogged here.

The advertised website leads to Pamela Geller’s “Refuge from Islam” website, where there are some cursory blog postings. The top one reads:

If you are thinking of leaving Islam, be wary, be careful. Do not tell your Muslim friends or family. The Qur’an commands your death for leaving Islam (4:89 calls for the murder of renegades from the faith), and Muhammad is explicit in a hadith: “If anyone changes his religion, kill him” (Bukhari). Many, many ‘honor killings’ have been committed for “crimes” that are in Islamic law considered far less serious than leaving Islam.

Think you’re safe in America? Rifqa Bary has been threatened numerous times for leaving Islam. Rashad Khalifa was murdered by Islamic supremacists in Arizona in the early 1990s — because of his “heretical” teachings. If you doubt that you’re in danger in America, be aware that apostates have been threatened or murdered in recent years in Afghanistan, Egypt, Pakistan, Somalia and elsewhere. It doesn’t matter how free or open your country’s society is: the law of Islam recognizes no national borders.

If you fear for your life, contact info@avoiceforthepersecuted.com. If you are unsure of how your family or community will respond to your admitting that you’re leaving, don’t take chances. Write to Pamela Geller at writeatlas@aol.com or Robert Spencer at director@jihadwatch.org. If you need immediate protection from a threat, call the police immediately.

A

Start here — these are your best resources for Muslims who have made the journey. They can hekp you.

Contact Nonie at Former Muslims United

Apostates of Islam

 Speak to Ali at  Faith Freedom org

Answering Muslims

Muslims Against Sharia

Above all, don’t give up hope. We can provide safe houses.

There follow several blog posts puffing SOIA and related subjects (of little interest to anyone besides activists) , and, at the very bottom of the page, the addresses of some women’s refuges in Miami. That’s it. No links to any serious resources on either honour crimes or protection for women – instead, there’s a motley collection of websites critical of Islam, some of which are primarily concerned with gaining converts to Christianity.

What little practical advice is given is contradictory:

If you fear for your life, contact info@avoiceforthepersecuted.com… if you need immediate protection from a threat, call the police immediately… We can provide safe houses.

Aside from “call the police immediately”, the rest of this is useless: “avoicefortheperscuted.com” is the website of a Christian writer named Nikki Arana, who lives in Idaho. Arana is the co-author of Through the Eyes of Christ, which presents strategies for persuading Muslims of the truth of Christianity; she doesn’t even claim to have any useful practical advice for ex-Muslims fearful of honour killings. And what exactly do Geller and Spencer know about running a “safe house”? Again, if a “safe house” is needed, that should be a matter for the proper authorities – and not for a pair of publicity hounds more interested in using ex-Muslims as trophies than in offering discrete assistance. The Rifqa Bary case, with which Geller and Spencer have been involved, quickly degenerated into a circus and something of a fiasco.

Plus, once again, there’s a conflation of “honour killings”, which are performed to assert patriarchal authority over females, with threats against apostates and heretics – Amina and Sarah Yaser Said, used in the advert above, were murdered for having boyfriends; we don’t know that they wished to “leave Islam”. All threats, of course, are reprehensible, but I’m incredulous that Geller really cares about someone like “Rashad Khalifa… murdered… because of his ‘heretical’ teachings”. Are she and Spencer really going to provide “safe houses” for heterodox Islamic teachers? Are we going to see a picture of Khalifa on the roof of a taxi?

Nothing here has been thought through properly; this is a stunt calculated to provoke rather than a serious effort to help ex-Muslims.

7 Responses

  1. Richard, it might be helpful to append these resources in the article:
    U.S. National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE)
    US womens aid organisations listed by state

  2. Geller and Spencer should be charged with practicing social work without a license.

  3. Definitely check this piece out on SIOA being a hate group. Snapshots of what SIOA members have posted on Facebook. One word: Genocidal.

    http://www.loonwatch.com/2010/07/sioa-is-an-anti-muslim-hate-group/comment-page-1/#comment-15791

  4. […] a look over the articles of agreement of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, which runs SIOA (Stop Islamization of America).  As expected, we see the signatures of Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, and Anders Gravers, but […]

  5. […] missed from a couple of months ago: Loonwatch notes various pictures posted on the Facebook page of Stop Islamization of America, including one that purports to be associated with military […]

  6. […] that they could provide “safe houses” for ex-Muslims in the USA. The announcement seemed to me to be a stunt rather than a serious project, and I note that there are no reports that any […]

  7. […] kilder: Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion, Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion, Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion, deaconjohn’s posterous, Bare Naked Islam, […]

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