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News :: Miscellaneous |
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AP: Crowd protests at Illinois mosque |
Current rating: 0 |
by AP, via PR
(No verified email address) |
13 Sep 2001
Modified: 04:44:24 PM |
This story is from the AP wire on Salon.com.
I am sickened that there are even 300 small-minded, stupid people in this state who can think of no better response to this senseless violence but to march on a mosque, blaming and threatening fellow Illinoisans and Americans. |
A perhaps predictable backlash hit several communities as federal officials said there was mounting evidence that radical Muslims planned and carried out the terror attacks in New York and Washington.
Police turned back 300 marchers -- some waving American flags and shouting "USA! USA!" -- as they tried to march on a mosque in this southwest Chicago suburb late Wednesday.
Three demonstrators were arrested, said Bridgeview Police Chief Charles Chigas. There were no injuries and demonstrators were kept blocks from the closed Muslim worship place.
"I'm proud to be American and I hate Arabs and I always have," said 19-year-old Colin Zaremba who marched with the group from Oak Lawn.
Federal authorities said they had identified more than a dozen hijackers of Middle Eastern descent in Tuesday's attacks and gathered evidence linking them to Saudi-born terror mastermind Osama bin Laden and other terrorist networks. In all, perhaps 50 people were involved in the plot, government officials said.
In Chicago, a Molotov cocktail was tossed Wednesday at an Arab-American community center. No one was injured, and there was little damage.
"The terrorists who committed these horrible acts would like nothing better than to see us tear at the fiber of our democracy and to trample on the rights of other Americans," Gov. George Ryan said.
In Huntington, N.Y., a 75-year-old man who was drunk tried to run over a Pakistani woman in the parking lot of a shopping mall, police said. The man, Adam Lang, then followed the woman into a store and threatened to kill her for "destroying my country."
In Gary, Ind., a man in a ski mask fired a high-powered assault rifle at the gas station where Hassan Awdah, a U.S. citizen born in Yemen, was working, the Gary Post Tribune reported. Gary Police are investigating it as a hate crime.
"I lived in the Middle East for most of my life and have never seen anything like this," Awdah said.
In Australia, a school bus carrying Muslim children was stoned and vandals tried to set fire to a Lebanese church in apparent acts of retaliation for the terrorist attacks in the United States, officials said. Queensland state Islamic Council Chairman Sultan Deen said stones and bottles damaged the bus Wednesday in Brisbane. Nobody was injured.
Tamara Alfson, an American working at the Kuwait Embassy in Washington, D.C., spent Wednesday counseling frightened Kuwaiti students attending schools across the United States.
"Some of them have already been harassed. People have been quite awful to them," said Alfson, an academic adviser to roughly 150 students.
In a show of patriotism, 45 people from Tampa, Fla.'s Islamic community registered with blood services to donate Wednesday and 30 members of the Muslim Students Association at the University of South Florida signed up.
"You feel the pain twice: Once because of what has happened and once because of the looks you get," said Sami Al-Arian, an engineering teacher at the University of South Florida.
Abu Nahidian, director of the Manassas Mosque in Virginia, said his congregation has been the target of insults and hate messages left on the office answering machine.
"We have some recordings in our tapes that say, 'We hate you so-and-so Muslims and we hope you die,"' Nahidian said.
A mosque in Lynnwood, Wash., was vandalized and no one showed up for afternoon prayers at the Islamic Center of Spokane.
"We must not hurt or terrorize Americans of Arab descent or Islamic faith," Gov. Gary Locke said Wednesday during a memorial service at the Puyallup Fair. Issam Koussan told the Detroit News he bought large U.S. flags to fly in front of his home and outside his supermarket after men in a car pulled into his parking lot and yelled threats and racial slurs at his customers.
"I just feel I needed to show my loyalty to this country," he said. |
See also:
http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2001/09/13/mosque/index.html
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Shame on Oak Lawn, my hometown |
by Paul Kotheimer
herringb (nospam) prairienet.org (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
13 Sep 2001
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Someone ought to remind this group of lilywhite, DisneyWorld-fantasy-fiction-headed suburban bigots that their own grandparents had been welcomed to America with sentiments like "NO IRISH NEED APPLY," and "ITALIANS NOT WELCOME." |
