Coalition Of Muslim.. National Press Club..Washington, D.C....Muslim In America

[Bilal Mahmud المكافح المخلص]

Press Conference Archive

Thursday, Sept. 2, 2010 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

A Coalition of African American Muslims (CAAM) held this press confence, Thursday, Sept. 2, 2010 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

The controversy over the Park 51 Project (Islamic Center in Lower Manhattan) is indicative of a general rise in racist bigotry towards people of color in this country. While the issue has its particular and unique distinctions, it cannot be separated from the rising violence against African Americans and Latinos, or the increasingly inflammatory rhetoric and exclusionary politics driving the national debate on immigration.

As African-American Muslims, we feel our unique perspective has been missing from an emerging national discussion. We wish to join that discussion by first of all affirming that among our forbears are Muslims who have lived peacefully and productively in this country since its inception. They, and others among our people have sacrificed too much, both in enduring the horrors and brutalities of chattel slavery, and during the long march to freedom, civil and human rights for us to silently accept a return to Jim Crow exclusionary practices and policies that relegate either ourselves or our co-religionists from other ethnic backgrounds to second-class citizenry.

Coalition Of Muslim.. View News Conference.. National Press Club

[Mansour Ansari]

It has been brought to my attention that it is high time for a wide range of American Muslims to step up and activate on a national level regarding the high pitch of Islamophobia now on display. I am talking about a sensitive and potentially topic which, if done correctly, will compliment the CAAM (Coalition of African-American Muslims). My inner circle of brothers has suggested that, with brothers like Dr Khalid Blankenship, Dr Abdul-Hadi Honerkamp, Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, and other prominent American Muslims of the caucasian persuasion to organize a group known something along the lines of a coalition of White American Muslims and, after making strong statements for the media, join together with CAAM in whatever form or fashion to get maximum impact. The Park51 project in lower Manhattan has attracted such vitriolic hatred from some sectors of the society and, if there were black and white American Muslims as the image of the project instead of our immigrant Arab brothers, the ugly statements by the wing-nuts would have been perhaps less ugly. Allah knows best.