Tonight Pamela Hall, Robert Spencer and I made our way over the Verrazano bridge to fight the stealth takeover of a convent/church in south Staten Island at a civic meeting. CBS reported that the Mosque Proposal On Staten Island Leads To Chaos.
Nonsense. The fix was in.
A couple of weeks back I reported that the Muslim Brotherhood in the US, the Muslim American Society, had purchased a convent in what was called a "mystery sale." An underhanded deal had been made for the Church land to be sold to a developer, but then in mysterious and shady deal, the land was sold to the MAS (Muslim Brotherhood.) The Archdiocese sold out the parishioners, without so much as basic cursory knowledge of how Christians have fared in Islamic countries, to the oppressive, violent Brotherhood, no less? The express and stated goal of the Muslim Brotherhood is a universal caliphate, by any means necessary.
The impending sale of an empty, 2 ½ -story convent in Midland Beach owned by St. Margaret Mary’s R.C. Church has neighbors angry and afraid because the purchaser is an Islamic organization they know little about.
Tonight the civic association held a meeting for the community to get to know their "new neighbors."
The community is worried. Very worried. Worse, the Archdiocese of New York, and the Rev. Keith Fennessy, St. Margaret-Mary's pastor at the time of the sale, refused to attend or have anyone there representing the church that sold out the community that by and large supported the church and the convent.
The meeting was cut short when the Midland Beach Civic Association abruptly ended the meeting, after they stopped people for asking questions and brought on shills and propagandists for MAS. The community was having none of it. Not after sitting through a half hour of proselytizing.
Community members took issue with the fact that this took up the speaking time of the residents who had waited patiently in line for their turn to speak, and were now summarily cut off. The media is depicting the crowd as unruly and out of control here and here. We were there. That's a lie.
Observers said the packed-to-capacity crowd was short-tempered during the meeting in the Olympia Activity Center, and grew frustrated by the nuances of some of MAS representatives' answers as the group denied any ties to terrorism.
Gathering early
Stealth jihadists, MAS
Packed house, so packed in fact, that mobs were kept from entering after the room reached full capacity. SRO
The Dynamic Duo
The Civics Board and three MAS members spinning such yarns
I have attended a good deal of these charades and I have to say that the members of this community were the most informed group of concerned citizens I have ever come across. The Q & A was fascinating -- every question well researched and educated. The MAS taqiya masters could not snooker this crowd.
Robert spoke first -- he was brilliant.
Pamela Hall will have the rest of the video up tomorrow. There was a lot of media there, all in the tank for jihad. Despicable.
CBS has this:The disparity between the perspectives and values of the political elites and their allies and those of the common people grows ever wider. We saw it again tonight on Staten Island, where my SIOA colleague Pamela Geller and I attended, along with SIOA-New York's Pamela Hall, a civic meeting that discussed the mysterious sale of a Roman Catholic Convent to the Muslim American Society, the Muslim Brotherhood's chief operating arm in the United States.
The fix was in, as is always the case. The meeting featured three Muslims affiliated with the MAS, who were billed as being there to answer questions and allay the fears of the community. No opponents of the sale were set to speak from the dais; they were only allowed to ask questions from the floor after the MAS operatives made their presentation. The MAS men came armed with folders for the crowd, full of commendations of the MAS from the likes of the Boy Scouts, the Rotary Club, etc., and began distributing them. I had prepared a one-page summary of the Investigative Project's dossier on the Muslim Brotherhood, and it was also being distributed among the crowd, along with the full 40-page version -- but then one of the local officials running the meeting announced that no materials were to be distributed, as this was a meeting devoted to giving an opportunity to the MAS to explain itself to the community, and now people were distributing material "against" -- it had to stop. Many in the crowd took exception, however, to the MAS operatives distributing their folder full of soothing detours as well, and so ultimately that was stopped too and all the printed matter left up front for anyone to take.
Soon thereafter the meeting started, and after some other business, the Muslims began their presentation. They spoke in calm, measured tones. They spoke about their many years in the community, their children, their work (two were physical therapists, one a high school math teacher). They spoke, of course, of the need for "mutual respect." They spoke about the need for both sides to communicate and get to know each other better. They spoke about reassuring someone with a sentimental attachment to the convent building (many of those present had been educated by the nuns who lived there) by saying, "God will be praised in that building." They praised the Muslim American Society as an upstanding civic group with "50 chapters in 55 states across the nation" (yes, you read that right). They spoke of the MAS's commitment to establishing a virtuous and just American society. They denigrated Steve Emerson and his Investigative Project as Islamophobic and claimed that he purveyed falsehoods. When challenged later by an IPT official to name even one specific falsehood in the IPT report on the Muslim American Society and Muslim Brotherhood, one of the Muslim spokesmen said only, "Later on."
I asked them if they were prepared to denounce Hamas and Hizballah, both of which were publicly endorsed by MAS leader Mahdi Bray, as jihad terrorist organizations, and to renounce any intention to bring Sharia to the U.S., in line with the Brotherhood's stated goal of "eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house" so that Allah's religion is "made victorious over other religions." In response, the main spokesman for the three hemmed and hawed and emitted billows upon billows of airy nonsense -- to the increasing impatience of the crowd. This spokesman, made nervous by the crowd's vocal disdain for his ever-lengthening non-answer, did ultimately call Hamas and Hizballah terrorist groups and renounce any intention to bring Sharia to the U.S. But since these positions are at odds with what are known to be the positions of the MAS, it seems likely that he was only saying this under pressure -- otherwise he wouldn't have needed to offer so much empty and condescending verbiage to the crowd before getting around to the point.
The other questions were pointed, informed and full of righteous indignation. Challenged about the MAS's leader, the unsavory Bray, the chief spokesman, a physical therapist named Ayman, called him a "civil rights activist." Challenged on whether he thought the people in the room were the Infidels that the Qur'an directs Muslims to wage war against, he told the questioner, "No, you are not an Infidel," and explained that the Qur'anic Infidels were only those who knew the truth and still rejected it. He did not mention, of course, that the Qur'an doesn't envision any other kind of Infidel, and that it has no conception of people who reject Islam in good faith.
Ayman defined jihad as the right of a nation to defend itself whenever it is oppressed and occupied -- a definition large enough to drive a bomb-laden truck through, and that fact didn't elude the questioner, who further asked him whether that definition would indeed make Americans Infidels, because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He explained that no, he wouldn't be raising his five children here if he thought America was Infidel. Another one of the Muslims on the dais insisted that Sharia was democratic and protected democracy. Once again, the glaring contradiction of all this with the words and deeds of the MAS leadership and the Brotherhood was left unexplained.
And so it went. Ultimately, one of the Muslim spokesmen, the other physical therapist, whose name was Muhammad, became firm. Asked if the MAS would prove the sensitivity to the community that the spokesmen were insisting they had by leaving the community, he said: "We are exercising our freedom of religion. We will not apologize for being Muslim. We will not apologize for being American."
Ringing words, but ultimately empty -- ignoring, yet again, the aspect of Islam that is political, and that would subjugate women and non-Muslims and deny the freedom of speech and the freedom of conscience. And when they were challenged on such issues, the Muslim spokesmen retreated behind their clouds of rhetorical smoke.
Finally, when the local officials tried to stop the questions from the floor while there was still a long line of people waiting to be heard, and to bring on instead a couple of local dhimmis (including a Christian Arab minister in a clerical collar) to explain how wonderful their experience had been living next to the Muslims of another Staten Island mosque, the crowd had had enough of being railroaded and lied to, and wouldn't quiet down. The meeting was summarily ended, prematurely. But it mattered little. The fix was in from the start.
A heated meeting ended in chaos on Staten Island on Wednesday night.
The subject: a Muslim group looking to open a mosque at the site of a former convent.
An overflow crowd grew until the gates around this meeting hall had to be secured by police. The hundreds inside were witnessing a spectacle. There was passion and loud interruptions.
This crowd was neither passive nor patient, loudly demanding answers about the mosque planned for an old convent on Greeley Avenue.
Many objected to the idea of an Islamic house of worship in the neighborhood, admitting they are afraid of the property's new owners, the Muslim American Society or MAS.
"Just not for the neighborhood, not for the neighborhood, I'm afraid," one woman said.
"I'd like to know why the MAS is on the watch list for terrorism," another woman said.
"Will you here and now denounce Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations?" asked Robert Spencer, founder of "Jihad Watch."
MAS representatives denied any links to extremist groups and said the mosque would promote peace and understanding.
"Muslim American Society is an independent organization that has no links with the Muslim brotherhood," a MAS representative said.
Some residents said they were angry the sale was secretly brokered by a parish priest who recently resigned.
