Nick Schou posted yesterday about the Al
Jazeera news service interviewing Orange County Islamic mosque infiltrator and FBI informant Craig Monteilh of Irvine, but he is not the only local who turns up in the piece. Along with some local Muslims who Monteilh apparently approached (and, they say, tried to entrap), Al
Jazeera catches up with Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Anaheim-based, Southern California office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
Ayloush is making the national and international media rounds this week. In addition to his comments to Al
Jazeera against the profiling and attempted entrapment of Muslims (especially in their places of worship), Ayloush's anti-extremism letter titled “Enough With the Fear Mongering” appears in Monday's Washington Times. It follows . . .
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Enough With the Fear Mongering
President Obama is correct. In fighting against al Qaeda-like
terrorism, we are combating violent criminals who try to hide behind
religion in order to justify their views and actions (“It's not over
until it's over,” Letters, Thursday). We must not fall into the trap of
those terrorists by legitimizing their false claims to the religion of
Islam. Labeling them “Islamic” is the best PR gift we can hand to them
as they try to recruit disenfranchised young people.
Abortion-clinic bombers and al Qaeda murderers are not Christian or
Islamic murderers, respectively. They are murderers and criminals who
must be stopped and punished, regardless of which Scripture they twist
to rationalize their hatred and violence.
I am not surprised to read that Zuhdi Jasser, a longtime darling of
the neoconservatives, is unhappy with the Obama administration's
decision to retire the neocons' fear-mongering rhetoric and
terminologies. Extremists on both sides–the neocons and al Qaeda–need each other's rhetoric of fear in order to justify their views and
raison d'etre. However, the rest of us are tired of both sides'
destructive behavior.
Hussam Ayloush
Executive Director, Los Angeles Office
Council on American-Islamic Relations
Anaheim, Calif.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.