"Thank you, Ann, for uniting Jews, Christians, and Muslims"

By Rebecca Trounson, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 25, 2007

Full story here, excerpts below:

As Muslim students and their supporters protested outside, commentator Ann Coulter told a USC audience Wednesday night that Americans should get tough on terrorists and "stop genuflecting before Islam."

The protesters who gathered outside the auditorium, chanted, shouted and carried signs, such as "Fight the Real Fascist, Down with Coulter" and "Hate Cannot Drive Out Hate."

Another sign noted the diversity of the protesters: "Thank you, Ann, for uniting Jews, Christians and Muslims."

Along with Ayloush's organization [CAIR], others represented included the Progressive Jewish Alliance of California, MEChA, the Anti-War Coalition and the Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace.

The Rev. Louis Chase, president of the interfaith group and pastor of Hamilton United Methodist Church in South Los Angeles, was among the protesters. "I have problems with Ann Coulter's characterization of the perfect society as a Christian nation, both as a pastor and a theologian," he said.

Steve Puzarne, a cantor who frequently sings at a Pacific Palisades synagogue and who heads the newly formed Pilgrimage of Peace, said he took issue both with Coulter and with what he called the demonization of Muslims.

"As I see it, these are very much cut from the same cloth," Puzarne said. "And I'm quite distressed that the Jewish community, which has responded vociferously to her comments about Jews, has remained relatively silent during her much longer history of hate speech about Muslims."

The term Islamo-Fascism, Puzarne said, is "beyond demagoguery."

Museum of [In]Tolerance

On June 19, 2007, the Museum of Tolerance in LA hosted a program commemorating the UN's Day in Support of Victims of Torture. S. Shaiq, an active member of the So. Cal. Muslim community (and a good friend of mine), decided to keep an open mind and check out the event. She posted her thoughts on her blog, part of which I copied below:

I really want to be a tolerant person...and I really pride myself on being very open minded and self-critical of even my own personal views...I'm obviously not perfect, but I'm trying.

I went to an event at the Museum of Tolerance this week and I was purely dismayed by how hypocritical they are. I had heard some rumors about them but I didn't want to believe them and went in with a very open/clean slate.

I really haven't felt like this in a long time but that day I really felt like I (or things I believed in or stood for) were being attacked or villanized. It was just unnecessary and it was so implicitly shown that to some it may seem like I'm just making a big deal out of nothing but when something can make an otherwise not sensitive person feel scrutinized or attacked than i think it should be looked at twice. I mean if we want to learn anything from history than we should really re-evaluate the demonization of and generalization of any set of peoples.

For example we watched this short film called 'In our time' that kind of went over different genocides in recent history and how we can never let these things happen again 'in our time'. So when they showed the genocide in the Balkans they had a caption up that said 'Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims all killed each other'- so why not mention Serb Christians, Croat Christians, and Bosnian Muslims if you're going to bring religion into it, especially since the Muslims were the ones that were offended the most in that situation. And then of course they brought in the Darfur situation and said that Arab Muslims were killing Darfurians, which implies that the Darfurians are not Muslim, when in fact they are...so again villanizing Muslims as though they were the aggressors in this situation against innocent non-Muslims.

Continue here.