TLC launched a popular reality show called All-American Muslim about everyday Americans, who happen to be Muslim, going about their normal daily lives including playing sports, going to school, going to work and paying their taxes.
This was too much for the anti-Muslim fear mongers at the Florida Family Association, who were outraged that the show was depicting Muslims as “ordinary folks just like you and me.” An article on the organization’s web site suggests that the show instead depict “one of its secular, attractive nominal Muslims as he decided to get more serious about his faith, and ended up participating in jihad activity or Islamic supremacist efforts.”
A controversy was whipped up by the extremist Florida Family Association over the show and Lowe’s Home Improvement decided to pull its advertising. The equation in the TV business is, no advertising = no show.
Lowe’s speedy capitulation to a small right-wing hate group sets a dangerous precedent and emboldens bigots. Lowe’s should have ignored the Right’s bigoted pleas and gone about its business.
Instead it caved to a group of bigoted extremists. The company claims it is committed to diversity — it’s time to prove it. To live in peace and harmony, all Americans must value religious liberty and reject hate, and the Radical Right’s anti-Muslim hysteria and bigotry.
Please sign the petition to Lowe’s Chairman and CEO Robert Niblock, urging the company to reverse course on its decision to pull its advertising from “All-American Muslim” in response to a Religious Right hate group and reinstate its advertising to set a precedence of rejecting bigotry and extremism.
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The world so needs that balance and your message is spot on. When people kept asking my son if he is a Muslim because of his name here in Norway, I was very offended. What if? And to think I chose the name because personally I do not believe in naming systems that attribute names to only one group and I like to share them.. .! I thought the world is free… I will not mention his names here actually because the world is not free. .. And it did not stop there. His other name was in question too because to many it meant a connection with a Romany family. Oh goodness! As if they could not see we come from Africa.. and that name, is used in neighbouring countries of Europe too.. only it ends with a vowel… Where is our seriousness and commitment to people being equal … I am missing it in the world. It is documented that some young people in Norway changed their names officially and from getting no job offers they received from between to 11 to 50 in no time. What is in a name my foot! A rose by any other name does not smell as sweet! I say this here because strong nations must take up their position of leadership in the world less ambiguously!
It is not history…Take racial prejudice.. I dislike to remember how some Arabs also take fairer skin to mean better than darker.. also some Africans among Africans and of course the racial issue is basically black and white but not just limited to that. In India the castes…
We need to act urgently as urgently on social injustice, as when we want to save the dollar of the Euro from collapse. We cannot abstain from action unless we are not seeing the big gap in leadership right where we are.. so thank you.