"No one can predict how people react to suffering or the knowledge of suffering," he said. "So some Jews who came out of World War II and their children understand the Holocaust as meaning that everyone in the world was and will continue to hate the Jews." He added: "Being called a Jewish Nazi-lover is not the nicest thing. But it speaks more about the intolerance of those making the charges than it does about CAIR."
The Staff and Executive Committee of CAIR-Philadelphia joins the world community in mourning the loss of Nelson Mandela. More than mourning, however, we remember a life lived with courage and conviction. We also remember with pride the many Muslims in…
Last week, CAIR-Philadelphia Legal Director Amara Chaudhry-Kravitz served as the course planner for a program devoted to the “right to counsel,” a legal right guaranteed by the 6th Amendment of the United States Constitution and commemorating the 50th anniversary of…
My appointment as Executive Director has continued to generate media attention. I was interviewed last week by Radio Sawa, a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week Arabic-language radio station broadcasting in the Arab world. The station is a service of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, and is publicly funded by the U.S. Congress. Read the story (in Arabic) at RadioSawa.com. I was also interviewed on AslanMedia, the website of best-selling American Muslim author Reza Aslan.
Talk to Jacob Bender for five minutes and you’ll get a sense that if bridges can be built between Muslims and other faith groups, he’s certainly the guy for the job. In October, the award-winning documentary filmmaker and interfaith activist was tapped to head the Philadelphia chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). His appointment to the Muslim advocacy group, which protects civil liberties of Muslim Americans and aims to increase public understanding of Islam, might have passed under the radar had his own religious faith — Judaism — not become the focus of his new gig.
This is the end of my first month as Executive Director of CAIR-Philadelphia. It has been quite a whirlwind of activity. Since the press release announcing my appointment was sent out on October 15, there have been over 7,000 Internet postings about the story, the great majority of them positive. Articles about CAIR-Philadelphia appeared online at Phillymag.com, Philly.com, The Washington Post, The Jewish Exponent of Philadelphia, Ha’aretz, and at hundreds of other Internet sites. I was also interviewed on Aljazeera, did a 30-minute interview on WEAA (the NPR station in Baltimore), with additional interviews in The Washington Times and The New York Jewish Week.
Last Friday, Oct. 25, 2013, in the early morning hours, vandals came under cover of darkness to desecrate the Islamic Society of Delaware (ISD) in Newark, the largest and most prominent mosque in the state. The alleged perpetrators destroyed a wooden fence and severely damaged an electronic sign. Damage is in the thousands of dollars. Most shockingly, the alleged culprits also fashioned the debris into a cross (Christianity’s sacred symbol for the “Prince of Peace”), thus insulting both Islam and Christianity. CAIR-Philadelphia immediately issued a Press Release condemning the attack and “urged local, state and federal law enforcement authorities to investigate this attack as a possible hate crime.” The Press Release went on to declare that the “unfortunately growing promotion of Islamophobia in our society leads to such troubling incidents.”
