At the ICNA fundraiser in Colorado, a lone wolf and misinformed anti-Islam protestor repeatedly accused ICNA and Sh.Yasir Qadhi of terrorism, and equating Islam with Nazism. As Yasir Qadhi discussed and confronted him on his inconsistencies, the protestor stubbornly stuck to his hate message.
source
The Mosque of San Gabriel sits back from the street so it’s easy to miss as you drive along Las Tunas. Originally a house, the congregation purchased it in 1984, and received their license in 1987. Approximately 200 members come from San Gabriel, Alhambra, Rosemead, Temple City, Sierra Madre and Pasadena.
An important part of their doctrine is community service and helping those in need. The Mosque of San Gabriel is the living embodiment of that belief. They have supported Union Station in Pasadena since 1990 with food and other necessities for the homeless. Recently, they have brought their benevolence closer to home. They have provided much-needed supplies for the food bank at La Casa de San Gabriel.
Grocery give-away
With the pandemic and stay-at-home order, they saw there was a greater need for distributing food as well as non-food items. In April, in conjunction with ICNA Relief USA organization, they had their first grocery give-away at the Mosque, handing out 85 large bags of groceries which included bread, juice, chicken, rice, sauces, onions and potatoes as well as packages of socks.
The guiding force in achieving all this largesse is Rick Khan, a long-time member of the Mosque. Although the entire congregation is involved, he credits his “team” with putting their programs in action, including fund raising, shopping and distribution.
The success of their grocery give-away showed Khan that there was a need to help families in San Gabriel. He contacted Rebecca Perez, Director of Community Services, which coordinates and distributes meals to seniors, to see if they could partner with the City and help in some way. Perez told him that with so many seniors staying home during the pandemic, they could use help with the senior meals program.
Senior meals program
According to the latest update, they are now delivering meals, two lunch box meals and three frozen meals to 250 seniors. Due to the increase in meal deliveries since the pandemic Community Services staff have been delivering meals twice a week.
When Khan heard that only cold lunches and frozen meals were being distributed, due to time and money constraints, with no hot meals, he felt that was a need the Mosque could fill.
Khan called his Mosque team members and they jumped into action. Some members reached out for funds, others ordered the hot food and still others volunteered to hand out the meals. Donations from members of the Mosque pay for the hot meals.
“This is what our faith teaches,” Khan said. “I feel fortunate that we are getting to do this.”
They partnered with ICNA Relief to bring bags of groceries to be distributed along with the meals.
The Mission Playhouse parking lot was reserved and flyers were delivered to the seniors. Cars were lined up a half an hour before the food was to be distributed. No walk-ups allowed. Two take-out containers with chicken, salsa, rice and salad were placed in each trunk along with a bag of groceries including fruit and non-perishables. All volunteers wore gloves and masks and thanked the seniors for coming. Staff kept the traffic moving and within a half an hour, 100 meals and bags of groceries were distributed. No one left without food.
“The Mosque of San Gabriel has been extremely generous in providing food donations as well non-perishable food items to our older adults. Their staff provided hot food distribution on two separate days with 200 hot meals, as a way to give back to the community and assist in these distressing times. We are extremely appreciative of their generosity and the partnership we have established.” Lucy Hokobian, Community Services Manager, said on behalf of the City of San Gabriel.
Boxes of fresh fruit & gallons of milk
More recently, on Saturday, June 22, the Mosque partnered with ICNA Relief USA again to provide 146 boxes of fresh fruit, 240 gallons of milk, large tins of tea and large jars of olives. The food is purchased from Interfresh Farmers to Families, part of the USDA Feeding Programs, as well as from Restaurant Depot.
The Mosque of San Gabriel provided the location, and the volunteers and ICNA provided the groceries. Cars were lined up down the street and around the block even before the boxes were unloaded. It took an hour to set up four tables of boxes and about half an hour to give it all away.
“The Mosque is working tirelessly to alleviate hunger in our neighborhoods by regularly donating hot meals and food, including fresh produce, to local food pantries while also volunteering with the distribution. I appreciate their spirit of service and call to action to give to those in need,” said San Gabriel Mayor Denise Menchaca.
The outreach is a family affair for Rick Khan. His two adult children, daughter Sadia Khan and son Haseeb Khan, have been helping their parents with the various service programs since they followed along as toddlers.
“Our parents have set a good example for us, and we have just followed their example,” said Haseeb. “I know that my dad underplays how much he does in organizing community outreach.”
“So much of what is done is him (Khan) doing it on his own, meeting people and finding a need,” Sadia added.
Rick and the Mosque of San Gabriel have even bigger ideas in store for the City. They want to establish their own food bank at the Mosque as well as continue to help support La Casa de San Gabriel’s food bank. The hot food program for seniors was so successful they plan to continue as long as it is needed.
Mosque of San Gabriel and its members will continue to serve the community wherever they find a need. When asked why they do it, member Yusuf Wadalawala said, “Someday I might need a handout. What goes around comes around.”
Article Courtesy: coloradoboulevard.net
(RNS) — The United Methodist Church has long promoted abstinence from alcohol.
But that didn’t stop City Road Chapel in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee, from announcing a Bar and Restaurant Workers Help Fund this week to assist locals whose food-service jobs have been impacted by the coronavirus outbreak.
“The reality is we’re a community-based church, and we’ve been located here for over 100 years,” said the Rev. Jay Voorhees, City Road’s lead pastor. “Many of the folks we serve are in the restaurant and bar business. So this is just a continuation of the normal command to love your neighbor.”
City Road has a relationship with a bar down the street that closed down in accordance with the city’s recommendation to mitigate the spread of the virus, leaving staffers without a livelihood. Voorhees’ own daughter works in restaurant management and had to lay off staff because of the coronavirus situation.
Across the country, houses of worship like City Road and other faith organizations have shut down their in-person services but are mobilizing to assist vulnerable community members who require assistance with grocery shopping, paying bills, picking up prescriptions and other tasks during the outbreak.
A poll conducted last week found that 18% of U.S. households already reported someone being laid off or having hours reduced because of the pandemic. Experts say it’s likely just the beginning of a massive economic downturn.
“In the midst of this crisis, we’re all having to rethink what it means to be church,” Voorhees said. “Church has been defined so often by what happens on Sunday morning when people show up for worship. … We’re trying to find the balance between keeping our people safe, keeping everybody safe, and being available to help those in need. This fund is one way we’ll do that.”
The church, which has received about $500 and five requests for assistance so far, will provide grocery store gift cards to local residents who can provide letters from former employers saying they have been laid off due to the pandemic. \
Another campaign, led by three Muslim organizations, has raised over $220,000 for low-income families to put toward food, bills and any other living expenses that will not be covered as a result of quarantines or work and school closures. Funds from the LaunchGood crowdfunding campaign will also be used to provide hygiene kits for low-income families and provide grants to local organizations coordinating similar relief projects.
Organized by CelebrateMercy, Penny Appeal USA and the Islamic Center at New York University, the effort was launched Saturday (March 14), originally asking for $20,000. Organizers bumped up their fundraising goal after donors put forward more than $75,000 within a day. So far, they have received more than 300 requests for financial aid.
“As American Muslims, we wish to respond to hardship with hope, as our faith instructs us, and send a message of compassion through action – serving our fellow Americans – of all faiths – who are facing distress and uncertainty right now,” said CelebrateMercy’s director Tarek El-Messidi. “Our Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said: ‘The most beloved people to God are those who benefit people most.’
“We pray that these hardship grants will help lessen the burden that too many hard working American families are feeling,” El-Messidi said.
That same spirit is behind the Islamic Circle of North America Relief’s grocery delivery service for families needing assistance in and around Washington, D.C. The aid group recently opened a special pantry in Boston to provide hygiene and household items to those who can’t afford it.
The Muslim Community of Ann Arbor, Michigan, created a dedicated zakat fund for those who cannot work during the outbreak. The Ahlulbayt Mercy Foundation is providing food baskets to families in need, and a group of Muslim youth in South Carolina also made headlines for their work providing groceries and other essentials to local charities.
The need appears to be growing ahead of actual cases, as schools are shuttered and layoffs begin. Georgia’s New Birth Missionary Baptist Church’s new food pantry has already fed more than 1,400 people this week. Philadelphia’s New Kingdom Baptist Church has opened its basement to provide free hot meals for children and families over the next two weeks. New York City’s Trinity Community Connection church is raising funds to keep its Harlem shelter for homeless LGBTQ youth open 24/7 during the outbreak.
Milwaukee’s Life Church is distributing meals to the local public school system and offering delivery to members in need. Florida’s Lake Gibson Church of the Nazarene is holding a “PB & Jesus” food drive event all week to collect food donations and prepare hundreds of meals for children at a local elementary school.
Other groups are focusing on providing for those isolated at home. At Colorado’s Cherry Hills Church, Texas’ Milestone Church and Ohio’s Centerburg Church of Christ, staffers are reaching out to congregants who are unable to get out for groceries and other supplies.
At Congregation Beth Jacob in Redwood City, California, clergy and volunteers set up a canned food drive and their own food delivery service and created a spreadsheet of grocery delivery services that are still in operation in their area. They’ve also created a community phone chain to have members touch base with each of their contacts.
“We want to show our concern and make sure people don’t feel isolated, even if they’re in isolation,” said Kendra Livingston, a member who helped organize the synagogue’s program after reading a viral Twitter thread about an elderly couple who were afraid to risk going into a store. “We’ve never mobilized like this in the past, to my knowledge. We’ve gotten a bunch of community members who are saying, ‘Hey, I’m young and healthy, I don’t have kids, how do I help?’”
Other synagogues have begun expanding existing support systems for congregants with new children or who are sitting shiva, now delivering groceries and setting up phone check-ins with elderly members and those in self-isolation.
In Britain, United Synagogue set up a daily phone help line to assist community members, and the Board of Deputies of British Jews sent out “I can help” cards for community members to post through mailboxes to those who are self-isolating.
“We need to dig deep to find the faith, strength and resources to get through,” Board of Deputies President Marie van der Zyl said. “ … We need to find coping mechanisms to deal with the new scale of challenge. The Jewish community has always been resourceful and giving to those both inside and outside our community and will continue to do so. We need to stick together even though we may be physically apart.”
Article Courtesy: Religionnews.com
by Aysha Khan, Religion News Service
When people ask Todd Green why Muslims don’t condemn terrorism — and they do ask, often — he has a quick response: “Have you ever Googled ‘Muslims condemning terrorism’?”
“The Council on American-Islamic Relations looked at the money trail from 2014 to 2016 from over 1,000 largely mainstream charities to 39 anti-Muslim groups that it calls the “Islamophobia Network.” The report, called “Hijacked by Hate,” was released Monday. It found that nearly $125 million was funneled to these groups. That includes money that was anonymously given through the charitable foundations of wealth management groups like Fidelity Charitable and Schwab.
The hate groups benefiting include ACT for America, the largest anti-Muslim group in the country and a registered nonprofit. The group is described by the Anti-Defamation League as an organization that stokes “irrational fear of Muslims.” Others, like CAIR, call it a hate group for its spreading of misinformation about Islam and fearmongering around the principles Muslims live by. Check out the Islamophobia networks in US here.”
One of the top search results is MuslimsCondemn.com, an online database created almost two years ago by a 19-year-old college student. “You could spend all day on that site reading Muslims’ condemnations,” Green said.
The site lists statements from organizations like the Muslim Public Affairs Council and Islamic Society of North America; religious leaders like Imam Omar Suleiman and Imam Suhaib Webb; and political leaders and civil activists like London Mayor Sadiq Khan and Linda Sarsour, former executive director of the Arab American Association of New York.
Fatwas have been declared, campaigns have been launched, memorials and prayer vigils have been held — all in the name of standing up against extremism.
But somehow, Green says, some people seem to have missed out on how vocally most Muslims stand against terrorism, extremism and violence. In his new book “Presumed Guilty: Why We Shouldn’t Ask Muslims to Condemn Terrorism,” the associate professor of religion at Iowa’s Luther College cautions fellow non-Muslim Americans against what he calls not only a “troubling and unethical” double standard, but also “a form of racist scapegoating.”
And it’s not just anti-Muslim groups doing the scapegoating. Plenty of bona fide liberals and interfaith proponents have fallen into that trap, he says. New York Times columnists, former President Obama and even Pope Francis have urged Muslim leaders to condemn terrorism as though they aren’t already doing so, or asked why they are not.
“They’ve spoken out over and over and over again,” Green told Religion News Service. “If we’re still asking these questions, the trouble doesn’t lie with Muslims at all. It lies with something deeper in the non-Muslim majority population. That is the normalization of Islamophobia.”
The problem, Green says, is that the question in itself incorrectly presumes Islam causes terrorism. It also distracts from violence caused by Christians, Jews and atheists.
Green, who previously wrote “The Fear of Islam: An Introduction to Islamophobia in the West,” served as a State Department adviser on Islamophobia in both the Trump and Obama administrations. Now, he has focused on this particularly common form of prejudice that “demands that (Muslims) constantly perform that role in the script, condemning terrorist attacks even though you know that the next time around they’re still going to ask you again.”
Not all of the misunderstanding is innocent. Anti-Muslim activists have fastened on “taqiyya” — the idea that Muslims who are facing extreme religious persecution can refuse to name their faith if they have a gun to their head, proverbial or otherwise. Ben Carson once described the term as “a component of Sharia that allows, and even encourages you to lie to achieve your goals,” a definition Islamic scholars criticized as a dangerously inaccurate oversimplification. But it has also been used to discredit Muslim condemnations of terrorism, along with anything else positive Muslims may do or so.
Green called this dismissal a time-honored trick used to demonize minorities, pointing to accusations in the early 1900s that Catholics were encouraged to lie to Protestants in order to impose the pope’s rule in America.
Balancing acts
Muslim activists like Heraa Hashmi, the creator of MuslimsCondemn.com, are working to change this mindset. At the Islamic Society of North America’s 2017 conference, Hashmi told how she was sitting in her class at the University of Colorado Boulder last year when another student sat down nearby. As their professor began lecturing on the the role of religion in European history, her classmate looked at Hashmi and asked, abruptly, “Why are Muslims so violent — and if they’re not, why don’t they condemn it?”
She told her classmate it was unfair to hold her to that standard, to ask her to apologize for the actions of a few, to paint an entire religion of 1.6 billion people with the same brush.
The conversation quickly turned tense, and Hashmi went home frustrated. She spent the next three weeks working on a 712-page spreadsheet listing examples of Muslim groups and leaders condemning violence, terrorism, sexual abuse, police brutality and more.
She posted the spreadsheet on Twitter, and within 24 hours it had been shared more than 15,000 times. With the help of two software developers who saw the tweet, Hashmi then turned her viral list into an online database that is continuing to expand.
Hashmi’s website has been well-received, and last year it helped earned her the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research’s Muhammad Ali Confident Muslim Award. But she told TRT World she now fears that the very act of amassing Muslim criticism of terrorist acts might be playing into a false dichotomy of peace-loving, moderate”good Muslims” versus the America-hating “bad Muslims.”
Green, too, struggles to avoid the good Muslim-bad Muslim framework. How can he and his colleagues show Muslims’ patriotism and their contributions to America, without pushing the idea that “good” Muslims join the army or the police academy while “bad” Muslims protest the Israeli occupation of the West Bank or the war on terror?
It’s a balancing act nobody has quite gotten right, he said. In his book, he looks at the juxtaposition of Muslims serving in the New York Police Department even as the NYPD’s controversial surveillance of Muslim communities has drawn federal lawsuits.
The other victims
About a month after the National September 11 Memorial and Museum opened in New York City in 2011, Green visited the site. He left feeling more connected to the pain and loss that marked that tragic day, but he writes that the museum pays attention to only some of those hurt by the events 17 years ago.
“There are far more victims of the 9/11 attacks than the almost three thousand people killed that day,” Green wrote. The memorial doesn’t mention the many civilian casualties of the subsequent War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the documented torture that took place in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay or CIA black sites. America, Green says, has been quick to forget its Muslim victims.
Green began writing “Presumed Guilty” almost a decade ago. Since then, he told RNS, Islamophobia has gotten worse. In recent years, anti-Muslim hate crimes have reached a record high, far exceeding the spike in attacks that occurred in the wake of 9/11.
Green cites the way Islamophobia has become a campaign tool used to galvanize voters. During their presidential campaigns, now-President Trump famously said “I think Islam hates us”; now-Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson said Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to become president; and Sen. Ted Cruz talked about patrolling Muslim neighborhoods.
While Green has plenty to criticize in the Bush administration’s response to 9/11, he recalls how President George W. Bush moved to quell distrust of Muslims in the days after the attacks.
“We have regressed very far from his defense of Islam as a religion of peace,” Green told RNS. “I can’t imagine any major Republican candidate in the last election cycle using that language.”
Article Courtesy: RNS