Justin's Political Corner

Like her fellow Minnesota-based conservative talk show host Bradlee Dean, End Times broadcaster Jan Markell is warning that Minnesota is about to experience divine punishment over the state’s new marriage equality law. She told the American Family Association’s news service that gay people and Muslims have turned Minnesota into “the occult capital of America,” noting that “God destroyed cities in the Bible over homosexuality.”

Jan Markell, founder and director of Olive Tree Ministries, laments that The North Star State has become a mecca for many unpleasant things.

“We’re the occult capital of America,” she tells OneNewsNow. “We certainly have more Islamic influence probably than any other place, other than Dearborn, Michigan. We’re certainly one of the gay capitals, and now with homosexual marriage a reality, many Christians, solid pro-family-type people — we don’t know where to run to.”

And Markell believes Minnesota Christians are concerned about God’s judgment on the state.

“Whether it be economically or some weather-related kind of a tragedy, but God destroyed cities in the Bible over homosexuality; He speaks out on this issue in a very clear manner and calls this an abomination,” the Olive Tree Ministries founder warns.

H/T: Right Wing Watch

The Virginia Republican Party this weekend nominated for lieutenant governor a minister who has a history of virulent anti-gay statements, accuses the Democratic Party of enslaving African Americans, and criticized President Obama for having “Muslim sensibilities.” The former Senate candidate ,who in 2012garnered less than 5 percent of the vote in the Republican primary,bested six other candidates during the Virginia GOP convention, and will join conservative Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli on the Republican ticket. He is the first black candidate the state party has endorsed since 1988.

Here are some of the most alarming facts you need to know about E.W. Jackson:

• He has said gays and lesbians are “very sick people, psychologically and emotionally” whose minds are perverted. He has also said homosexuality “poisons culture, it destroys families, it destroys societies”
• He called alleged Democratic Party ties to Planned Parenthood “more lethal to black lives than the KKK ever was” and thinks blacks who join the Democratic Party arevoluntarily selling themselves into slavery.
• He has equated Islam with anti-semitism, and criticized President Obama for having “Muslim sensibilities,”
• He led an “Exodus Now!” movement encouraging African Americans to leave the Democratic party because opposition to same-sex marriage and government endorsement of religion means “Democrats are engaged in a concerted effort to do away with all symbols of our Judeo-Christian culture.”
• He rallied against hate crimes legislation as a “virulent strain of Anti-Christian bigotry and hatred.”

h/t: Nicole Flatow at Think Progress

Next time Christian Broadcasting Network correspondent Erick Stakelbeck talks about religious liberty, just remember that he doesn’t seem to extend that freedom to Muslims. During a conference call with the group Tea Party Unity, Stakelbeck attacked the Obama administration for having “literally” intervened in cases to defend the construction of mosques.

Stakelbeck said he is outraged that the Obama administration is trying to stop residents from blocking the construction of mosques because how dare the Justice Department defend the First Amendment!

He was also livid that Muslims may want to build “a $5 million mega-mosque,” just as we are sure he is angry that a Southern Baptist congregation in Dallas constructed a $130 million megachurch.

Stakelbeck told another caller that “there is a concerted effort by Islamists to infiltrate the very heartland of American society,” particularly the Bible Belt.

Just to be clear, Muslims represent just 1% of the population of Tennessee and less than 0.5% in other Bible Belt states like Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Arkansas.

h/t: Brian Tashman at RWW

In his WorldNetDaily column today, Erik Rush claims that President Obama likely “orchestrated the attack” on the compound in Benghazi “given his connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and legendary understanding of all things Islamic.” He offers no evidence as to why or how Obama “arranged for the assault on the compound,” but that’s par for the course at WorldNetDaily.

Rush cites the “Trinity United murders,” which according to far-right lore was Obama’s move to murder his former gay lovers he attended church with, as proof of Obama’s record of “grave criminal action.”

“Depending on the outcome, measures might be as severe as charges filed against Cabinet officials or the impeachment of Obama himself,” Rush writes. “While this president reasonably deserves to be occupying a cell in some federal penitentiary anyway, impeachment presents many troublesome aspects.”

h/t: RWW

Avi Lipkin is back and once again stirring fears that President Obama — with the help of the Illuminati and the Free Masons, of course — is planning to engineer a crisis in the Middle East that will push 50-100 million Muslim refugees to the US who will then live on property seized under Agenda 21.

As he explained on an interview on VCY America’s Crosstalk yesterday, Obama will use Agenda 21 to confiscate lands such as parks and farms in Texas and the Ozarks in order to create “a Muslim majority in America.”

Later, Lipkin explained that Muslims tend to settle in forests and are already setting up encampments until there are about 50 million Muslim forest dwellers.

From the 05.06.2013 edition of VCY America’s Crosstalk:

H/T: rightwingwatch.org

But is it true? Let’s take a look at several issues and how both mainstream liberals and mainstream conservatives respond. I will be adding links to the conservative side to forestall the usual “Straw man” complaint.

1. Abortion: Can a woman abort a fetus and if so, up to what stage of development?

Liberals – Currently, there is no way to know when a fetus/zygote becomes a  person with the same moral weight as a “post-uterine” individual. In the absence of anything more solid than, “That’s how I feel about it,” liberals are willing to let the choice belong to the woman up to the point of viability. No one is comfortable with a 30 week abortion except under dire circumstances.

Conservatives – Not only have they declared that a single celled zygote is the same as a 10 year old child but have tried to pass laws to allow civilians to kill abortion providers and arrest women suspected of trying to induce a miscarriage.

Who is more extreme?

2. Religion in school – Should religion be promoted in school through teacher-led prayer and religious iconography or should schools be “religion neutral?”

Liberals – They would prefer to keep religion out of schools so no one religion is promoted over others in a country with literally hundreds of different faiths and sects (or none at all). This way, no one is ostracized or pressured.

Conservatives – They want Christianity, only Christianity and a particular brand of Christianity (No Catholics or Mormons!) taught in schools. At the same time, they do not want objective and verifiable science taught because it runs counter their very specific brand of fundamentalist Christianity. No evolution and no six billion year old Earth.

Who is more extreme?

3. Banning religion – Should the United States pass laws against unpopular religions in direct contradiction of the First Amendment?

Liberals - Militant atheists, not all of whom are liberals, talk about banning religion but they are a minority and no lawmaker has tried to seriously do this.

Conservatives – Conservatives talk about banning Islam all the time and have passed several “anti-Sharia” laws.

Who is more extreme?

4. Guns – Does society have the right to limit certain kinds of firearms and accessories like semi-automatic assault rifles, extended clips and fully-automatic machine guns while requiring all purchases of guns to be subjected to a background check to weed out criminals, the mentally ill, potential terrorists, etc.?

Liberals - Militant gun control proponents would like to ban all guns like many other industrialized countries have done with no ill effect. They are a minority and no lawmaker has tried to seriously do this. Liberals, in general, believe that background checks will reduce gun crime and banning certain kinds of guns and accessories will reduce, but not eliminate, the ability of killers to commit mass murder.

Conservatives – They have suppressed gun control laws so much that anyone can buy almost any gun at anytime with no oversight whatsoever and want to continue to do so. Conservative lawmakers have pushed laws to allow guns in churches, pre-schools and bars that serve alcohol. Some towns have mandated that every household MUST have a gun. They even want people just released from mental health facilities to immediately be able to buy a gun as well as convicted violent felons. They believe more guns make them safer in direct contradiction to evidence that show states flooded with guns have a high level of gun violence.

Who is more extreme?

5. Marriage – Can the definition of marriage be expanded to include homosexuals? 

Liberals – Considering marriage used to be prohibited between blacks and whites and nothing bad happened when we changed it, liberals would like for people to be able to marry the person they love regardless of their sex.

Conservatives – They insist that marriage has remained unchanged for centuries despite all evidence to the contrary. They also insist that same sex marriage is no different than bestiality and pedophilia despite it being between two consenting adults.

Who is more extreme?

6. Voting – Should we require citizens to obtain special ID in order to vote?

“Big government” Liberals – Everybody should be able to vote with a minimal amount of interference.

“Small government” Conservatives – Everyone should be forced to have “Voter ID” that costs time and money to get in order to fight wide-spread (but strangely impossible to find) “voter fraud.” Curiously, if you ask these same people if guns should be subject to the same kinds of rules to combat the well established tens of thousands of gun deaths and hundreds of thousands of gun crimes a year, they get very upset at this “infringement” on their “freedom.”

Who is more extreme?

7. The President – Does the office of the President of the United States deserve unquestioning respect and obedience in a time of war?

“Totalitarian” Liberals – No. No president should have carte blanche to wage war in our names or be immune to criticism. The right to to petition the Government for a redress of grievances is in the very first amendment in the Bill of Rights. Yet, anyone that criticized President Bush in any way, including about about non-war related policies, was labeled “traitors” by conservatives for “not supporting the president in a time of war” as if he were the God-Emperor of Arrakis.

Conservatives – During the very same war in which Bush was not allowed to be criticized, President Obama has been accused of being a secret Muslim from Kenya, a Nazi, a Communist, a Socialist, a homosexual, a gangsta, a traitor, a terrorist and racial slurs have been tossed around like confetti at a KKK gathering. The calls for impeachment haven’t stopped since almost his first day in office.

Who is more extreme?

8. Taxes – How should the broken tax code be fixed?

Liberals – We want tax loopholes closed for the rich and corporations and for them to pay what they actually owe. Hiding money in tax havens should be aggressively discouraged with confiscation and jail time (just like the rest if us face when we dodge our taxes). A modest tax hike on billionaires wouldn’t be so bad, either but not terribly necessary if the previous steps are taken.

Conservatives – They want to pay no taxes at all (but not a penny to be taken from their Social Security and Medicare) because they’ve been taxed enough already despite having lower taxes than at any point in the last 30 years..

Who is more extreme?

9. Rhetoric – Whose rhetoric displays a disconnect from reality and/or violence?

Liberals – We yell about the banks stealing our money with bailouts and being “Too big to fail,” getting money out of politics, the rich not paying their taxes, no more warmongering, no more rape, no more discrimination, respecting women’s rights, feeding the poor and hungry, stopping Climate Change and freedom of, and from, religion.

Conservatives – While they happen to agree with liberals about the banks, getting money out of politics and no more warmongering, they also say that liberals are violent thugs that are planning on putting conservatives into concentration camps, regularly talk about secession, revolution, Second Amendment remedies, shooting liberals and pray for Obama’s death.

Who is more extreme?

10. Rape – Is rape…rape?*

Liberals – Yes. It doesn’t matter if violence, drugs or coercion were used. If the sex was not consensual, it’s rape.

Conservatives – Well, it depends. Was it legitimate? A Gift from God? Did she get pregnant? Was it forcible? Was her vagina shredded by the rape? If not then it wasn’t “real rape.”

*I’m leaving out all of the slut shaming and “she was asking for it” because that is a product of rape culture and is almost entirely independent of political affiliation. While it is more prevalent among conservatives it’s not remotely confined to them. I’m not even sure they represent a majority in this regard.

Who is more extreme?

Now, conservatives will complain that I’m “misrepresenting them” or “using straw man arguments.” This is why I included all of the links to actual quotes from actual mainstream Republicans or conservatives. These are not fringe beliefs for the right. This is what their elected officials and media representatives say. When a conservative uses the most extreme of left wing positions (They want to ban all guns!), they have to find a blog no one has heard of or random Facebook comments to support their accusation. It certainly isn’t a part of mainstream liberal ideology.

h/t: Justin Rosario at AddictingInfo.org

This morning, the National Review broke the news that tea party Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is considering a presidential run, a scoop that should surprise no one who’s paid attention to his short Senate career. As Jonathan Bernstein explains, Cruz has spent his few months in the Senate alienating his colleagues by constantly trying to distinguish himself as the more-conservative-than-thou alternative to “establishment” Republicans. Such behavior makes no sense if Cruz is interested in building the coalitions necessary to legislate, but it makes perfect sense if he has his eyes set on winning a tea-soaked GOP primary in 2016.

 Here are five examples of such theories that Cruz actually believes in:

• George Soros leads a global conspiracy to abolish the game of golf. In a January 2012 article published on Cruz’s senate campaign website, the future senator argues that a twenty year-old non-binding United Nations resolution signed by 178 nations including the United States under President George H.W. Bush, is actually a nefarious plot to “abolish ‘unsustainable’ environments, including golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads.” Cruz attributes this plot to a common tea party boogieman — “[t]he originator of this grand scheme is George Soros, who candidly supports socialism and believes that global development must progress through eliminating national sovereignty and private property.”
• Communists infiltrated Harvard Law School. Almost three years ago, Cruz gave a speech to the tea party group Americans for Prosperity in which he claimed that revolutionary communists were a major presence on Harvard’s law faculty. According to Cruz, “There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.” Cruz’s claims came as a big surprise to Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried, a Republican who served as President Reagan’s solicitor general, who says that “I would be surprised if there were any members of the faculty who ‘believed in the Communists overthrowing the U.S. government.’”
• Islamic law threatens the United States. Echoing a common fear among very conservative politicians that Sharia law is somehow creeping into American life, Cruz told a senate candidate’s forum last year that “Sharia law is an enormous problem” in the United States. In reality, there are barely any examples of Islamic or Sharia law even being mentioned in American legal proceedings, and when it is mentioned it is typically because a contract, will or other document drafted by a private citizen invokes Sharia law, not because the court wishes to replace American law with something else.
• Obama wants the immigration bill to fail so he can campaign on it in 2016. Cruz claims that “the reason that the White House is insisting on a path to citizenship” in the immigration bill making its way through Congress “is because the White House knows that insisting on that is very likely to scuttle the bill” giving Obama an issue to campaign on in 2014 and 2016. In reality, a path to citizenship was a key prong of the immigration bill President Bush supported in 2007. It’s also a major prong of the Gang of Eight bill — agang which includes Republican Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ). So if the path to citizenship is actually an Obama plot to give himself a campaign issue, Obama has some unexpected co-conspirators in this scheme.
• George W. Bush led an assault on Texas’ “sovereignty.” Cruz’s first campaign ad touted his victory in a Supreme Court case permitting the state of Texas to execute a Mexican national, despite the fact that Texas violated America’s treaty obligations by not permitting this Mexican citizen “to request assistance from the consul of his own state.” President Bush objected to Texas’s effort to flout a treaty that even North Korea had honored when it detained two American journalists for five months in 2009. Cruz dismissed Bush’s objections as an intrusion on “the sovereignty of the States.”

If elected to the White House, Cruz is unlikely to step back from his penchant for Glenn Beck-style conspiracies.

h/t: Ian Millhiser at Think Progress Justice

In a syndicated column Friday, conservative commentator and former Republican presidential adviser Pat Buchanan called for a “moratorium on immigration from the Islamic world” in response to the Boston bombings. Calling the bombings “the dark side of diversity,” Buchanan asks, “Why are we bringing all of the world’s quarrelsome minorities, and all the world’s quarrels with them, into our home?”

Buchanan’s call to ban immigration from entire swaths of the world is nothing new. In a 2011 interview with the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer, Buchanan agreed with Fischer that the U.S. should ban Muslim immigrants and the construction of mosques.

Buchanan has also claimed that Mexican immigrants are causing the “death of the West” and staging “an immigrant invasion of the United States from the Third World.”

h/t: Right Wing Watch

Fox News and other conservatives are busy attacking Attorney General Eric Holder for assuring the public that law enforcement will not tolerate any acts of violence or discrimination in the wake of the Boston Marathon terror attack. But their latest feigned outrage ignores that hate crimes against Muslims are a very real concern. 

Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly covered the story on the April 30 edition of America Live, hosting Fox contributor Michelle Malkin, who mocked the “phantom threats of hate crime epidemics that have never happened.” (This was the second straight day Kelly had devoted a segment to expressing outrage about Holder’s common sense comments.) 

Other conservatives lashed out at Holder for his vow to defend religious minorities in America.

Fox’s weird attempt to push back against Holder’s pledge fit nicely into Fox’s frequently anti-Muslimprogramming. It also highlighted how little interest Fox has in the larger issue of anti-Muslim violence.  

I noted last week how Fox News remains largely blind to acts of right-wing extremist terror and political violence because that storyline doesn’t fit into the cable channel’s preferred narrative about Muslim terrorists, or Fox’s eagerness to assign collective blame onto the Muslim-American community.

Here’s a recent timeline:

• Dearborn MI, January 2011: A man is arrested with a vehicle full of explosives he intended to use to blow up a local mosque. 
• Queens, NY, January 2012: A Molotov cocktail was thrown at an Islamic center. The suspect reportedly told police he intended “to inflict as much damage as possible and take out as many Muslims and Arabs as possible.”
• Lombard, IL, August 2012: An acid-filled bottle was thrown at an Islamic school during the nighttime Ramadan prayers.
• Joplin, MO, 2012: The local mosque burned to the ground one month after it was the target of an arson attack.
• Toledo, OH, September 2012: Authorities ruled that a gasoline fire on the main floor of the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo was the result of an arson attack.
• San Antonio, TX, November 2012: A man was arrested for threatening to kill as many people as possible at the Islamic Academy of San Antonio.
• Fremont, CA, December 2012: A man entered the Ibrahim Khalillullah Islamic Center and threatened to shoot everyone.
• Fayette, GA, January 2013: The windows of a Muslim house of prayer were shot out at 2 a.m.
• Oklahoma City, OK, April 2013: Vandals spray-painted racial slurs on the walls of the American Muslim Association.  

H/T: MMFA

Writing in WorldNetDaily today, Judicial Watch founder Larry Klayman expanded on hisconspiracy theory that a deadly fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, was actually a terrorist attack.

Instead of offering any evidence to substantiate his claims, he argues that the fact that the explosion at the plant was ruled an accident (and likely a result of loose regulations) is proof enough that the Obama administration is actually covering up an act of “Muslim terrorism” that was meant to kill George W. Bush, who lives in Dallas, Texas.

Dallas, of course, is approximately 77 miles north of West, but that doesn’t really matter.

See, as Klayman explains, Obama is “potentially even more dangerous than al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, the mullahs in Tehran, or any terrorist group or nation state, combined” and a “traitorous ‘Muslim in drag,’” and only Klayman himself can comprehend and expose his diabolical schemes.

h/t: Brian Tashman at Right Wing Watch

On August 5, 2012, just before 10:30 in the morning, Wade Michael Page pulled up outside the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisc., took out his semi-automatic handgun and started killing worshipers. An Army veteran and an avid bass player in a neo-Nazi rock band, Page killed two Sikhs outside the house of worship and then made his way inside. There, he reloaded and killed four more, including the president of the temple who was shot while trying to tackle Page. Three more were critically wounded in the massacre.

When local police descended, Page opened fire and shot one officer nearly ten times. When the authorities returned fire and shot Page in the stomach, he took his 9mm pistol, pointed it at his own head, and pulled the trigger.

According to acquaintances, the 40-year-old killer hated blacks, Indians, Native Americans and Hispanics (he called non-whites “dirt people”), and was interested in joining the Ku Klux Klan. Immersed in the world of white power music, Page’s band rehearsed in front of a Nazi flag.

Note that back in August 2012, Fox News didn’t care very much about Wade Page and the wild gun shootout he unleashed in an act of domestic terror in the Milwaukee suburb, nor did Fox suggest the event was connected to a larger, more sinister terror trend. In fact, in the days that followed the gun massacre, there were just two passing references to Page during Fox’s primetime, one from Bill O’Reilly and one from Greta Van Susteren. No guests were asked to discuss the temple shooting, and after one day the story was completely forgotten.

In one rare occasion when the conversation did turn to Page’s motivations, Fox’s opinion hosts were quick to criticize the notion that he was a far-right extremist. (He clearly was.) On The Five, after co-host Bob Beckel referred to Page as “right-wing skinhead,” he was quickly shouted down by his colleagues. Co-host Andrea Tantaros stressed that the killing was an isolated event that didn’t have any larger implications. “How do you stop a lunatic?” she asked. “This is not a political issue.”

Fox’s guarded response to an extremist’s killing spree was striking, considering that in the wake of the Boston Marathon bomb attack Fox News has gone all in (again) with its war on Islam as the channel fights its latest bigoted chapter in the War on Terror. It’s striking as Fox tries to blame a larger community for the act of two madmen because it’s the same Fox News that often can’t find time to even comment, let alone report, on what’s become regular, and often deadly, right-wing extremist attacks in America.

From neo-Nazi killers like Page, to a string of abortion clinic bombings, as well as bloody assaults on law enforcement from anti-government insurrectionists, acts of right-wing extreme violence continue to terrorize victims in the U.S. (“Fifty-six percent of domestic terrorist attacks and plots in the U.S. since 1995 have been perpetrated by right-wing extremists.”) But Fox News is not concerned. And Fox News does not try to affix collective blame.

It’s clear that Fox is only interested in covering and hyping a single part of the War on Terror; the part that targets Muslims and lets Fox wallow in stereotypes. The part that lets Fox accuse Obama of being “soft” on Islamic terrorists and perhaps sharing a radical allegiance. The part that lets Fox advocate for bugging mosques and eliminating other Constitutional rights, and lets it unleash a collection of anti-Islam crusaders onto the cable airwaves.

Most importantly, Fox covers a War on Terror that lets it uniformly blame Muslims.

Keep in mind though, there’s been no reported evidence that anyone in the Cambridge, Mass., Muslim community knew about, condoned or helped plan the bombing perpetrated by Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. In fact, it’s possible the bomber brothers told nobody of their plan because local Muslims would have reported them to the police, the way a local imam tipped off Canadian officials who made arrests this week and thwarted an alleged rail bombing plot. (And the way local Muslims in Virginia and New York have helped prevent terror plots.)

Fox’s ugly religious attacks represent a brazen display of bigotry and bullying. The hypocrisy is that Fox News routinely downplays acts of political, and religious, violence from far-right extremists, while making sure not to condemn those indirectly associated with them.

Such acts have been legion. During a robust period of political violence last decade, women’s health clinics were attacked in January, May, and September 2003, January and July 2004, January, May, and July 2005, as well as May and December 2007, according to the National Abortion Federation.

Then in 2009, five clinics in Florida were the target of acid attacks.

More recently, two antiabortion firebombings occurred in 2011. And last year a woman’s health clinic in Wisconsin was damaged when a homemade bomb was set off on the building’s windowsill.

Of course, in May 2009, antiabortion extremist Scott Roeder shot and killed Dr. George Tiller while he attended church in Wichita, Kan.

And then there are the right-wing hate extremists who have plotted attacks against the government and minorities. Below is a partial list of attacks, or planned attacks, unleashed by radicals in recent years. The descriptions are taken from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2012 report, “Terror From the Right: Plots, Conspiracies and Racist Rampages Since Oklahoma City.”

h/t: AlterNet

No sooner had the reality of the Boston Marathon bombing sunk in than Muslim activists in the U.S. began sending out a slew of news releases, tweets and Facebook messages urging prayers and aid for the victims — and condemning whoever was behind the horrific attack.

It’s a familiar race against time for Muslim groups. Almost as soon as the smoke cleared around Copley Square, they knew from long experience that some would immediately point the finger of blame in their direction.

Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations moved quickly to establish, in a statement on Monday, that “American Muslims, like Americans of all backgrounds, condemn in the strongest possible terms today’s cowardly bomb attack on participants and spectators of the Boston Marathon.”

“We also call for the swift apprehension and punishment of the perpetrators,” Awad added, echoing a statement from the Muslim Public Affairs Council that called on “all of us as Americans to work together to bring those responsible to justice.”

But they realize there are already waves of rumors to combat. They’ve seen it before. Many widely believed Muslims were behind the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, until American militiaman Timothy McVeigh was convicted of the crime.

And the Boston bombing was no exception to the pattern. Regular Fox News guest commentator Erik Rush quickly sent out tweets blaming Muslims, adding in one, “Let’s kill them,” a post he subsequently deleted. “Jihad in America,” wrote anti-Muslim blogger Pam Geller.

Speaking about the bombings on his ‘700 Club program, Pat Robertson was also furious: “Don’t talk to me about religion of peace” — the way Muslims describe their faith — “No way.”

On his show, conservative host Glenn Beck opined that “no American citizen blows up random people; that’s a Middle Eastern scene, that’s not an American scene. When our crazies go off, they target the government, not streets that are crowded with people.”

On Monday afternoon, the New York Post had to pull a story that reported that police had a Saudi suspect in custody. Later reports that a Saudi national’s apartment near Boston had been searched also raised anxieties among Muslims; the man, who was wounded in the bombing, was subsequently cleared.

“Discrimination against Muslims has been a real dynamic in the United States,” said Christina Warner, campaign director of Shoulder-to-Shoulder, a national interfaith alliance of Muslims, Jews and Christians who combat anti-Muslim prejudice. “We’ve already seen some reports falsely identifying the perpetrator as a Saudi individual when he was just a witness.”

h/t: USA Today