Muslim Student Refuses to Stand for Pledge Story That Wasn’t

Sheila Musaji

Posted Sep 1, 2009      •Permalink      • Printer-Friendly Version
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Muslim Student Refuses to Stand for Pledge Story That Wasn’t

by Sheila Musaji

We’ve had a lot of stories that weren’t:

The Evil Muslim Bus Driver Story That Wasn’t, the Rachel Rae, Dunkin Donuts incident that wasn’t.

And, now we have the “story” of the JROTC student in Florida who was suspended because she confronted a Muslim student in hijab for not standing for the pledge of allegiance.  According to the story the student said to the Muslim girl:  “Take that thing off your head and act like you’re proud to be an American”. 

Once again the Islamophobes were a little quick to jump to negative conclusions about Islam and Muslims.

Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch posted an article with the headline:  “Florida: Muslim girl sits for Pledge of Allegiance. Non-Muslim girl asks her why she doesn’t act proud to be an American. Guess who got suspended”  A site called “Bare Naked Islam” posted the “GET THE HELL OUT OF MY COUNTRY YOU MUSLIM SCUM. Fricken Muslim will wear a rag on her head but not put her hand over her heart.” which was the least offensive thing they had to say.   

The only problem with all of this is that as it turns out that according to school officials the student lied about seeing Muslim student sit during Pledge of Allegiance and furthermore, the Muslim student did stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

You would think that simply in the interest of not looking like alarmists, the Islamophobes would wait until they had all the facts before printing anything.  This doesn’t seem likely based on past experience.

Lots of other things never happened, or are simply not true.  Arabs didn’t celebrate 9/11 at a Dunkin Donuts in New Jersey.  Budweiser did not pull all its product from the shelves of a convenience store where there was celebration of the terrorist attacks - this never happened.  An American Missionary in Africa didn’t face possible murder charges and hanging because of a traffic accident.  There is no verse of the Qur’an on “The Wrath of the Eagle”.  The supposed bomb threat made by an Arizona student that led to an evacuation of the school was a hoax by non-Muslim students.  The story that Iran was considering forcing Jews to wear a yellow star appeared in several publications and it was totally false.  The slaying of the New Jersey Coptic family was falsely charged to Muslims.  The story about the British banks banning piggy banks so as not to offend Muslims never happened.  Muslims are not more likely to support terrorism and violence than Christians or Jews.  Muslims did not destroy the Library of Alexandria.  Muslims do speak up against extremism and violence.  The claim that hospitals in England asked nurses to turn hospital beds towards Mecca totally untrue as reported by no sword through the 41 cent mark on the Eid stamp.  Bernard Lewis’ claimed that Iran would attack the U.S. and/or Israel with nuclear weapons on August 22, 2006.  This Nuclear Apocalypse turned out to be milder than expected, and in fact never happened.  The claim that all terrorists are Muslims ignores history.

The fact that these “news stories” and articles are simply wrong doesn’t change the fact that they are “out there” and that they will be read and believed by many of the same folks who believe the supermarket tabloids.  They will be forwarded or passed on, and commented on, and the stories will grow and more and more people will accept them as “facts”.

As I wrote in the past about such non-stories “If Muslims Are So Terrible, Why The Need To Make Up So Many Lies?” 

You can find lots more such stories at http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/responses_to_allegations_claims_against_specific_individuals_organizations/

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