Geller certainly does not curry favor with many. Nonetheless, I for one, will consider her article that Imams often influence those who attend their Mosques.
Maybe she exaggerates. On the other hand, they are getting it from somewhere. Online would seem generally a much lesser impressive manner.
I dont think that Sharia law is coming to the USA, its ISIL whom wants to bring its own distorted version of law to the world. But ISIL goes against Islam. American Muslims are not interested in over turning the laws of the USA, otherwise there would be chaos all across the USA. The vast majority of Muslims around the world reject extremist Ideology such as what ISIL brings forth. I haven’t seen Pam Geller and Robert Spencer bring forth polls and studies which portray Muslims in a positive light.
Jihad for example is an act that True Muslims carry out, such as what we see from the Muslims taking on ISIL or from a Muslim who works to bring together people of different belief systems.
Also, here is a source which looks at the history of Mosques in the USA, and this source will reveal similarities between Christians and Muslims, Christians and Muslims answer to polls in similar manners, but this is not shown on Pam Gellers website…
*Mosques have been here since the colonial era. A mosque, or masjid, is literally any place where Muslims make salat, the prayer performed in the direction of Mecca; it needn’t be a building. One of the first mosques in North American history was on Kent Island, Md.: Between 1731 and 1733, *
*According to recent Pew and Gallup polls, about 40 percent of Muslim Americans say they pray in a mosque at least once a week, nearly the same percentage of American Christians who attend church weekly. About a third of all U.S. Muslims say they seldom or never go to mosques. And contrary to stereotypes of mosques as male-only spaces, Gallup finds that women are as likely as men to attend. *
On the view that American Muslims want to spread Sharia law in the USA,
*
Islamic law includes not only the Koran and the Sunna (the traditions of the prophet Muhammad) but also great bodies of arcane legal rulings and pedantic scholarly interpretations. If mosques forced Islamic law upon their congregants, most Muslims would probably leave – just as most Christians might walk out of the pews if preachers gave sermons exclusively on Saint Augustine, canon law and Greek grammar. Instead, mosques study the Koran and the Sunna and how the principles and stories in those sacred texts apply to their everyday lives. *
Irt the Funding of Mosques in the USA,
*There certainly have been instances in which foreign funds, especially from Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf region, have been used to build mosques in the United States. The Saudi royal family, for example, reportedly gave $8 million for the building of the King Fahd Mosque, which was inaugurated in 1998 in Culver City, a Los Angeles suburb.
But the vast majority of mosques are supported by Muslim Americans themselves. Domestic funding reflects the desire of many U.S. Muslims to be independent of overseas influences. Long before Sept. 11, 2001, in the midst of a growing clash of interests between some Muslim-majority nations and the U.S. government – during the Persian Gulf War, for instance – Muslim American leaders decided that they must draw primarily from U.S. sources of funding for their projects. *
And irt the big one, which is the view that Mosques in the USA are a center for terror training.
- To the contrary, mosques have become typical American religious institutions. In addition to worship services, most U.S. mosques hold weekend classes for children, offer charity to the poor, provide counseling services and conduct interfaith programs.
No doubt, some mosques have encouraged radical extremism. Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian sheik who inspired the World Trade Center’s first attackers in 1993, operated out of the Al-Salam mosque in Jersey City, N.J. But after the 2001 attacks, such radicalism was largely pushed out of mosques and onto the Internet, mainly because of a renewed commitment among mosque leaders to confront extremism. *
more,
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/26/AR2010082605510.html
Glad to hear it. I suspect our good friend the author might even agree if pressed a little. I tend to paint in broad strokes myself - saves time and energy.