Founded | 1990 |
---|---|
Founder | Martin Mawyer |
Type | 501(c)(3) non-profit organization |
Location |
|
Area served | United States |
Key people | Martin Mawyer, President David Carroll, Chairman |
Website | christianaction |
Christian Action Network (CAN) is a Christian activist organization founded by Martin Mawyer in 1990. The organization states that its "primary goals are to protect America's religious and moral heritage through educational efforts." [1]
The group has advocated on a number of issues, including actions against the National Endowment for the Arts, [2] battles regarding First Amendment to the United States Constitution issues, [3] and the Islamic community center to be built near the World Trade Center site in New York. The group has been described as part of the counter-jihad movement, [4] and has been identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-Muslim hate group. [5]
The Christian Action Network was founded in 1990 with the goal to inform the public about issues which it believes affect "traditional Christian family values." [6]
According to the company's website, founder Martin Mawyer began a journalism career in 1979 in Washington D.C. covering religious issues for the daily news service Religion Today and as a correspondent for Moody Monthly, an American religious magazine published by the Moody Bible Institute. Mawyer went on to become the editor of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority Report, a news publication of the Moral Majority, where he served from 1980 to 1988. [7] [ better source needed ]
In 1993 CAN conducted several protests of the funding of what it called obscenity by the NEA. In July Mawyer's group hand-delivered letters to 114 freshman members of Congress and Republican congressional leaders urging them to abolish the NEA on the basis of a concurrent art exhibit at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art. The show "Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire" featured images of excrement and homoerotic acts. [8]
On July 29 the group set up a photography show at the U.S. Capitol that featured sexually explicit photographs by Joel-Peter Witkin, an artist funded by NEA grants. The exhibit was abruptly banned from the Capitol before it could publicly open and was then closed down by House Speaker Tom Foley after 15 minutes at a second location. [9]
The following September, CAN distributed 15-minute video tapes to President Bill Clinton and members of Congress that contained clips of pornographic films that the group said had the "stamp of approval" of the NEA. The 15-minute tapes contained excerpts from three films shown at the Pittsburgh International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in July 1991, which Mawyer said had been funded by NEA grants. An NEA spokeswoman disputed that the funding had supported those specific films. [10]
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) accused CAN in 1995 of violating the Federal Election Campaign Act by running television commercials prior to the 1992 presidential election that asserted Democratic candidate Bill Clinton supported job quotas for homosexuals as a kind of Affirmative Action. The commercials aired in 25 cities. In 1995 the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia granted CAN's motion to dismiss the complaint. [11] In 1996 the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the decision, finding that because the commercials did not expressly advocate for the election or defeat of the candidate, they were not a violation of the Act. [12]
In June 1999 Mawyer and an accomplice went into nightclub at Downtown Disney during Gay Days at Walt Disney World, obtaining hidden-camera video of men simulating sex acts as they danced onstage. CAN cut the footage into a video, showing it at a news conference at the National Press Club. CAN threatened to boycott Disney unless the company agreed to warn families entering its parks and booking hotel rooms during the annual Gay Days event. [13]
Although Disney did not change any of its policies after the expose, a spokesman did acknowledge that the dancing men in the video were Disney employees and that whoever was responsible for the dance routine would be disciplined. [13]
The organization had a nationwide screening tour that included stops near speaking engagements by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the former spokesman for Park51. The group's campaign received wide press coverage. [14] [15]
CAN and American Center for Law and Justice threatened the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation with legal action after it was unable to get permits to show its film in several public parks around the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks. The Department said the parks were unavailable. [16] The organization then announced that they were granted permits to show its film in several parks. [17]
On September 7, 2011, congressman Allen West (R-FL) hosted a screening of the film in the Rayburn House Office Building in Congress, where he reiterated his opposition to Park51 alongside several people who lost family members in the September 11th attacks. [18]
Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN) responded by sponsoring an event on September 13, 2011, to publicize a report about the "Islamophobia network" in the U.S. [19] The report criticized Rep. Allen West for spreading anti-Muslim sentiment and for his involvement in the event at which the work was screened. It also criticized the Christian Action Network and other participants. [20]
In August 2011, CAN announced a "Counter-Jihad Summit", which stated that "Our public schools are sneaking into their curricula pro-Islamic teachings that actually promote Sharia law. An entire generation of our children is being brainwashed!" [21] Mawyer is also connected to the counter-jihad movement by being on the advisory board of the International Free Press Society. [22]
In 2009, CAN released a video titled Homegrown Jihad: The terrorist camps around U.S., [23] which was followed in 2012 by the book Twilight in America: The Untold Story of Islamic Terrorist Training Camps Inside America. [24] [25] Both the book and film described the activities of the group Muslims of America, which set up religious hamlets, such as Islamberg in New York and Holy Islamville in South Carolina. Muslims of America was portrayed as the creation of Sufi Cleric Sheikh Syed Mubarik Ali Shah Gilani, a Pakistani cleric [26] who was alleged by the U.S. Government to be associated with the terrorist organization Jamaat ul-Fuqra. [27]
In 2013, The Muslims of America, based in Hancock, N.Y., sued Mawyer, a co-author and the Christian Action Network for $3 million in federal court in Syracuse, N.Y., seeking also to halt the continued publication of Twilight in America: The Untold Story of Islamic Training Camps in America. [24] In 2014 the suit was dismissed by a federal judge on the grounds that the Muslims of America lacked standing to sue, since the allegations in the book on which its claims were based pertained to a different organization, Muslims of the Americas Inc., which had dissolved in March 2013. [28]
The Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) is a Muslim civil rights and advocacy group. It is headquartered on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., with regional offices nationwide. Through civil rights actions, media relations, civic engagement, and education, CAIR's stated purpose is to promote social, legal and political activism among Muslims in America.
Islamophobia is the irrational fear of, hostility towards, or hatred against the religion of Islam or Muslims in general. Islamophobia is primarily a form of religious or cultural bigotry; and people who harbour such sentiments often stereotype Muslims as a geopolitical threat or a source of terrorism. Muslims, with diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds, are often inaccurately portrayed by Islamophobes as a single homogenous racial group.
Robert Bruce Spencer is an American anti-Muslim author and blogger, and one of the key figures of the counter-jihad movement. Spencer founded and has directed the blog Jihad Watch since 2003. In 2010 he co-founded the organization Stop Islamization of America with Pamela Geller.
Steven Emerson is an American investigative journalist, author, and pundit on national security, terrorism, and Islamic extremism. He is the founder and director of The Investigative Project on Terrorism, and received a George Polk Award for the 1994 documentary Terrorists Among Us: Jihad in America.
Jihad Watch is an American far-right Islamophobic blog operated by Robert Spencer. A project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Jihad Watch is the most popular blog within the counter-jihad movement.
The post-9/11 period is the time after the September 11 attacks, characterized by heightened suspicion of non-Americans in the United States, increased government efforts to address terrorism, and a more aggressive American foreign policy.
Louay M. Safi is a Syrian-American, a scholar of Islam and the Middle East, and an advocate of Arab and Muslim American rights. He published on such issues as social and political development, modernization, democracy, human rights, and Islam and Modernity. He is the author of 11 books and numerous papers, and speaker on questions of leadership, democracy, Islam, and the Middle East. He is also a spokesperson for the Syrian National Coalition, a league of Syrian opposition groups fighting Syrian President Assad, which was formed in November 2012 in Doha, Qatar.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center, formerly the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC), is a conservative anti-Islam foundation founded in 1988 by political activist David Horowitz and his long-time collaborator Peter Collier. It was established with funding from groups including the John M. Olin Foundation, the Bradley Foundation and the Scaife Foundation.
The Clarion Project is an American nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. that was founded in 2006. The organization has been involved in the production and distribution of the films Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, The Third Jihad: Radical Islam's Vision For America and Iranium. These films have been criticized by some for allegedly falsifying information and described as anti-Muslim propaganda. The organization publishes a weekly "Extremism Roundup" newsletter.
Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), also known as the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), is an anti-Muslim, pro-Israel American counter-jihad organization known primarily for its controversial, Islamophobic advertising campaigns. The group has been described as extremist and far-right. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) lists SIOA as an anti-Muslim hate group.
The Third Jihad: Radical Islam's Vision For America is a 2008 documentary style film directed by Wayne Kopping of South Africa and Erik Werth. It was produced by Werth and Raphael Shore, a Canadian-Israeli, with financing from the Clarion Project, an organization described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-Muslim group.
Mohamed Zuhdi Jasser is an American religious and political commentator and physician specializing in internal medicine and nuclear cardiology in Phoenix, Arizona. Jasser is a former lieutenant commander in the United States Navy, where he served as staff internist in the Office of the Attending Physician of the United States Congress. In 2003, with a group of American Muslims, Jasser founded the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) based in Phoenix, Arizona, and in 2004 he was one of the founders of the Center for Islamic Pluralism.
Founded in 2004, the Cordoba Initiative is an Islamic, multi-national, multi-faith organization dedicated to improving Muslim-West relations. It promotes the controversial interfaith Cordoba House community center, later renamed Park51.
ACT for America, also referred to as ACT! for America, founded in 2007, is a US based advocacy group that stands against what it perceives as "the threat of radical Islam" to Americans. The group has been characterized by some media outlets as anti-Muslim.
Pamela Geller is an American anti-Muslim, far-right political activist, blogger and commentator. Geller promoted birther conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama, saying that he was born in Kenya and that he is a Muslim.
Counter-jihad, also known as the counter-jihad movement, is a self-titled political current loosely consisting of authors, bloggers, think tanks, street movements and so on linked by beliefs that view Islam not as a religion but as an ideology that constitutes an existential threat to Western civilization. Consequently, counter-jihadists consider all Muslims as a potential threat, especially when they are already living within Western boundaries. Western Muslims accordingly are portrayed as a "fifth column", collectively seeking to destabilize Western nations' identity and values for the benefit of an international Islamic movement intent on the establishment of a caliphate in Western countries. The counter-jihad movement has been variously described as anti-Islamic, Islamophobic, inciting hatred against Muslims, and far-right. Influential figures in the movement include the bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer in the US, and Geert Wilders and Tommy Robinson in Europe.
The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) is a non-profit research group founded by Steven Emerson in 1995. IPT has been called a prominent part of the "Islamophobia network" within the United States and a "leading source of anti-Muslim racism" and noted for its record of selective reporting and poor scholarship.
David Yerushalmi is an American lawyer and political activist who is the driving counsel behind the anti-sharia movement in the United States. Along with Robert Muise, he is co-founder and senior counsel of the American Freedom Law Center. He is also general counsel to the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., a national security think tank founded by Frank Gaffney described as far-right and conspiracist.
Nina Rosenwald is an American political activist and philanthropist. An heiress to the Sears Roebuck fortune, Rosenwald is vice president of the William Rosenwald Family Fund and co-chair of the board of American Securities Management. She is the founder and president of Gatestone Institute, a New York-based right-wing anti-Muslim think tank.
American Muslims often face Islamophobia and racialization due to stereotypes and generalizations ascribed to them. Due to this, Islamophobia is both a product of and a contributor to the United States' racial ideology, which is founded on socially constructed categories of profiled features, or how people seem.