Category: Islam

Hijabs and religious head coverings okay in Congress, secular hats not? Religion once again gets a pass

November 23, 2018 • 9:15 am

As you’ve surely heard, Ilhan Omar was elected to the House of Representatives this year. She’ll be representing a district in Minnesota, and is one of the first two Muslim-American women to be elected to Congress. She’s also the first hijabi elected to Congress (the other woman, Rashida Tlaib, isn’t a hijabi). Omar always wears a fancy, high-rise hijab:

And she’s vowed that she won’t take it off, even though there’s been a ban on head coverings in the House since 1837. Here’s a recent tweet from her:

Note that she invokes the First Amendment—presumably freedom of religion—to justify wearing her hijab.  And now, according to NBC News and many other sources, House Democrats are proposing a rule change that will allow headscarves and other forms of religious headgear in Congress, a rule specifically designed for Omar but that will also allow yarmulkes and other forms of religious head covering. Likely future Speaker Nancy Pelosi is also on board with it:

Democrats say they will add an exemption for religious headwear under their new package of rules changes for the next Congress, which begins in January, so that the protection of religious expression is explicit. The language will also cover someone wearing a head covering due to illness and loss of hair.

“Democrats know that our strength lies in our diversity, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation or religion,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in a statement to NBC News. “After voters elected the most diverse Congress in history, clarifying the antiquated rule banning headwear will further show the remarkable progress we have made as a nation.”

“This change will finally codify that no restriction may be placed on a member’s ability to do the job they were elected to do simply because of their faith,” said incoming House Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern, D-Mass., who is working on the amendment with Omar and Pelosi. “The American people just elected the most diverse Congress in history and our rules should embody that.”

When I first heard about this, I wasn’t disturbed, as I thought they were simply deep-sixing a general rule against head coverings. While some members of Congress have been religious (Senator Joe Lieberman, an observant Jew, often wore a yarmulke outside Congress but not in the chambers), nobody has ever sought an exemption.  But that’s not the way it is: the kinds of head coverings that are allowed are specifically religious ones (as well as head coverings for head injuries or other medical issues—presumably bandages or wigs for those who have lost their hair via chemotherapy).

As I said, this doesn’t seem to be a hill one wants to die on, but not everybody feels that way. As a friend of mine wrote me:

I find that Congress would change the rules (or that Democrats are proposing such a thing) outrageous and dangerous.  More special rights for Muslims, of course….

Well, everybody gets Omar’s rights for religious headgear, so yarmulkes are okay too. One could argue, though, that Muslims feel especially entitled compared to other religionists, and will simply refuse to shed their religious practices when they conflict with secular custom—or rules in this place.

What made me rethink my indifference was this report, which notes:

The head-covering rule has vexed some lawmakers, notably Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, who is known for her colorful hats and has pushed to get the ban lifted.

Under the proposed changes, Wilson would still be barred from wearing hats on the House floor.

And that means that this rule is for specifically religious garb, not any other form of head covering (I wonder if a colander would qualify, since it’s headgear of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster). Hats were worn in Congress before the rule was enacted, and I can see that some people, like Wilson, would want to wear them for decorative or non-religious reasons.

It’s clear, then, that this rule privileges those who wear religious headcoverings (or medically-mandated ones) and not secular headcoverings. And that seems a violation of the First Amendment—something that shouldn’t be happening in our nation’s legislative bodies.

Now the rule change is almost certainly a fait accompli, for Congress wouldn’t want to look Islamophobic, hijabs are now the equivalent of haloes for the Authoritarian Left, denoting some kind of admirable victimhood, and there is already a religious invocation that opens each session of Congress (Dan Barker and the Freedom from Religion Foundation are fighting it). And it worries me that Omar is threatening, in her tweet above, to fight for lifting other bans, which seems to me to invoke more privileging of religion—in her case Islam—over secular values. I add in passing that Omar has changed her position on BDS, now supporting it after her election (she wasn’t in favor of it before she was elected), and has emitted some pretty nasty tweets against Israel (see here), as well as calling it “an apartheid regime.” (Tlaib also supports BDS).

But never mind the Israel-hating. This new rule is part of religion’s general tendency to try to override secular laws in favor of religious laws or customs. Islam is only the most visible of these attempts, but we know how Christians are also asking for exemptions. I’m now on the fence against this new regulation, and so am taking a poll and soliciting readers’ views in the comments below. Please vote:

 

h/t: cesar

Saudi women wearing their abayas inside out to protest religiously-mandated covering

November 22, 2018 • 11:30 am

The BBC (and Quartz) report that there’s a new form of female protest against religiously-mandated clothing restrictions in Islamic countries. (Click on screenshot).

In March the murderous crown prince Mohammed bin Salman decreed that the traditional abaya, a full-length covering gown, was no longer required wear for women in public, and could be replaced by “modest” dress. As the Prince decreed:

“The laws are very clear and stipulated in the laws of Sharia [Islamic law]: that women wear decent, respectful clothing, like men,” he told CBS TV.

“This, however, does not particularly specify a black abaya or black head cover. The decision is entirely left for women to decide what type of decent and respectful attire she chooses to wear.”

Nevertheless, as Quartz reports, “In practice, however, wearing the abaya is all but compulsory—and Saudi women have had enough.” And so, like the “White Wednesdays” and “My Stealthy Freedom” Twitter sites from Iran, Saudi women are protesting the covering by creating their own hashtag cite (in Arabic): , which apparently means “inside-out abaya”.  Yes, the women are wearing their abayas inside out as a protest. Here are a few Tweets from that site:

https://twitter.com/alwaysthiscase/status/1061843196345507841

https://twitter.com/FallenAngel_45/status/1064016165377318912

https://twitter.com/rahaf_mqb/status/1062718475871735808

https://twitter.com/Heee000__/status/1065533987781861376

https://twitter.com/iiYas97/status/1061854578969399299

This is a clever protest, for wearing your abaya inside out violates no rules, but it a definite sign of protest. I hope for the day that Saudi women no longer need to do this.

h/t: Jószef

Who, exactly, are persons of color? (And a note on “victimhood culture”)

November 16, 2018 • 1:00 pm

A modest proposal: it’s time to ditch the phrase “persons of color” when used to refer to either oppressed people who are white or as a general cover-all term for minorities who consider themselves oppressed. That’s because many “persons of color” are really white, or at least white vis-à-vis skin pigmentation, while many people who do have some pigmentation aren’t oppressed or seen as oppressed.

Take (please!) Linda Sarsour, who referred to herself as a “white girl” until she put on the hijab, as the article below notes.  And indeed, she is white—whiter than I am. She’s the descendant of Palestinians, born in America, and is not a person of any color. Nor did she see herself as one:

The headline above is a bit misleading, for, as you can hear below, Sarsour said she wears a hijab not to be seen as a person of color, but to show that she’s a Muslim. The important thing, though, is that before she donned the headscarf she considered herself a “white girl.”

I would argue that she mainly wears the hijab not out of respect for Islam, but to flaunt her supposed victimhood, which otherwise wouldn’t be visible in a “victimhood culture“. In fact, if your skin is white, there’s no way people can tell you’re a victim unless you put on a hijab.

 

But we can see from this quote that now Sarsour does consider herself as a “person of color”, so clearly the hijab is equivalent to melanic pigmentation, and she says that more or less explicitly (my emphases):

In one profile, Sarsour said she wanted to become a high school teacher “inspiring young people of color like me.” The piece notes that The New York Times called her a “homegirl in a hijab” and that black nationalist Malcolm X’s autobiography “changed her life.” It adds, “For Sarsour, being identified as a person of color ‘is important in the political climate that we are in,’ she says, ‘because it allows for us to understand where we fit in in the larger political landscape. We fit in with marginalized groups, who oftentimes are other people of color.’”

Equally telling is the fact that Sarsour has taken part in openly segregated forums. At one point, she attended an event open to “all individuals (from ages 4 and up) who self-identify as women of color” from which white people were apparently barred.

But why can’t you fight for marginalized people without having to pretend you’re one of them? You know the answer: the fight is more than a fight for social justice, but also a way to display your own moral purity.

The article above also cites an admiring one at the Fader website:

After watching Michelle Pfeiffer’s character in Dangerous Minds, Sarsour decided to become a high school teacher, “inspiring young people of color like me, to show them their potential.” She graduated a year early, gave birth to her eldest son, and enrolled in community college.

Then 9/11 happened — and suddenly, the oppression, violence, and discrimination she saw her black classmates experiencing felt much more personal. “People were like, ‘Linda, this apparatus, this racial profiling that you’re speaking of is impacting immigrant communities, black communities,’” she recalls. “I finally realized that my community was just an additional community that was being targeted.”

That was when Sarsour says she began to think about race more critically. In the U.S. Census, Middle-Easterners are categorized as “white,” but for Sarsour, being identified as a person of color “is important in the political climate that we are in,” she says, “because it allows for us to understand where we fit in in the larger political landscape. We fit in with marginalized groups, who oftentimes are other people of color.”

At end, author Atossa Abrahamian buys into Sarsour’s narrative that she’s a woman of color.

. . . .The dinner is the first time all day that Sarsour has seemed uncomfortable. She has little common ground on which to make small-talk, and she’s the only woman of color there. As she shares stories about the Women’s March and her experiences with post-Trump Islamophobia, I sense that she easily prefers being in the thick of the action to commenting on it from afar.

What Sarsour and Abrahamian mean by “color”, then, is “marginalization”. I would suggest, then, that “marginalized person”, or “member of a marginalized group” should be used instead of the pigmentation term. You can say “Palestinian,” or “African American” or “Asian”, or, if you refer to different ethnicities or genders, “Maginalized people”, all of which are more accurate than “people of color.”

And sometimes pigmentation is not an indication of marginalization. Several of my Middle Eastern friends who are light-skinned and not from Palestine are not considered people of color. Nor are Israelis, many of whom share both pigmentation and genes with their Middle Eastern neighbors. One could, I suppose, use pigmentation to see East Asians like Chinese and Japanese as “people of color”, but they’re not really marginalized in the U.S. Again, “color” isn’t equivalent to “oppression.”

Actually, it’s useless to try to get rid of the PoC term now, but we should at least clarify that it’s connected not with skin pigmentation, but with claimed marginalization. Yet that won’t even do, for it would be hard for a privileged Asian, say like Sarah Jeong, to say that she’s “marginalized”, because she isn’t. On the other hand, it’s easy for her and her defenders to say she’s a person of color, and therefore by proxy marginalized. This is why the whiter-than-white Linda Sarsour would much prefer to call herself a “person of color” than a “marginalized person”. The former will fly; the latter will not.

And on that note, I’ll recommend an article in Quillette by Bradley Campbell, who, with coauthor Jason Manning, wrote a book I like and wrote about (see also here): The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars. In that book, Campbell and Manning describe three types of “moral cultures”: dignity culture, honor culture, and victimhood culture, which is the current culture on campus and a hybrid of the first two. If you don’t want to plow through the whole book, the article below (click on screenshot). It’s a very good summary of Campbell and Manning’s thesis:

The article begins with a chilling but true story of the fate of Samuel Abrams, a professor of political science at Sarah Lawrence College, who published an op-ed in the New York Times pointing out that American college administrators were far more liberal than the markedly liberal college professors in our country, who are already mostly liberal. According to Abraams, this caused a skewing of the ideologies seen by students. (I agree with that take, but am not so sure that we can keep academics from embracing the Left, nor should we.). But despite my mild disagreement with Abram’s thesis, what happened to him when the students got hold of his article shouldn’t happened to anyone.

Campbell goes on to describe the nature of victimhood culture, to disagree with Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff on its causes, and then to prognosticate about its fate (short take: we won’t be able to get rid of it easily).

It was only after I read that article that I realized that the hijab is a way to assume pigmentation, for once you put it on, you’re seen as a Muslim and therefore an oppressed victim. You become special, as did Sarsour. (Remember that the admiring profile of Sarsour in the New York Times was titled “Brooklyn homegirl in a hijab.“)

The hijab apparently gives you bonus points in fighting the oppressed, as Sarsour pretends to do, but the real import of the headscarf, for many who don it, is to give them visible credibility as victims. The sad thing is that it’s a double victimhood, for the hijab exists to hide the sexually alluring hair of Muslim women, helping them fend off the uncontrollable passions of men who would become raping animals at the sight of a wisp of hair. In other words, the hijab may be equivalent to the victimhood of pigmentation, but it’s is also a sign of the victimhood of Muslim women by Islam itself.

h/t: Orli

European Court of Human Rights upholds blasphemy law: Defaming the Prophet Muhammad or his marriage to a six year old girl hurts people’s “religious feelings”

October 25, 2018 • 2:00 pm

I’m gobsmacked, as I hadn’t been aware of this case. This comes from the Andelou Agency, a Turkish website, so it’s not gonna be critical of this decision.

The text:

Strasbourg: Defaming the Prophet Muhammed “goes beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate” and “could stir up prejudice and put at risk religious peace” and thus exceeds the permissible limits of freedom of expression, ruled the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Thursday, upholding a lower court decision.

The decision by a seven-judge panel came after an Austrian national identified as Mrs. S. held two seminars in 2009, entitled “Basic Information on Islam,” in which she defamed the Prophet Muhammad’s marriage.

According to a statement released by the court on Thursday, the Vienna Regional Criminal Court found that these statements implied that Muhammad had pedophilic tendencies, and in February 2011 convicted Mrs. S. for disparaging religious doctrines.

She was fined €480 (aprox. $547) and the costs of the proceedings.

“Mrs. S. appealed but the Vienna Court of Appeal upheld the decision in December 2011, confirming, in essence, the lower court’s findings. A request for the renewal of the proceedings was dismissed by the Supreme Court on 11 December 2013,” it said.

“Relying on Article 10 (freedom of expression), Mrs. S. complained that the domestic courts failed to address the substance of the impugned statements in the light of her right to freedom of expression.”

On today’s ruling, the ECHR said it “found in particular that the domestic courts comprehensively assessed the wider context of the applicant’s statements and carefully balanced her right to freedom of expression with the right of others to have their religious feelings protected, and served the legitimate aim of preserving religious peace in Austria.”

The court held “that by considering the impugned statements as going beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate and classifying them as an abusive attack on the Prophet of Islam, which could stir up prejudice and put at risk religious peace, the domestic courts put forward relevant and sufficient reasons.”

The statement also added that there had been no violation of Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights, covering freedom of expression.

I suspect that Mrs. S. defamed Muhammed’s marriage to his wife Aisha, whom he married at six or seven and “deflowered” (i.e., raped) at nine. And why, exactly, shouldn’t that be defamed? It happens to be true, so the Austrian woman was simply fined for telling the truth. And that truth is construed as potentially offending Muslims.

But really, look at the bit I’ve put in bold. It’s a blasphemy law they’re enforcing! Muslims “need to have their religious feelings protected” in Austria. This is unconscionable. A democratic country protects a religious minority from having its feelings hurt? Does that go for Christians, too? You’re not allowed to defame Jesus, who might not have even existed? But of course we know that among all faiths these days, it’s Islam who are using the “hurt feelings” excuse to protect their religion from criticism.

This isn’t even Islamophobia: it’s criticism of religion, and most likely criticism of an Islamic practice of marrying and raping young girls. Shame on Austria, and on the European Court of Human Rights. There is no reason for the modern Western democracies to have blasphemy laws. Let’s face it, in Austraia there is no real “freedom of expression”—not if you can’t criticize religion.

Grüß Gott im Himmel!

Nick Cohen on the alliance between the British Left and extreme Islam

October 7, 2018 • 12:16 pm

There are two “alliances” that I think about constantly. The first is one that I’m involved with, which isn’t a real alliance but a convergence of interest. That is the concentration of both the Right and people like me in calling attention to the excesses of the authoritarian Left. For instance, a lot of the stuff I write about dealing with regressiveness in universities is also highlighted on right-wing websites like The College Fix or Campus Reform. That has led people to call me “alt-right,” but that doesn’t worry me. If I think behavior of some liberals is hurting the Left, or I’m disappointed with college students in some cases, I’ll say so. Just because the Right also does that, as a way to discredit the Left as a whole, doesn’t deter me so long as I emphasize my profound differences with the American Right in other ways. Further, the Leftist media, like the New York Times or the New Yorker, judiciously ignores (or excuses) regressive Leftism, or, in the case of Sarah Jeong, promotes it (see my next post). What is happening, in fact, is that collegiate regressivism metastasizes to the Leftist media as college students enter the work force and become journalists.

The other alliance—and the subject of Nick Cohen’s latest piece at the Spectator (click on link or screenshot below)—is the alliance between the Labour Party (and other moieties of the British Left) and the subset of Muslims that is anti-Leftist in rejecting apostates, free speech, gays, and women’s rights.

This second unholy alliance occurs in the U.S., too, and is the outcome of the Left’s misguided decision when two aspects of liberal philosophy collide: sympathy for oppressed people of color, and sympathy for the plight of other marginalized or “second class” people like gays, nonbelievers, and women. Many Muslims, even those in the West, have regressive views on homosexuality, atheism, apostasy, blasphemy, and women’s rights, and yet because Muslims have somehow acquired the status of OPOC (oppressed people of color), the pigmentation trumps the misogyny, censoriousness, and homophobia. This is THE great philosophical schism of today’s Western Left, and Nick Cohen (a national treasure of British journalism) has expended a lot of words exposing it. He’s also spent a lot of time calling out the Labour Party for not only its Islam-osculation, but also the anti-Semitism that comes along with it. And so he continues in the piece below:

I don’t have much to say today, what with Kavanaugh’s depressing confirmation and my Duck Troubles, so let me steer you to Cohen’s piece and tender a few quotes:

The alliance between the white far left and the Islamist right is a dirty secret in plain sight. Few can bear to look at it. None of the books and documentaries on Corbyn’s takeover of the Labour party asked, even in passing, how people who professed to be socialists and feminists, found themselves promoting theocrats and misogynists. I have no doubt that ‘serious’ scholars will be as negligent when they come to write their accounts. In supposedly stable Britain, there is a psychological aversion to admitting that the dark corners of modern history can be the best place to find the roots of current crises.

However much respectable writers hate to admit it, you cannot understand Brexit without understanding the rise of Ukip from its beginnings on the cranky fringe of James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party. We may one day explain the rise of anti-Muslim bigotry by looking at the shift of today’s Ukip supporters from hatred of the European Union to hatred of Muslims. What applies to the far right applies to the far left: without understanding its toleration of religious extremism, little about modern Labour politics makes sense.

But wait! There’s more!

In 2002, Jeremy Corbyn attended a rally for Palestine in Trafalgar Square. Nothing unusual in that: many on the centre-left had marched for Palestine for years. But 2002 was different. They were no longer marching for the Palestinian Liberation, Organisation whose secular constitution connected it to the western left. In 2002, however, they marched alongside Islamists who believed apostasy from Islam is either “a religious offence punishable by death” or, at least, “an act of mutiny or treason, that is punishable”. 

Even before the great protest against the Iraq war of 2003, the combination of the far left and the religious right could get 100,000 on to the streets. Imagine that: 100,000 people willing to listen to your speeches, wave your placards, vote for you in elections and give you an energy your moribund movement thought it had lost. Radical Islam was crack cocaine for the old left. All Islamists asked in return for the fix invigorating support was that the left ignored and excused religious fanaticism, however violently it manifested itself. They were happy to go further and merge the rump of the old socialist movement with the Islamist right.

But wait! There’s a bit when the Palestine Solidarity Committee asked Cohen (a secular Jew) to become their patron. His response was this:

I experienced the shift when the Palestine Solidarity Committee called and asked me to become a patron. I had not yet realised the modern left required you to think about Israel from the moment you woke up to the moment you went to sleep, and wondered why they wanted me. ‘Because of your name”’. Ah right, I had a Jewish name it would be useful to stick on the letterhead to reassure those who worried that they were straying into racism.

I said that to my mind you had to combine a campaign for an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank with principled opposition to Hamas. It was all very well to announce your support for ‘the Palestinians’. They were not a homogenous bloc, but divided between too warring parties. Surely you had to decide which side you were on.

‘Do you condemn Hamas’,’ I asked.

‘We don’t think it’s our business to tell Palestinians what to think.’

‘That’s funny,’ I thought, as I turned down the offer, ‘you seem very keen on telling everyone else what to think.’

Now that is a riposte!

Cohen predicts that in the end, the British Left will suffer from this alliance, for many Muslims have the goal of spreading their faith, and do so by demonizing those who dislike Islam with the label “racist” or “Islamoophobe.” And they’ve succeeded. The rub will come when Labour is finally asked to tolerate sharia law, and I hope that at that point they dismount from the tiger. If Corbyn becomes Prime Minister, then Brits had better start looking in the mirror.

C. J. W*rl*m*n goes fully over to the dark side, supported by organizations soft on Islamist terrorism

September 20, 2018 • 8:30 am

By my own rules I’m not allowed to write the full name of disgraced plagiarist and Islam-osculator C. J. W*rl*m*n, so I’ve disemvoweled his name. I note that his Wikipedia entry, which described his plagiarism and other bizarre deeds as well as his osculation of Islam, has now been deleted (I have no idea why). I refer you, reluctantly, to his Twitter feed. You can find his plagiarism amply described on this website; much of the cribbing was found by Stephen Knight, creator of the Godless Spellchecker website.

The Man Who Cannot be Named was once a strong critic of Islam, but then something happened: an atheist, he began ripping into New Atheism à la Glenn Greenwald and, also like Greenwald, became an Islamophile, working for Islamic outlets and constantly decrying “Islamophobia”. The conversion was, I think, intensified when he was found guilty of plagiarism and could no longer write for mainstream outlets. And of course when you become hugely sympathetic to Islam, you gain a big new audience that isn’t so scrupulous about your journalism.

You can see an account of W*rl*m*n’s bizarre conversion at the site Atheism and the City, as well as in an acerbic Twitter exchange with Ali Rizvi on Daily O.

Now, it seems, W*rl*m*n is issuing encomiums for Muslim terrorist-supporting organizations (he’s always blamed their existence on the West). They even seem to be supporting him. 

I tender this Twitter thread, which gives documentation for the claims. It was found by Grania. Note the bizarre touting of a bogus Qur’an. Stephen Knight is a main participant in the thread.

There’s more documentation of W*rl*m*n’s activities on the thread, but I’ll leave you to look at them.

In view of this, I wouldn’t be surprised if W*rl*m*n actually converted to Islam. There he will find a congenial group of friends who share his values.

My apologies for tendering a Tweet-based post, but I think this is informative, and I’m short on time today.

Ex-Muslims of North America booted from Starbucks for wearing their group’s tee shirts

September 4, 2018 • 12:00 pm

I’m a great admirer of the Ex-Muslims of North America organization (EXMNA), whose President is Muhammad Syed and whose Executive Director is Sarah Haider. They actually do stuff rather than just talking, and they’re courageous to do it in public knowing that an apostate Muslim is, to many active Muslims, deserving of death. I suspect these apostates are even worse than Jews to Islamists! At any rate, to be a public ex-Muslim these days is to evince bravery.

And you also court the disapprobation of non-Muslim Leftists, who revere Muslims as Oppressed People of Color and demonize those who criticize the religion or its pervasive oppression. You’re also spurned by the many people who are simply afraid to be around ex-Muslims because their mere proximity means you might be in danger—but even if not you’re certainly around “Islamophobes.”

That explains the incident described on the EXMNA website (click on screenshot to read about it).

What happened is that EXMNA members were in Houston handing out flyers at the Islamic Society of North America’s annual conference, as well as speaking to conference attendees. That itself is a brave thing to do.  Taking a break, the EXMNA people repaired to a nearby Starbuck’s coffee shop. They weren’t protesting there, but simply looking for coffee.

But they were wearing teeshirts that said “I’m an Ex-Muslim, Ask Me Why” and “God Love is Greatest”.  Those aren’t even that “in your face”, but it was enough for Starbucks to kick them out. As the report notes:

“I was surprised. I was simply drinking my iced coffee and scrolling through my phone, and they told me I needed to leave, so I asked why”, says Lina an ex-Muslim Syrian woman who had traveled to the conference on behalf of EXMNA. “I was told that they are not allowing protestors at the property, I assured the woman that I was not a protestor. She then asked me if I was part of the event or a guest at the hotel. I was neither. I was then told that even though I was a paying customer, I was not allowed to be on the premise as it was reserved for guests and event members for the weekend and that they will not be allowing anyone else on their private property. However, I noticed the Starbucks was still open to the public and I didn’t see anyone else being asked to leave.”

In other words, Starbucks was feeding them a line of bullshit.

Upon additional inquiry after leaving the premises, the hotel employees stated on video that the EXMNA group was not welcome due to their T-shirts, and repeatedly claimed the group was “protesting”, a charge which all volunteers explicitly denied multiple times.

“This appears to be a case of discrimination,” says President of Ex-Muslims of North America, Muhammad Syed. “We were asked to leave the premises and informed that we could only enter the premises if we removed the shirts, none of which stated anything inflammatory. The treatment was unjust and especially cruel considering the plight of ex-Muslims. We are killed and abused all over the world for our disbelief. It is unconscionable that companies like Starbucks and Hilton acquiesce to conservative religious sensibilities”.

. . . Armin Navabi, an Irani atheist activist, was in Houston on behalf of EXMNA. “Our goal was to see how tolerant Muslims can be, to our delight, we found many Muslims were tolerant”, he stated. “On the other hand, we found that many Westerners were intolerant. It seems that “saviors” of Muslims are more sensitive about anything that could potentially offend Muslims than Muslims are themselves.”

Hazar, another Syrian ex-Muslim who was in Houston for ISNA, states “I expected negative pushback of our presence by ISNA itself but in fact, most Muslims we talked to were welcoming. And so I certainly didn’t expect to be discriminated against on American soil by the Hilton staff for refusing to be closeted about my ex-Muslim identity. It was important for me to represent ex Muslims at ISNA because we are some of the lucky few that are able to do so with minimal consequences in comparison to those of us who aren’t privileged enough to live in a democratic society. And yet today, the treatment we received by the staff at the Hilton felt just as dehumanizing.”

Here’s a video of the EXMNA members getting the boot, apparently because they’re considered “part of the protest”.  Even someone not wearing a shirt with any motto was apparently prohibited because he was “part of the protest”.  But I’m sure they’d let Muslims in wearing shirts that said “Allah is greatest”, or religionists saying “I’m not an atheist. Ask me why.” This is simply discrimination against ex-Muslims.

I’m not sure about the legality of what Starbucks did, but I’m certainly going to write to them in protest. (Their drinks are overpriced, anyway.) You can see where to write below the video.

Reader Patrick, who sent me a link to the EXMNA article, adds this:

The ISNA conference took place at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston.  The nearest Hilton is the Hilton Americas, which does have a Starbucks.  Their address is 1600 Lama St., Houston, TX 77010.  Their phone number is (877) 421-9062.  Starbucks corporate complaint page is:  https://customerservice.starbucks.com/app/contact/ask/
A bit of my own complaint (I used the “In our stores” form and asked for a response):