On Dec. 1, 2016, "extremist blogger" James Simpson was the keynote speaker at the Oakland County Business Roundtable at the Auburn Hills Marriott Pontiac at Centerpoint, where he fueled Islamophobia by railing against immigrants. Here Dawud Walid, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, responds to Simpson's claims.
Simpson said: "The Council on American-Islamic Relations is a Muslim Brotherhood front. It is an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terror financing trial the United States has ever had. It remains a mystery why they're unindicted, and I hope perhaps under this new administration they will no longer be unindicted."
Walid replies: The Tea Party as well as the alt-right have sought to openly vilify organizations that are working toward social justice and change here in the United States of America. [In Simpson's] own statement about CAIR, the operative prefix is "unindicted," which means "not having sufficient evidence to indict." And even if someone is indicted under the American jurisprudence system, it doesn't mean that the party is guilty.
Simpson said: "I don't see any Muslims being murdered in the streets of America, I do see a lot of Americans being murdered in the streets of America by Muslims but I do not see any Muslims anywhere being murdered by American citizens."
Walid replies: Well, I guess he has short-term memory loss about the white man who murdered three Muslims in Chapel Hill, N.C. I guess he also has memory loss about the white nationalist who went into a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and killed six people on the misunderstanding of Sikhs being Muslims, because they wear beards and turbans. It's called cognitive dissonance. And if we were to look at violent crime in America, it should be people's desires to want an American Muslim to be their neighbor, because when it comes to violent crime in the United States of America, Muslims actually have the lowest crime rate of committing assault, battery, and murder against fellow Americans — and this can be easily looked up and corroborated.
Simpson said: "Now, this is what I want to say about this, you know I am not anti-Islam, I am not anti-Muslim, I am not anti-anybody. But we have to be honest with ourselves, these aren't Amish terrorists, they're not Methodist, they're not Episcopalians. I'm sorry to say it but it's just the truth. They're all Islamic terrorists and we have to be honest with ourselves and recognize that, and recognize the problem that that ideology can create, you just have to do it for our own self-protection."
Walid replies: He should go to the FBI's website and look at the domestic terrorism statistics to see who are the majority of people who have committed terrorism against the homeland in the last quarter-century. He will see that they are predominantly white nationalists and white supremacists, and that's what our government says. Dylann Roof, who went to that church and killed nine black people, wasn't reading the Koran when he did that. In Colorado Springs, the man who went to Planned Parenthood and shot up and killed those people, you know, he wasn't a follower of prophet Muhammad when he did that. We have no evidence that the slew of black churches that have been burned down in America since the shooting of Mike Brown were committed by Muslims, you know. So perhaps he should go and look back at the Department of Homeland Security, who themselves have talked about the rising threat of white supremacist and white nationalist groups that have risen up in America since the year 2009. Unless, like President Trump, he feels that the CIA and the intelligence community is not dealing with real information, and he thinks he knows better.
