'They Want Us Dead Because They Hate Us'

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The Times brings us Brigitte Gabriel:


Ms. Gabriel says she is motivated not by fear or hatred of Islam, but by her love for her adopted country. "I lost Lebanon, my country of birth, to radical Islam," she wrote. "I do not want to lose my adopted country America." 

She insists that she is singling out only "radical Islam" or Muslim "extremists" -- not the vast majority of Muslims or their faith. And yet, in her speeches and her two books, she leaves the opposite impression. She puts it most simply in the 2008 introduction to her first book, "Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America." 

 "In the Muslim world, extreme is mainstream," she wrote. She said that there is a "cancer" infecting the world, and said: "The cancer is called Islamofacism. This ideology is coming out of one source: The Koran." 

In what ACT! is calling "Open a Koran" day this September, the group plans to put up 750 tables in front of post offices, libraries, churches and synagogues and hand out leaflets selectively highlighting verses that appear to advocate violence, slavery and subjugation of women.

This won't be much comfort to Muslims, but reading this, I was overwhelmed by the sense of repetition. There is always some ethno-religious group in America threatening to bring the house down. It's probably too much to call Islam the new black, the new Catholic, maybe?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. More

Born in 1975, the product of two beautiful parents. Raised in West Baltimore -- not quite The Wire, but sometimes ill all the same. Studied at the Mecca for some years in the mid-'90s. Emerged with a purpose, if not a degree. Slowly migrated up the East Coast with a baby and my beloved, until I reached the shores of Harlem. Wrote some stuff along the way.

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