By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Interstate 17, the Black Canyon Freeway, heads north from this metropolitan area toward Mother Nature’s Arizona Disneyland. That includes Sedona, the Grand Canyon, Painted Desert, Petrified Forest, Meteor Crater, and southern Monument Valley.
As on any trip, the surroundings change as your vehicle moves up the highway.
However, you also could stay in just one place and watch the surroundings change as time speeds past, as in H.G. Wells’ 19th-century science-fiction novel that goes into the far future, The Time Machine.
And sometimes substantial change takes only decades to arrive around you, not centuries or millennia. Welcome to social and religious transformation and globalization. Discomfort and raw edges.
Consider northwest Phoenix’s Orangewood Avenue setting, bisected by Interstate 17. Just to the west of the freeway’s sound-barrier walls stands an impressive, sparkling mosque amid palm trees, its soaring minaret and two domes topped with crescents visible from Orangewood. This is the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix (ICCP).
The reason for its existence would have seemed unimaginable back in the 1960s, when the Black Canyon Highway was being upgraded to a freeway, and Mideast populations seemed much farther away.
“The Phoenix area is home to tens of thousands of Muslims,” Reuters news service said on May 29.
That news story, and many others, reported on the day’s rally outside the ICCP, which was seen as a firm symbolic response to the planned violent attack in early May against a draw-Mohammed cartoon contest in Garland, Texas.
Two armed Islamists who had worshipped at the Phoenix mosque reportedly drove the approximate 1,100 miles east to Garland, but were fatally shot by police before they could turn their firearms on the cartooning crowd.
The Phoenix rally wasn’t planned to be violent, and didn’t turn out that way, but the feeling of threat hung in the air, with attendees invited to arrive armed. Organizer Jon Ritzheimer, a former Marine, made no secret of his disgust toward what he believed the followers of Mohammed have produced. “F— Islam” said the T-shirt that Ritzheimer and some others wore.
And some threatening tweets came from apparent Islamists, such as “Dawlatil Islam” saying, “We promise u we will drink ur blood” at the event.
It’s not as if one’s view about the gathering could be predicted by political persuasion. Before the event, the conservative Arizona Informer blog headlined, “Morons! Group to hold rally under guise of ‘free speech’ set to harass Muslims at Phoenix mosque.”
Local physician M. Zuhdi Jasser, MD, founded the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), which opposes radical Islam and advocates reconciling the faith with pluralism and democracy.
The day before the rally, its website (aifdemocracy.org) recalled the group’s “outrage and deep concern about the fact that too many people have been radicalized right under the noses of imams, while leaders of so-called ‘mainstream’ Muslim organizations deny the real problems.”
The May 28 AIFD statement continued: “We are not lone voices, and we will not be deterred — but when a group plans an armed protest of a place of worship, its Facebook page bearing comments from supporters advising participants to bring ammunition ‘coated in pig blood and fat,’ efforts at real reform are set back. Ultimately, this kind of rhetoric empowers Islamists, not reformers like us.
“We would ask that non-Muslims who are concerned about radical Islam to recognize that many Muslims are allies in the fight against terror,” AIFD said. “We can best be reached not by armed mobs brandishing drawings, but through meaningful efforts at moving the public’s focus toward effective change — which must include the unconditional rejection of Islamism.”
The targeted mosque’s own website (iccpaz.com) had a post from October 2, 2014, beneath the headline, “ICCP condemns ISIS.” It read (unedited):
“The Islamic Community Center of Phoenix joined global, national and local Muslim scholars and leaders in refuting the ideology of the terrorist group ISIS, we are urging ISIS supporters to repent and return to the religion of mercy. Our Imam Sheikh Mahmoud Sulaiman & many others such as Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah have given Friday sermons and wrote articles to denounce ISIS misguided philosophy, also a group of over 125 of the world’s top Islamic scholars have written an open letter to the self-declared leader of ISIS ‘Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’.”
People began the May 29 evening in Phoenix by congregating on Orangewood Avenue, closed off to vehicles by the police, as were many other neighborhood streets that helicopters swept over.
Then the critics of Islam’s suppression of free expression generally moved to the north side of the street, while mosque defenders moved to the south, directly in front of the ICCP property.
There were no brawls or brandishing of firearms protected by the Second Amendment, and the very visible police presence wanted to play safe and keep things that way.
Police eventually stretched two parallel yellow warning tapes down the middle of Orangewood, with open space in between. More than 40 officers stood shoulder to shoulder in the territory between the tapes. No longer could the opposing sides speak closely but had to shout across a distance of perhaps 20 feet.
Except, anyone still could cross from one side of the street to the other if he walked around the tapes. Both sides had younger and older people, lighter skins and darker skins. It looked as if the north side had a slightly larger turnout, exceeding about 250 people, but the southern, mosque, side also was well-represented.
On the south side were small cups of water on a table, freely offered to thirsty anyone. A typical late May evening, temperature around 100 degrees.
One poster on the north said, “Defend America from Muslim terrorist killings. Stand by: Police and military.”
An older man with a long ponytail emerging beneath a sombrero-style hat might have been a vintage hippie, but his T-shirt said, “F— Islam.”
A young man with a microphone connected to a bullhorn at his waist emitted a stream of harsh talk against Muslims: “You guys would behead us if you could. . . . You’re disgusting in the eyes of a holy God. . . . You are reeking, you are disgusting. . . . Sharia law has no place in our courts. . . . I feel bad for you Arabs who are subjected to it.”
Someone Identified As “X”
I walked over to the mosque side.
One poster there said, “Live peaceably with all.” Another, “Hatred harms the hater more than the hated.” Also, “Rally 4 peace and love!” “No hate no fear,” said a poster atop the mosque’s fence.
A man wearing a bandana to conceal the lower part of his face wore a T-shirt saying, “I might be illegal.” The reverse side of the shirt, in smaller letters, said, “Stop profiling, racism, hate.”
Another man’s black T-shirt simply had large white lettering of the well-known logo of The New York Times.
I asked a woman at random, who was near the mosque driveway and said she was 28 years old, about the event protesting Islamic radicalism.
“I don’t know a lot about why they want to agitate the people because, for me, agitating people and inciting violence has never been a solution. I have lived in Arizona for many years, since I was 12, and until recently I was undocumented,” she said.
“So I’m used to this crowd specifically, Arizona residents that are full of hate and lack humility and humanity and are selfish to the point that they are willing to harass other members of their community because they’re different than them, or to gain political capital or media attention,” she continued, identifying herself as Raquel Guerrero.
She said she received a work permit through Barack Obama’s DACA and works for Living United for Change in Arizona.
Its website (luchaaz.org) reveals a left-wing activist organization.
I said the people on the other side of the street said they’re protesting killings of people.
“We can’t blame a whole group of people because of an individual’s decisions,” Guerrero said, regardless of race, religion, or ethnic group.
Back on the north side of Orangewood, I asked a thin young man dressed all in black what weapons he was carrying. A Glock 22 .40 caliber pistol, pepper spray, a baton, and an AK-47.
He said he was 24 years of age and wanted to be identified only as “X.”
Why was he here? “Just here to support my Second Amendment rights, and First Amendment rights. Without the Second, there is no First,” he said. “I don’t think people should be dying in my own country.
“If they want to bring Sharia law to my country, to my state, they’re going to have one heck of a fight, and simply because we have families, we have mothers, we have daughters that don’t deserve that,” he said.
Guitar music sounded in the background.
A young woman and four young men, all apparently armed, stood side by side. I asked one of the men what he was carrying. He declined to say, but the man just to his left said, “Assault weapons.”
A middle-aged woman on the north side called to the south, “I’ll give you a hug. I’m not your enemy. Islam is your enemy.”
Squabbling Americans
On the other side of the yellow tapes a pretty, dark-haired woman, apparently in her late 20s, wearing a skirt down to her ankles, held a poster saying, “Islamophobia was created by the media.” That seemed an unrealistic statement in the current violent world.
However, certain realities still could cross the tapes. “Hey, you,” a man on the north side yelled in her direction.
Was he about to deliver an ethnic insult at her? Not at all. “You’re kinda hot,” he said, using a term for sexually attractive.
A black man on the south side sang America the Beautiful.
What dangers to society lurked here? Shortly before 8 p.m., as I walked from the scene where Islamists were supposed to drink our blood, a young couple walked toward the rally with two tykes in a stroller. Maybe they’d drink some cool water from that table outside the mosque.
As long as Americans squabble, the better His Majesty in the White House probably likes it.
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