The four proselytizers who were arrested for handing out copies of the Gospel outside the Arab International Festival were arraigned a couple of days ago on disturbing the peace charges and will have to appear at more hearings. I wrote earlier that unless more stuff went on that no one is talking about, I didn’t think what they were doing justified an arrest.
So this is what Steve Pardo of The Detroit News wrote about the arraignment:
Negeen Mayel, 18, of California; Nabeel Qureshi, 29, of Virginia; Paul Rezkalla, 18 of New York, and David Wood, 34, also of New York, face fines of up to $500 each and up to 93 days in jail. Dearborn authorities said the four “chose to escalate their behavior, which appeared well-orchestrated and deliberate” as they handed out religious literature and talking with people at the festival. The woman and three men are members or founders of a group called “Acts 17 Apologetics.” …
…City officials said police received a complaint of the members of Acts 17 Apologetics “harassing and intimidating patrons of the festival and that a large crowd was gathering.”
The behavior of these individuals drew and incited a large crowd to a point where they were in violation of city ordinances, including breach of peace and failure to obey the lawful order of a police officer, according to the city’s public relations department.
Festival rules require religious groups to distribute information at paid booths or outside the event.
The proselytizers released a YouTube video that appeared to show hardly anyone was nearby when police arrested them. The group also is complaining that the police confiscated their video cameras and haven’t returned them.
Just for fun I checked out the Acts 17 website, which is very attractive. The organization exists to convert Muslims to Christianity. From there I found some YouTube video from the same festival in 2009 in which the Acts 17 people clearly were proselytizing inside the festival area, not outside of it.
The video I linked to (if you don’t have the stomach to watch it) shows an Acts 17 guy behaving like a five-alarm asshole, aggressively (in a verbal way) challenging the religion of Islam right in the middle of this festival and then whining about how unfair it was that the security people at the festival made them stop filming and go away. Personally, I say the fair attenders showed enormous restraint by not breaking the video camera over the jerk’s head.
I think it’s important to recognize that aggressive, in-your-face proselytizing is an act of hate and hostility. The message behind it is “I hate you, and I’m going to keep hating you until you become like me.” It’s beyond obnoxious, but the proselytizers are incapable of seeing themselves as others see them.
I just hope for their sake they don’t spin off an organization to convert Buddhists. We may be non-violent, but we also invented kung fu.
What amazes me the most about Christians is what they either conveniently forget, or ignore:
Jesus Christ himself.
You can’t seperate the man from his message, which they don’t seem to know.
It’s like worshipping Henry Ford, while not bothering to study to get a drivers license, and still lecture people about their driving skills and how a Ford is the best car.
STFU. If people like Chevy, or Toyota, or Honda. Why do you care?
Heaven is an exclusive club for you and yours. That’s what you believe. Do you really expect me to believe that you really want to share it with brown, black, red, and yellow people?
Hell no! You figure by antagonizing people of other faiths, you’re earning points with a God who’s as stupid, narrow-minded, and vicious as you are.
And then you wonder why no one converts when you act like that? Who wants to join a Country Club full of obnoxious self-rightious assholes for all eternity? You’ll water down the drinks, we’ll have to nod politely as you make another stupid point, and no one will have any rhythm at the nightly dance when Pat Boone tries to do a cover of another black artists hit.
Count me out, is what people are telling you. Me, too!
Oh, wait, I forgot one reason to allow people of color into your Country Club Heaven. Someone’s got to make the mint-juleps and clean up the vomit on the floor after the dance.
My bad…
I saw the video of the Acts 17 people inside the festival.
Why didn’t the Acts 17 people get a table inside the festival, in the same way that the Muslims did?
There’s many, many Arab Christians…
When the women who was filming in spite of the request to stop started yelling” this is America”, it kinda revealed a prejudice that went beyond proselytizing for Jesus. The assumption is that the security men were not Americans because they were Arabs.
I still say the police should have taken them in the trailer and given them each a couple of good licks with the hickory stick..and then charged them with resisting arrest/ with violence. Had I been the cop who ran into that obnoxious Christian, I’d guarantee that on his next trip into the harvest field of souls he’d proselytizing from behind a pair of dentures.
Gulag, on one of my many long distance drives, I thought up a story where a televangelist dreams he has died and goes to heaven. After several weeks of harp music and basking in the heavenly light, he yearns for the attention and prestige he had back on Earth, and leads a revolution against God.He wants, once again to lead the flock.
Heaven is, after all, a socialist universe where nobody has to work………….
Anybody know why that silly gravatar has replaced my bamboo forest?
erinyes,
You should try to write that as a script. It’s a very, very interesting idea, and could actually teach people about the meanings of the lessons in the Bible in an entertaining way.
I have only one problem with the premise: I’m just not sure a televangelist could ever make it up to Heaven. I would hope that St. Peter would pull a Woody Allen and have God, like Marshall McLuhan, come from behind the Pearly Gates and say to the televangist, “You know nothing about my work…”
Why didn’t the Acts 17 people get a table inside the festival, in the same way that the Muslims did?
That doesn’t appear to be how they operate. Tables at festivals are informational, not confrontational. Based on the content of their disparaging exchanges with Muslims, members of this group are anti-Muslim. Whether they’re even Christian is open to debate.
Anybody know why that silly gravatar has replaced my bamboo forest?
erinyes, I wonder if somehow the link to your photo got “broke”?
“I just hope for their sake they don’t spin off an organization to convert Buddhists. We may be non-violent, but we also invented kung fu”
Right, though they could use a good swift kick in the pants. I find it amazing how these dopes run around trying to convert the godless (muslims, atheists, etc) as if it is some higher calling and they are doing the “lords” work. The work they are doing is for what ever child molesting church they belong to. They are out there recruiting donations, it is all about money, how fucking stupid does one have to be to not see that? Rhetorical question, once you believe in the shy wizard all bets are off.
Ooops I meant sky wizard!
When we atheists calmly and rationally point out the absurdity of Christian beliefs, it’s oppression and persecution of all Christians everywhere; when these assclowns break the rules and get up in the faces of Muslims minding their own business at Arab Fest, it’s just doing God’s work.
I can hardly claim any special insight into spiritual matters. I am for the most part a tin-horned, half-assed Buddhist. I have found, as cundgulag mentions, that Jesus is curiously absent from many conversations I have with fundamentalist Christians. We usually get side tracked into Revelations or some of the more scary Old Testament material. I have yet to have someone else bring up the “Sermon on the Mount” or the delicious expulsion of the money changers. Christianity makes a lot more sense if you disregard the divinity of Jesus, which only came into the picture in John, the latest of the Synoptic Gospels along with the spurious laying of blame for his death on the Jews, and look at his work as a teacher who had found his Buddha nature. The notion of his divinity allows for the power hungry to intercede between Jesus and his flock and claim a divine imprimateur on their ambitions. Examples lie thick on the ground.
Sadly, I think for some religion only “insulates them from the experience of God.” Of course, I am not sure what is really meant by “God”. The “Christian Right” seems to me, primarily a poltitical, not a religious movement; primarily “right” and secondarily Christian. They conveniently forget the passage in Matthew, where Satan tempts Jesus with earthly power. Some seem to have no spiritual engagement, but only a set of proscriptions. They have been well insulated.
As for the actions of the “Dearborn Four” I suppose they have no better way at hand to “seek their salvation”. We all labor under severe limtations, but the hostility of some attempts to win converts only seems to illustrate what happens when spiritual quests go horribly awry.
“Religion is regarded by the ignorant as true, by the wise, as false, and by the powerful, as useful.” –Seneca
Hey, I got the avatar with the monocle. I actually used a monocle, briefly after my first cataract operation. Yes, I was advised by a British ophthalmologist and the “Colonel Klink” jokes won in the end. Maybe I can sell it on eBay.
Erratum:
That should of course be “limitations”.
Herm. I’m not sure what you mean, but that’s something that can be heard as a “no true Scotsman” fallacy.
But if you mean, you think maybe they pretend to care about Christianity because it gives them an excuse to harass Muslims and if there weren’t Muslims to harass, they’d probably be apathetic (non-church goers, but the church they fail to attend is a Christian one), well… I see that point. I think it’s a valid question.
But that kind of wording is a sticky point. A lot of Christians will accept only the good that can be attributed to Christianity, because no “real” Christian would be a flaming asshole.
It depends on what you mean by aggressive. I mean clearly the guy inside was in a private space but there is no crime against proselytizing itself which Maha seems to (correctly) support as a right.
“Aggressive” proselytizing is deliberately provocative, such as getting in your face and asking if you’ve found Jesus. Non-aggressive is quietly offering literature to people walking by, assuming the literature itself is not inflammatory. If the Dearborn Four were just offering people copies of the Gospels on a public street, which is what they say they were doing, then I don’t think criminal charges are justified. However, judging by their behavior on their own videos, it’s possible that’s not all they were doing.
Whether you agree with their beliefs or not, the fact is they were arrested for nothing more than exercising their rights to free speech and right to assembly in a public place. From what I have seen, they did little more than hand a book to someone. Last I remember, you don’t have to agree with what people want to say, but you can’t keep them from being able to say it.
If that’s all they did, I agree with you. And people accused of a crime are innocent until proven guilty.
However, what we’ve seen are videos the group made and edited themselves, which means they might not be telling the whole story. The prosecution is saying they did things not shown on the video. If the prosecution has proof of that the accusations against the proselytizers are true, then the proselytizers are not only criminals, but liars.