‘Leaving Islam?’ Bus Ad Still In Limbo in Detroit

I disagree. I think this particular wording is offensive because it assumes anyone leaving Islam is threatened by violence from their friends and family, feeding the stereotype that Muslims are inherently violent.

Reword it as “No longer believe in Allah? Don’t want to sit though more sermons at mosque?” – no problem. As it is now, however, it does indeed unfairly characterize Muslims.

Although let’s not forget that the koran clearly calls for DEATH for any apostate and any unbeliever. So who’s being intolerant? We hear many, many stories of people who are reluctant to leave their religion because of how they will be treated by their family. With islam it’s even worse. It’s time to stop pussy footing around with islam. They need to get over their overdeveloped sense of “offense”. How dare they threaten free speech? Where do they think they are? Maybe they would be more comfortable in Pakistan where such speech means the state can kill you as it is an offense to allah. They may not like the ad but they better damn respect anyone’s right to say it.Period

The Bible also calls for those who leave the faith to be shunned, and the OT has loads of laws demanding death for minor infractions of nonsensical rules. Yet only the tiniest fraction of Christians or Jews take those injunctions literally, and they’re generally considered fanatics by their coreligionists. To merely say “The Quran demands death for apostates, so this is justified!” assumes that every Muslim is a fundamentalist literalist, ready to implement that order – an assumption as mistaken about Muslims as it would be about Christians.

Well, it would be nice to have some kind of support system in place for people who are actually in danger if they try to leave Islam–or even if they just want to leave a fundamentalist Islamic family but still be a moderate or liberal Muslim. Kind of like those groups that help young Mormons leave. Well, technically it would be nice to have a similar system for anyone who is trying to leave an abusive fundamentalist family/community, but right now it’s Islam that’s got a significant chunk of itself mired in the Dark Ages–no different than Christianity about five hundred years ago, of course, but it does seem to me that people who want to leave Islam might need a little more support right now.

Don’t know if this group is the one to do it though, if they’re a bunch of libertarian conspiracy theorists–lesser of two evils is still evil and all that jazz. Plus, it doesn’t sound like they’d be interested in helping Muslims who just want to be moderate or liberal and are just trying to escape a fundie community or family safely.

I second what JimG said… it’s offensive because it portrays Muslims in general as violent. Attacking parts of the Muslim faith is okay. Even admitting that Islam has a problem with violence, intolerance and radicalism is okay. But this advert just goes one step too far.

I’m not sure if the analogy is perfect, but what if someone made a similar advert about people of a specific race or other group? We should be allowed to talk about problems that some may perceive in any community, but painting all the members of a community in the same negative way just seems wrong to me.

I was wondering if this would ever show up here! I e-mailed Hemant when I saw some of these ads in the San Francisco Bay Area last year. As far as I can tell, the local Muslim community ignored them, and there was never any kind of uproar or controversy. The ads were on buses for a few weeks, and then they quietly disappeared.

Frankly, the people putting out the ads seem very extreme. For anyone interested, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer co-founded a group called Stop the Islamization of America. IMO, this group does not appear to be legitimately concerned with Muslims who are facing repression. They just seem to be seething with hatred for Islam in general. I think that comes across in the sensationalistic wording of the ads.

Of course, I’m against any form of censorship. Offensive or not, these ads have every right to run. Even if Spencer and Geller are looney-tunes, the ads themselves are no different from any other ads encouraging people to leave or join a certain religion.

I would oppose an anti-Muslim ad, but I fully support alternatives-to-Islam ads.

If by “oppose” you mean you’d be in favor of SMART rejecting the ad, I have to disagree.

From SMART’s website:
SMART is supported by federal and state funding, local contributions through a transit property tax millage from opt-in communities and bus fares.

From my perspective, ads on federal & state financed buses can’t be rejected on viewpoint grounds.

Question:
Who are the only people that would really be offended by this billboard?

Answer:
The fanatical Muslims that would threaten, intimidate or kill those that have lost their faith.

I’m sure there’s an inappropriate joke in here somewhere about the ads getting a better response via taxi cab than on the side of a bus…but I’ll try to refrain

I have seen ads that say things like “Afraid to leave your husband? We can help” and as a man, I’m not at all offended. I suppose if it were a group that was never known to hurt someone for leaving it would seem ridiculous (“Afraid to cancel your gym membership? We can protect you!”), but whenever someone has a legitimate fear of harm being done to them, I don’t care if the extremists are theist/atheist/man/woman/whatever. You get the person safe first, and worry about feelings later. I bet in most of these cases there is no risk of physical harm, but that’s no reason to let one or two people get hurt to show how tolerant we are.

(I feel weird defending a group as hateful as that, but that particular message of theirs doesn’t offend me)

I loathe the organization that wants to run this ad, but I don’t think that’s enough. Just looking at the ad itself, I think it is unobjectionable from the point of view of what should be prevented from appearing on a bus. The ads should run.

I definitely think the ad should be allowed. I don’t know enough about the group itself to know whether I’d agree with them or not. (If dantresomi is correct, I don’t agree with them.) They have the right, though, and the ad isn’t advocating hatred or discrimination against Muslims.

Also, when I think about it, an ad that was (for example) advocating that people should join Christianity is implicitly saying that people should leave other religions and that other religions are wrong. An ad advocating any religion is basically saying that all the other ones are wrong, and this seems to be similar to that.

@dantresomi: I agree. I wish more atheist and/or secular groups were putting up ads about Islam, instead of just Christian groups.

What bothers me about this is that these people probably saw an atheist bus ad and decided that it was exactly the sort of thing they could use as an outlet for their hatred of a particular group.

I do think this particular wording is perhaps unnecessary. The first poster mentioned the unfair characterisation of all Muslims as inherently violent – and while this is no doubt the experience for some, it’s not for all. This ad would probably be more relevant in Iran, to be honest – thouogh of course, it would *never* be allowed there!

I think the concept itself is good, but the wording should be toned down a bit. It does make a rather unnecessary assumption that people reconsidering Islam are automatically in fear of their lives.

People, especially women and girls, are KILLED if they leave the faith of Islam. while not every family or community is violent, enough are that offering help in an area with lots of Muslims is a good service.

Of all the things going on in Detroit, THIS is what they worry about?