Archive for December 30, 2010
East Mountain Tea Party Officials and Islam
Editor’s note: We consider it important to state at the outset of this article that it is in no way our intent to denigrate or disrespect anyone’s religious beliefs, in this article or elsewhere; in fact, it was the issue of religious intolerance that sent us down the path that led us to this piece. We’ve provided links to full articles where appropriate to provide our readers with the full context of the quotes; we have saved the key references in both PDF and PNG screen grab formats, so if any of the links in this story should become inoperative in the future, please let us know and we’ll do what we can to repair them.
Update 1/4/11: Our original article on the East Mountain Tea Party’s apparent anti-Islamic bias can be found here.
by John Weckerle
East Mountain Tea Party Co-Founder Therese Cooper (image via You Tube)
As many of our readers may remember, we took issue some time back with what we considered to be anti-Islam positions officially expressed on the East Mountain Tea Party (EMTP) web site (our articles on the subject, along with others, are now collected under the category “Tea Party-gate.”). The EMTP post informed readers that key members of the EMTP (Therese Cooper, Char Tierney, Silvana Lupetti, and Felicia Wilson), including at least two of its co-founders, had submitted a letter to Congressman Martin Heinrich’s demanding that he state his position with respect to a Muslim community center proposed for downtown New York. We objected to the anonymously-posted EMTP article, and received a surprisingly vitriolic response indicating a clear anti-Muslim bias. We had a little fun trying to track down the identity of the anonymous poster, who in our view is the EMTP’s official internet spokesperson – and after a while, partially lost interest in that aspect, but we continued to research the issue of religious discrimination, because we were frankly dumbfounded by the strong anti-Islamic sentiment that came across in “teapartynm’s” response.