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Detroit Prayer Rally Rattles Muslim Community

Tonight, a group of people are gathering at Ford Field in Detroit, the stadium where the Detroit Lions play, and they will be participating in a 24-hour prayer rally organized by a group called The Call.

The leaders of The Call believe a satanic spirit is invading all of American society and it must be faced with intensive Christian prayer and fasting. The problem with The Call is they are not as vague about demons and Satan as most evangelical Christians. They have given a name and a face to that satanic spirit and it is Islam and Muslims.

The leaders of The Call have identified Detroit as being in mortal danger because the city has one of the largest Muslim communities in America. There is nothing ambiguous about this rally. It’s theme is anti-Allah.

The Call isn’t the first group to single out Detroit for evangelical intervention. Florida pastor Terry Jones, whose Qur’an burning resulted in a deadly attack on a United Nations mission in Afghanistan, and members of both the Westboro Baptist Church and the Acts 17 Apologetics have visited the city. The later are missionaries who were arrested for disorderly conduct last year for disrupting the Arab International Festival. They were acquitted, more the pity. Acts 17, by the way, deals with various confrontations between the missionaries of the first century and communities of Jews and pagans. The Call claims that Detroit is a “microcosm of our national crisis” particularly because of “the rising tide of the Islamic movement.”

Dawud Walid, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Michigan chapter, told the media “Our concern is that we are literally being demonized by the organizers of this group, and given the recent history of other groups that have come into Michigan…we’re concerned about this prayer vigil stoking up the flames of divisiveness in the commuity.”

The Call’s co-founder Lou Engle has been organizing rallies since 2000, including one in San Diego, two days before the 2008 vote on Prop 8 to ban gay marriage. Muslims aren’t the only satanic influence in The Call’s list. Engle is an end-time evangelical, independent of any organized denomination and some of the leaders of these churches elevate themselves to the title of Apostle and claim to get their instructions directly from God.

Muslims aren’t the only people worried about the impact of The Call. A group of Detroit clergy was planning on marching to the stadium today to hold their own rally. Rev. Charles Williams II, of Historic King Solomon Church in Detroit, said Wednesday, “We do not agree with the spread of a message of hate, but a message of peace and a message of love. We love our Muslim brothers. We love those who are homosexual and we are not scared…to stand up when the time calls for us to.”

Apostle Ellis Smith of Jubilee City Church in Detroit, spoke for The Call. He claimed that the concerns about the rally were overblown. They won’t be “praying against Muslims,” but “against terrorism that has its roots in Islam. We are dealing with extremism. We’re against extremism when it comes to Christians.” Yup – that’s why October 9 he delivered a serman calling Islam a “false,” “lame” and “perverse” religion. He called Detroit “pivotal” in the battle against that satanic spirit, “That’s why I believe it’s by divine appointment: Detroit is the most religious city in America. What I’m saying to you is Detroit had to happen because we have to break these barriers that have hindered in so many ways.” On Thursday, Smith said that Islam is “a false religion as many others are. [The rally is about] loving God, loving God’s people.”

Oh, now I get it – they believe that they are going to be gathered up in the Rapture, therefore they are God’s people. They refused to understand that Allah is the Arabic word for God, and consider Him some alien God instead of the God of Abraham and Christ. And it appears that whatever translation of the Bible they use, the story of the Good Samaritan was been edited out.

Millions of Jews have died violently over the course of the past 1900 years because Christians could not separate a handful of Pharisees from the ordinary Jew. People like Engle choose to blame billions of Muslims for the actions of less than thirty men. Code words don’t cover up raging bigotry. The legacy fo 9-11 should not be that it becomes an excuse for hatred and fear-mongering. Muslims died that day, too.

Related articles

• Detroit prayer event puts Muslim community on edge (sfgate.com)
• Why This Prayer Rally Is Making Muslims Nervous (huffingtonpost.com)
• Christian Prayer Rally Putting Muslims On Edge (alan.com)
• Mad fundies plan to cleanse Detroit of its ‘demonic spirit’; Muslims aren’t happy (freethinker.co.uk)
• As if (atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com)