The Florida Family Association logo (Photo: floridafamily.org)

Home-improvement chain Lowe’s is facing backlash following its decision to pull ads from TLC’s All-American Muslim, a reality-TV show centering on the lives of Muslims living in a Detroit suburb. Though reps for Lowe’s have said the company pulled the ads due to “strong political and societal views” from many individuals, a conservative Florida group is at the center of the controversy.

Last month, the Florida Family Association sent a series of emails to supporters asking them to petition several of the companies advertising during All-American Muslim. According to the Association’s website, companies including Sweet ‘N Low and The Home Depot have also pulled their ads from the show. The Association has said that Lowe’s is the 66th company to remove its advertising from the show, but it is the only one to release a statement about its decision. (Ed note: Since this article’s publication, Florida Family Association has disabled all pages of its website, leaving a lone statement on its homepage about having faced “mean spirited” attacks from critics; though the nature of such attacks is not specified. “Because of our real concern for the terrorism that is a way of life for some folks, we ourselves have become victims,” the statement reads.)

Though the show aims simply to show the lives of American Muslims living in a post-9/11 world, the Family Association has claimed it profiles “only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish.”

“Learning Channel’s new show All-American Muslim is propaganda clearly designed to counter legitimate and present-day concerns about many Muslims who are advancing Islamic fundamentalism and Sharia law,” reads a post on the Association site.

This isn’t the first time the group has concerned itself with television shows. The group also launched petitions against the advertisers of VH1′s Ru Paul’s Drag Race, NBC’s The Playboy Club (which was canceled after only three episodes) and the Teen Nick show DeGrassi.

California Sen. Ted Lieu has said the ad pulls were evidence of “naked religious bigotry” and are prime examples of the discrimination often faced by Muslims in America.

In addition to penning a  letter to Lowe’s CEO Robert Niblock, in which he expressed his distaste for the company’s recent actions, Lieu told the Associated Press he might consider legislative action if Lowe’s doesn’t apologize to Muslims and reinstate its ads.

Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., has also spoken out against Lowe’s, which he says is choosing to disregard the First Amendment. ”Our nation’s history is full of examples demonstrating how we have repeatedly torn down false divisions hate groups choose to create,” Ellison said in a statement. “But the struggle against bigotry and hatred must continue so we never give in to intolerance like Lowe’s Corporation has done.”

Florida Family Association Executive Director David Caton (Photo: floridafamily.org)

According to a 2010 Florida Family Association financial statement (PDF), the organization received around $172,000 in gifts and contributions last year. According to the mission statement posted on its website, the group was formed in order to “educate people on what they can do to defend, protect and promote traditional, biblical values.”

Haris Tarin, the director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council’s D.C. office, said he anticipated that the show would be controversial.

“From the beginning, our organization was anticipating that there would be a few campaigns launched to use the show to push the discourse to an even more extreme position against Islam,” Tarin said. “There’s an entire industry that doesn’t want to see any portrayal of Muslims without terrorism or without an extreme narrative of Islam being pointed out.”

Tarin said his organization has launched its own campaign, to counter the attacks by the Florida Family Association. In addition to meeting with the Council’s interfaith and civic partners, the group plans to put pressure on companies like Lowe’s to ensure that it apologizes and reinstates the ads.

“We’ve been getting Americans of all backgrounds to call Lowe’s since last week and we are initiating meetings with Lowe’s and some of the other advertisers to have a conversation about this, because it sets a very disconcerting precedent,” Tarin said. “There are a large number of Muslim-Americans who shop there, as well as many Muslim employees, and this decision [to pull the ads] could prove very problematic for our democracy.”

(Photo: Flickr Creative Commons/www.BackgroundNow.com)

Torgerson, who has the backing of Tea Party Nation, also took shots at fellow Republican challenger Chris Fields for his divorce and support for LGBT rights.

Torgerson is running for the Republican nomination in Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District. Earlier this year, she told Tea Party Nation that she would be running—the group backed her previous run for office. Torgerson raised $60,000 in the last cycle—nearly as much as the Republican in the race. She self-financed $25,000 of that money and she was the only Minnesota-based donor to her campaign; all other contributions are from out of state. She ran as an unaffiliated independent.

One of Torgerson’s main issues is an opposition to civil rights for gay people. She said homosexuality goes against “natural law.”

“Two men cannot make a baby. Two women cannot make a baby. Further, all cultures which have evidenced moral decline have fallen,” she wrote. “Homosexuality has traditionally been seen as evidence of moral decline. Thus, homosexuality is not good for America, nor any culture.”

Torgerson told Golden Valley Patch at her 9/11 campaign launch that she was “entering the race to stand for the moral, Judeo-Christian values the country was founded upon. That’s our foundation, and if we don’t have our foundation in place, then the economy and things aren’t going to be doing so well.”

She said it was important to her to support the U.S. Constitution.

“I still need to expose Keith Ellison for being a radical Islamist. I do believe that he says he does eventually want to replace the U.S. Constitution with sharia law,” Torgerson said.

Torgerson told Patch she recently asked Ellison whether he believed the Constitution or “Sharia law” was supreme.

“He evaded the question,” she said. “He refuses to state that the U.S. Constitution should be supreme over Sharia law, which is to me quite surprising. He talked about how the Constitution has been amended and it appears that he would amend the Constitution to incorporate Sharia law.”

Torgerson’s question was caught on video posted by her campaign. In the exchange, Ellison said there are no communities in the United States that have tried to install Sharia law.

“I believe that the United States Constitution which has been amended well over 25 times is the bedrock of American law,” Ellison said. “This whole movement to try to ban Sharia, this bill has been introduced in over 22 states, in my view, this is a very thin-disguised effort at religious persecution of people who are Muslim.”

The Islamic Center of Northeast Florida was pipe-bombed just before evening prayer services on May 10, 2010. The bomb caused no injuries and only $500 worth of damage to the mosque, but was thought by many to be a hate crime possibly linked to the appointment of a Muslim man to the Jacksonville Human Rights Commission.

Though video surveillance captured the suspect on tape, his face wasn’t clearly visible and police never named a suspect. But nearly a year later, the FBI announced that a suspect had been killed following a “confrontation” with FBI agents. Sandlin Matthew Smith, a 46-year old bus driver from Julington Creek, Fla., is said to have been responsible for last year’s bombing.

According to the FBI, the “critical lead” in linking Smith to the pipe bomb was the discovery of explosive materials in his residence found after executing a search warrant.

According to Jacksonville’s First Coast News, Smith had been bragging to friends that he was responsible for the bombing.

After speaking to more than a dozen of Smith’s acquaintances, the FBI tracked him to Oklahoma. Smith was shot and killed following a “confrontation” with FBI agents. He was armed.

“I want people in my administration that are committed to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States,” said Cain. “I don’t want any inkling of anybody in my administration who would put Sharia law over American law. I have not found a Muslim that has said that they will denounce Sharia law, you know, in order to support the Constitution of the United States.”

Cain, who was the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza and former chair of the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City, formed an exploratory committee for the Republican nomination in 2012.

Ingraham asked Cain, “So Keith Ellison you think would be more in favor of Sharia law than the Declaration of Independence?”

Cain said, “Didn’t he take his oat on the Qur’an instead of the Bible? Am I wrong in that?”

“I think you are correct in that,” she said. (To be precise, it was a copy of the Qur’an owned by Thomas Jefferson.)

Cain continued, “This is my point. If you take an oath on the Qur’an, that means you support Sharia law. I support American law. Our laws were derived from principles that are biblically based. Maybe not said in the same words that are in the Bible, but our laws are derived from principles based upon the Bible. This is why I’m not going to back down or pander to anyone who wants to call me xenophobic or a bigot simply because I said no. I don’t want anybody in my administration that I’m going to have to be looking over my shoulder to figure out if they are going to try to do something against the principles that I believe in which are also the principles that the majority, the overwhelming majority of the American people believe.”

Here’s the audio:

“Islam has no fundamental First Amendment claims, for the simple reason that it was not written to protect the religion of Islam. Islam is entitled only to the religious liberty we extend to it out of courtesy. …

Our government has no obligation to allow a treasonous ideology to receive special protections in America, but this is exactly what the Democrats are trying to do right now with Islam.

From a constitutional point of view, Muslims have no First Amendment right to build mosques in America.”

Fischer claimed in 2010, while his group was spending around $140,000 in Iowa to oust three Supreme Court justices, that Adolf Hitler was gay and hired gays to be Nazi stormtroopers for their “savagery,” that homosexuals should be banned from public office, and having fewer homosexual students would reduce teen suicide rates. In December, he called for homosexual sex to be made illegal because it was as dangerous as intravenous drug use.

The Southern Poverty Law Center recently classified AFA as a hate group. However, conservative Republicans considering a run for president have still courted the Mississippi-based organization.

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty recently appeared on Fischer’s radio program, where he said he would reinstate the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that bans homosexuals from serving openly in the military.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich helped bankroll AFA Action’s effort to oust the justices in Iowa based on their unanimous ruling overturning a state ban on same-sex marriage. Gingrich quietly donated $125,000 to them in 2010, in addition to his monetary support for other groups involved in the anti-judge campaign.

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn), who appears to be edging closer to running for president, told Fischer in an interview Thursday that she would support using all of the natural resources “God has given us” in her platform for her energy policy.

House Minority Leader Eric Cantor defended the hearings, making them sound like a friendly extended hand from Capitol Hill to American Muslims.

“The purpose [of the hearing] is, if you ask Chairman King, to try and assess how we can better work with the Muslim community in America to stop the spread of radical Islam,” he said.

That description will likely pale when set beside the hearings themselves.

As Greg Sargent at the Washington Post reports, King’s re-working of the testimony schedule has all but guaranteed Americans will be treated to a “three ring circus.”

[T]he committee has quietly divided its plan for the hearings into three separate panels — separating Republicans from Democrats who might disagree with them on the issues in question.

For instance, the first panel features as a witness Dem Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress, while the second features GOP Rep. Frank Wolf. Dems expect Wolf, who has a long history of doing battle with the Council of American-Islamic Relations, to support King’s views of the threat of Muslim radicalization. Previously, Dems say, the plan was for Ellison to be on the same panel as Wolf, but now the two have been separated — meaning that Dems won’t be able to ask Ellison to rebut Wolf during hearings that are expected to attract national attention.

“This type of division based on party and ideology is curious. especially when the hearing is supposed to be combining thoughts to combat radicalization,” one Dem staffer on the committee tells me. “Now, if Representative Wolf says something negative about Muslims, Mr. Ellison will not have the opportunity to rebut it. There is no rationale for this decision.”

Forbes magazine blogger Osha Gray Davidson has called on King to resign. He notes that, presented with his past stance on the IRA, King hasn’t flinched.

Hypocrisy? Rep. King reacts indignantly to the charge. His terrorists, he explains, “never attacked the United States.” Only British civilians, a distinction which, in King’s moral universe, makes his support acceptable.

It is not.

The man who has a history of supporting terrorism abroad, a man who, let’s not mince words, who has the blood of innocents on his hands, has no place in the U.S. Congress. He should resign.

Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart had a predictable field day lampooning King and his “Islamic radicalization in America” hearings.

If Cantor really believes King’s hearings will result in increased cooperation with the Muslim community in America, former Colorado Republican politician and founder of Muslims for Bush Ali Hasan might disabuse him of that notion.

A hard-core fiscal conservative and outspoken supporter of Republican causes and candidates for years, Hasan fled the party last year. He told the Colorado Independent demagogic bigotry against Muslims and gays and Latinos had taken over as a core Republican Party message. He said the policy proposals springing from the message mocked the Constitution.

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At a Monday rally for Scott Brown in North Andover, Mass., I met Bill Hudak, a first-time candidate for Congress running against Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.). He stayed as close to Brown as he could — pictures of the rally are now at the top of his campaign website. Hudak is the guy in the leather jacket and glasses.

What I didn’t know at the time: Hudak is a conservative activist with some extremely strange views of President Obama’s religion and citizenship. On November 3, 2008, the Tri-Town Transcript reported that Hudak, who lives in Boxford, Mass., had pulled down kooky anti-Obama signs from his property after getting too many complaints.

Down the road at 165 Herrick Road, William and Angela Hudak have more of the same anti-Obama signs lined along the front of their property. One large, roughly 6-foot-by-4-foot sign stands back from the road, up against their house, with words – such as socialist, Marxist, and lazy – surrounding the same picture of Obama dressed as Osama Bin Laden.

William Hudak said he received complaints over the weekend from the police about some of the larger signs placed near the roadside. But Hudak added he didn’t need to take the signs down but did so just because the police department was being flooded with phone calls. [...]

Hudak asserts that Obama was not born in the United States but in Kenya, according to affidavits that he made available to the Tri-Town Transcript. He said that Obama has ties to the Muslim faith through an extremist cousin that is from Kenya.

“There is a lot more going on here than anyone knows,” Hudak said.

Brown endorsed Hudak immediately after the election. Here’s video of Brown recognizing Hudak at that North Andover rally, the day before the election.

A high-level Pentagon inquiry into the Fort Hood shootings that left 13 people dead has concluded that the military should focus more resources on identifying service members who might pose a threat to their colleagues and outlines a series of steps the Pentagon should take to prevent future attacks, Pentagon officials said.

According to Jaffe’s piece for The Washington Post, the report — expected to be released on Thursday — will recommend the Defense Department “to ensure that it fully staffs FBI-run Joint Terrorism Task Forces so that information collected by other government agencies about potential contacts between troops and terrorist groups is shared promptly with the Defense Department.” We’ll know more on Thursday, but it appears for now like Gen. George Casey’s call not to stigmatize American Muslim soldiers has been embraced by the panel, led by ex-Army Secretary Togo West and ret. Adm. Vern Clark. Good for them.

General George Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, said on Sunday that he was concerned that speculation about the religious beliefs of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, accused of killing 12 fellow soldiers and one civilian and wounding dozens of others in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, could “cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers.”

“I’ve asked our Army leaders to be on the lookout for that,” General Casey said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union. “It would be a shame — as great a tragedy as this was — it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well.”

But, as if Casey never said it, here’s the independent senator from Connecticut:

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” labeled the shooting spree “the most destructive terrorist act to be committed on American soil since 9/11” and said that as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee he intended to investigate Major Hasan’s suspected motives and whether the Army “missed warning signs that should have led them to essentially discharge him.”

“If Hasan was showing signs, saying to people that he had become an Islamist extremist, the U.S. Army has to have zero tolerance,” Senator Lieberman said. “He should have been gone.”

It’s important to ask the question of whether Hasan acted alone. The early evidence is that he did. But the question is appropriate, because the stakes are people’s lives.

But that’s the stake in Lieberman’s investigation, too. Inquiries like the one he described have an awful tendency to build the conclusion into the premise — turning constitutionally protected speech or religious behavior or dissent into troubling “signs,” when the person exercising his freedoms worships in a mosque and not a church or a synagogue. The soldiers who died at Ft. Hood did not serve their country to see it devolve into witchhunting.

Whole letter after the jump.

Jihad at Fort Hood

Every American this morning should be outraged not only about the murderous rampage against U.S. soldiers in Ft. Hood, Texas, by Major Nidal M. Hasan, but also by the sickening effort of Big Media, and even some U.S. officials, to deceive us about what has taken place.

For eight years we have been fighting radical Islamists around the world, and we have been the victims of jihadist attacks by lone radical Muslims repeatedly here in the U.S. Yet as the story broke of the carnage yesterday, 13 dead and 30 wounded, virtually every major media outlet, along with our own government, seemed to have as their main goal convincing us that the event had nothing to do with terrorism or radical Islam.

But minute-by-minute, more information is coming to light that can’t be ignored. We have found out that six months ago Major Hasan may have defended Muslim suicide bombers on his web page, comparing such acts to the sacrifice a U.S. solider makes when he falls on a grenade to save his fellow soldiers. Col. Terry Lee, who worked with the killer, said Major Hasan had said, “Muslims shouldn’t be fighting Muslims.” Back in June, when a Muslim convert assassinated a U.S. soldier at a recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas, Col. Lee said that Major Hasan seemed happy about the event and that he was confronted by other officers. (You may recall that it took days for Obama to acknowledge that attack, yet the White House issued a rare Sunday statement when late-term abortionist George Tiller was killed.)

In recent weeks, while off the base, Major Hasan started wearing Arabic and religious clothing. He passed out Korans on the morning of the shooting. Survivors in the facility where Major Hasan went on the attack reported that he yelled, “Allahu Akbar,” (Allah is great) before he opened fire – the same words shouted by the jihadists on 9/11 and which have been repeated by our enemy in every attack since.

Nor is this an isolated incident. In June 2003, Sergeant Hasan K. Akbar attacked his fellow soldiers as they gathered in Kuwait to start the liberation of Iraq. He killed two officers and wounded many more. Numerous plots by American Muslims have been uncovered in recent years to attack Fort Dix, the Quantico Marine Corps base and other military facilities.

No one is suggesting that an Al Qaeda operative contacted Major Hasan and ordered yesterday’s attack. But the evidence certainly indicates that Major Hasan was becoming more and more committed to radical Islam and growing increasingly hostile to the American military that paid for his education and repeatedly promoted him. NPR reports, “Hasan was put on probation early in his postgraduate work… He was disciplined for proselytizing about his Muslim faith with patients and colleagues…”

I understand the media’s politically correct mindset. What is inexcusable is why the military and the FBI continue to be so reticent about acknowledging the nature of the enemy we are confronting. Instead of going into denial, our military, the FBI and other intelligence agencies need to admit the obvious. While thousands of loyal American Muslims have served in the military, and some have died with other Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are also “sleeper cells” or “sleeper individuals” who are jihadist ticking time bombs inside our own ranks. Similar attacks are inevitable the longer our leaders engage in self-deception. The brave men and women in uniform, who are on the front lines in Afghanistan and Iraq, should not have to worry about being killed at home by the same enemy they are fighting abroad.

Obama’s “Shout out”

As details of the Ft. Hood carnage poured in yesterday afternoon, the White House announced that President Obama would make a statement at a previously scheduled event. Close to 5:00 PM, cable stations switched to cover the president’s remarks as he was getting ready to speak at a Tribal Nations Conference hosted by the Interior Department. What happened next has callers to talk radio shows all over the country outraged.

Instead of bringing a somber demeanor into the room, the president seemed to many to be light-hearted and frivolous. He thanked various staffers, and then said he wanted to give a “shout out” to Dr. Joe Medicine Crow, who he incorrectly identified as a “Congressional Medal of Honor” winner. After several minutes of banter, the president read a somber, brief statement about the shootings. Increasingly, this White House seems “tone deaf.” How hard is it to realize that this was not a time for joking or “shout outs.” In fact, it would have been more appropriate to cancel the speech and make a reassuring statement from the White House on the events in Texas.

This morning, the president made another statement ordering flags to fly at half-staff until Veterans Day. But he also cautioned us not to “jump to conclusions” until we have all the facts. (The last time there was a pending law enforcement issue, the president was the first to jump to conclusions when he said the Cambridge Police Department “acted stupidly” for arresting his friend Professor Louis Gates.)