Ad campaign promoting Islam angers NY lawmaker

“I have no problem with the ad itself, but I have a very, very real problem with those behind it,” Republican lawmaker Peter King said on Tuesday.

“They are especially shameful because the ads will be running during the seventh anniversary of September 11, and because the subways are considered a primary target of terrorists,” he said.

However, mayor Michael Bloomberg apparently did not share King’s outrage over the campaign, which also coincides with the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

“If you were to advocate becoming a Muslim, I assume the First Amendment would protect you,” Bloomberg said.

King, however, did not see it as an issue of free speech and expressed objections to sponsors of the campaign, among whom is Siraj Wahhaj, the imam of a Brooklyn mosque, who has been a “character witness” for convicted 1993 World Centre bombing mastermind Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman.

Wahhaj, who has led a prayer before the House of Representatives, had appeared on a list of 170 potential unindicted co-conspirators in the 1993 bombing case but was never charged.

The Islamic Circle of North America, which is promoting the campaign says the ads, coinciding with the holy month of Ramadan, aim to educate non-Muslims about the faith and reach out to those interested in it.

The campaign will run in 1000 of some 62,000 cars and bring USD 48,000 as revenue to the Metropolitan Transit Authority.

The ads will feature key words or phrases about Islam on such as “Head Scarf?” or “Prophet Muhammad?” accompanied by the words “You deserve to know” along with the Web site address WhyIslam.org, CNN said.

“The idea is to get the people looking at the ads to a point where they can reflect upon certain words that get thrown around a lot but are not necessarily defined in most proper context,” New York University’s Imam Khalid Latif, a cleric who is promoting the project, was quoted as saying.

Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor in the 1993 bombing case, told CNN that Wahhaj’s name was included in a filing that prosecutors were required to provide to defence attorneys, a list of all the names of people who could possibly be foreseen to come up in the evidence.

The filing, McCarthy said, has been called a “co-conspirator list”. But Wahhaj was never named by the prosecution. “The only time he came up in a meaningful way before the jury is when the defense called him as a witness,” McCarthy recalled.

Wahhaj said that he was a character witness for bombing mastermind Abdel-Rahman in the context of “what we knew about him before the incident,” citing him as a “scholar in Islam” and “a great reciter of the Quran.”

“People try to make the connection as if I’m endorsing some bad deeds that [were] done by Sheik Abdel-Rahman,” he said. “That had nothing to do with it.”

The New York Post, which broke the story, ran a cover photograph of Wahhaj with the headline “Jihad train”.

Wahhaj said the New York Post‘s “cheesy” and “anti-Islam” reaction to his participation in the Subway Project is “the very reason young Muslims want to put out this ad campaign.”