Once again, a major American transit system has become a hotbed of racial hate. On Monday the American Freedom Defense Initiative, a far-right group based in Houston, Texas, that’s led by conservative activist Pamela Geller, launched an ad campaign that uses photos and images to denigrate Islam. Geller pulled a similar stunt earlier this year in Washington, D.C., but this time she’s upped the ante: the ads will include a photo from journalist James Foley’s gruesome beheading.
That’s Going To Leave A Mark…. [Coming Soon To NYC Buses] http://t.co/zQaXbL0giv pic.twitter.com/JzxbW5pxPw
— Anti-CAIR (@AntiCAIR) September 18, 2014
As Jack Jenkins points out at Think Progress, this isn’t the first time New York City’s subways have been a spectacle of Islamophobia. "In 2012, the group posted ads in Washington, D.C. and NYC that referred to enemies of Israel "savages," and this summer it put posters on 20 buses in the U.S. capital that included an image of Adolf Hitler sitting next to Muslim leader Haj Amin al-Husseini underneath the caption, "Islamic Jew-hatred: It’s in the Quran." Read more.