Kenders' Musings

From a CAIR News Release:

Carlos Charco bought a turban, tunic and sandals on the first day of a short mission trip three years ago in a West African country.

He wanted to blend into this Sahara Desert region, far from Mexico's Pacific coast, where he grew up. Far from the San Antonio seminary where he was studying Christian theology.

The new duds and his mestizo features - black hair and brown skin - matched those of the Arab community there. Nearly everyone assumed he was Muslim.

So they're trying to blend in and be inconspicuous....sound like a tactic you've heard of? It gets better.

"It was an advantage as a missionary that I'm not white and my eyes were not blue or green," said Charco, a San Antonio pastor who's preparing - along with his wife, Viviana, of South America - to be missionaries in a Muslim country.

They are part of a rising evangelical movement of Latin-American missionaries going to areas that are the least Christianized in the world.

They believe their skin tone and non-Western background give them advantages in Muslim countries over Anglo missionaries, who are held back by post-9-11 hostilities.

(emphasis mine in the last paragraph)
Good to see the street goes both ways. Hostilities against muslims by Americans are rising, rightly, and until they rise en masse against their radical brothers, Americans will continue to treat Muslims as suspect. At least, wise Americans will do that..

Yet, for some U.S. Islamic leaders, the emergence of Latino missionaries only adds to the tension and distrust of evangelicals who they say periodically invent new ways to conceal unwanted requests for Muslims to convert. . .

This approach, even if led by Latinos, still draws skepticism from some Muslims who have seen a variety of methods by Christians seeking the same objective of conversion, said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group in Washington.

Men growing beards. Women wearing head coverings. Bibles placed on wooden stands like Korans. Churches built to resemble mosques.

"It's a new twist on an old approach," Hooper said. "They want to appear as Muslim as possible to kind of blur the lines."

(bold emphasis theirs in the last paragraph, italics mine)
So trying to get people to peacefully convert to Christianity is bad, but threatening death against a man that converts to Christianity in Afghanistan is A-OK? Where was CAIR on THAT one, eh?

Get a load of that last line:
"They want to appear as Muslim as possible to kind of blur the lines."
Replace "Muslim" with "American" and what do you have?

Enough said.

Hooper said he doesn't believe humanitarian help from evangelical mission groups is unconditional.

"If the Bible is handed out with a sack of rice, they're going to take the sack of rice and the Bible if their kids are starving," he said. "We have no problem with someone coming to a Muslim and saying, 'I think Christianity is better.' But we object to going into a vulnerable population with a disproportionate power relationship." . . .
Muslim skepticism is fueled in part by the fact that major U.S. Islamic charity groups have been shut down by U.S. law enforcement officials, said Ingrid Mattson, Islamic studies professor at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut.

The crackdown has come due to concerns about terror links to Islamic charities, she said, prompting U.S. officials to freeze their assets.

"This is creating a huge amount of bad will," she said. "This also helps further the agenda of the American Christian evangelical groups, because it makes it impossible for (Islamic charities) to help their fellow Muslim countries and easy for Christian groups to go there."

(emphasis mine)
But do you object to creating a vulnerable population of women that are subjugated and an entire class of citizens that are second class and must pay a tax to not be Muslim?

What about that "vulnerable population?"

Now this is just a thought, but if "Islamic charities" didn't use the funds they raised for things like BULLETS AND BOMBS, maybe, just MAYBE, they wouldn't GET SHUT DOWN!!!!!