Following up on last week’s sudden firing of 100 Muslim workers at a JBS Swift meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado, 500 Muslim workers at the company’s plant in Grand Island, Nebraska, have walked off the job to protest being denied time to pray at work during Ramadan.
On one level, this is a workers’ rights and religious freedom issue, but the underlying problem seems to be a basic lack of respect for Muslims at this meatpacking company. Seriously, can you just let people schedule break times around prayer? Is that too much to ask?
UPDATE: The Greeley Tribune reports that proceedings for reinstatement are stalled, and that the incident has a lengthy backstory.
Who represents Islam in the United States, a country with 6 million Muslims? Is it the radical imam, the webmaster, the mystic, the feminist? Barrett traveled the country to discover what life is like for American Muslims in different regions of the nation. He finds that Muslims, like the rest of the population, are varied and diverse in look, thought, belief and behavior.
Paul Barrett is the Director of the Investigative Reporting Team for BusinessWeek and the author of American Islam.
I found this to be very provocative and worth my time. If you want to skip around, click on the FORA Tools icon and click through the channels. Update: I read this article, “The The Halal Melting Pot: Why Dearborn isn’t Paris” in the current issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and it also adds to the mosaic picture of American Islam.
Compare Goode’s rant to Ellison’s gracious behavior on the floor of Congress yesterday. Watch below to see who goes over to introduce himself to Rep. Goode.
Interesting interview yesterday featuring a spokesperson from CAIR discussing recent survey results that show the Muslim vote trending Democratic. Good to see that his quick departure from Dancing with the Stars hasn’t dampened Tucker’s ability to imply that Muslims are terrorists…
Check out the audio to the right for a much more articulate take on interfaith relations and response to Rev. Robertson from Islamoyankee of the great blog Islamicate…