In a blog post on August 22, 2010 you accused Ikhras of participating in a “smear campaign” against you and made several baseless allegations including “attacking” you for being a Christian. That blog post stated the following: Several Christian leaders have contacted Hanania in the past few weeks saying they are urging their Arab Christian congregations to protest KabobFest and another hate site called Ikhras…The haters…continue to say that my religion has nothing to do with their vicious assaults but you will NEVER see them assault a Muslim in the same manner as they are now slandering me. The only reasons they are attacking me is because I am Christian, I am a moderate who openly and consistently opposes violence, and my wife and son are Jewish…I am even more proud to be targeted by hate mongers like KabobFest and Ikhras.”
You must realize this is not true, and we can only speculate as to why you have decided to pursue a personal campaign of sectarian agitation and foment division within the Arab-American community. Our site is dedicated to covering a select group of Arabs and Muslims in the United States that claims to speak in the name of our community. You have even made a living out of it. Our focus is on their political activism and the positions they advocate ostensibly on our behalf, which they have no right to do. We are not concerned with any aspect of the personal background of any individual including religious affiliation. This is readily apparent to any fair-minded reader of our site. We have criticized your own exploitation of your personal background which you have done in pursuit of a comedy career, as a vehicle for self-promotion, and often as an implied claim to indigenous credibility for your commentary on Palestine and other topics related to the Middle East. We have also criticized (ok, ridiculed) you for routinely mentioning the personal background of your family in your Jerusalem Post articles, and your recurring use (misuse) of the Arab/Jew dynamic. While we questioned the relevance of this personal information to the debate, it was you Ray, not us, that insisted on inserting his family and personal background into the discussion. Perhaps, as it now appears, it is all you had to talk about, but we refused, and will continue do so.
You now claim several Christian leaders contacted you in the past few weeks saying they are urging their Arab Christian congregations to “protest KabobFest and another hate site called Ikhras”. You also claim to have issued a statement to about “30 Christian leaders in Michigan, Illinois, California and Washington DC who offered their support to stand up to the anti-Christian racism that is finding its way into the rhetoric of some extremist Palestinian and Arab activists.”
We Issue You The Following Challenge, Should You Choose To Accept
1) Reveal the names of those who offered you their support. If they indeed offered to “stand up” for you why would they remain anonymous?
2) If any of these alleged religious or community “leaders” would like to “stand up” and “support” you let them do so publicly. If we can verify their name, location, and leadership designation we pledge to post their statement of support on our website in its entirety and without editing.
3) Finally, we also challenge you to demonstrate where we expressed any form of “racism” or “hysteria” directed towards any group. We pledge to post any justification you can present for this ludicrous charge in its entirety and without editing.
We have received an incredible amount of support far beyond what we expected in such a short period of time. Our community has welcomed the unprecedented coverage Ikhras is providing and our readership is growing. Our readers are evaluating us based on the content and quality of our coverage, and not the angry whining of one individual upset about legitimate criticism of his publicly stated views. Your attempt to wrap yourself in the collective shroud of a religious group within our community and shout “racism” may be all you have left. Maybe stirring division and sectarian agitation is a final, desperate attempt to regain some limited acceptance among a select few after your unconscionable and offensive political views rendered you an outcast among the vast majority. These reprehensible Zionist tactics betray a complete intellectual and moral bankruptcy. They highlight your inability to engage in a discussion or debate about the real issues and serve as a further reminder of your own alienation from the Arab world and the Arab-American community in the US. These cheap tactics will certainly fail because they will be rejected by both the Muslims and Christians in our community. And we doubt you can find even a single “leader” to “stand up” and “support” you. Put up or Ikhras!
