Child's face is not redacted in original.
An anti-Islam group has posted a flier featuring the face of a small girl next to a photoshopped image of an Arab man, unpretentiously implying that the child depicted is or could be the victim of sexual molestation by Muslim men. The group Defendstudents.org purports to defend unsuspecting children, circumventing actual parents to warn kids themselves against the Islamic monster under their beds. They take fliers like this one and pass them out at schools, as evidenced by this passage from the blurb under the flier:
The “Defend our Students Campaign” will distribute a very provocative flyer that exposes the truth about Muhammed sexually abusing his six-year-old wife. This will occur at Milpitas High School in Milpitas at 2:30 p.m. The purpose of the campaign is to protect our young people from being recruited and radicalized by Islam by forcing our schools to tell the truth.
The group does not list contact information, other than a dropbox for reports of supposed Islamic abuses and intimidation. But we can certainly ascertain a few things from the flier and the organization itself: one, the child in the photo is too young to be able to consent to being associated with sexual abuse, especially on record and on school campuses across America; and likely no consent was given anyways. And two, this organization that claims to be about child advocacy has no idea how to approach the issue of child abuse, how to protect a child’s identity and dignity, or really anything about child advocacy at all. I can tell you now that there is no legitimate child advocacy organization in the U.S. that would plaster a kid’s face all over America, in schools and on the internet with the words, “Married to Children” boldly proclaiming the depicted child to be a sex slave. Must I say that the blatant aim of Defendstudents.org is not to help children but to hurt Arab Muslims? Yup.
Update: Commenter wheatdogg over at Ed Brayton’s blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars points out that the type of turban the man in the poorly Photoshopped image is wearing is not typical of Mulims but of Sikhs. It would not be surprising to see the depraved anti-Islam community confusing people of Middle Eastern decent out of blatant xenophobia–i.e., “a Sikh is a Muslim is a brown person whose culture hails from foreign lands.” aka “They all look the same to me.” If anybody out there knows more, please let me know in the comments section. Thanks.
Resisting the Milieu 