RUSH: Muslims now want a mosque in the football stadium. This is from Little Green Footballs, the blog site. ?Yet another demand from Muslims for special treatment — special treatment that would be denied to any other religious group: seeking timeout for prayer. As the Ohio State Buckeyes pummeled the Northwestern Wildcats on Ryan Field last November, senior Amir Siddiqui and his friends slipped below the bleachers, removed their shoes and knelt on pieces of poster board to pray. As the sea of purple cheered and jeered above, Siddiqui tuned out the world around him to perform salaat, the Islamic ritual prayer that faithful Muslims recite five times daily. Siddiqui will do the same in Welsh-Ryan Arena next week when the Buckeyes basketball team goes up against the Wildcats. But rather than pray amid raucous crowds, some Muslim students are pressing Northwestern?s athletic department to set aside a secluded space for the ritual, or grant them permission to come and go from the arena before the buzzer. ?If we attend the game in its entirety, we would miss one of our five daily prayers,? said Siddiqui, president of the Muslim cultural Student Association. ?I can leave the game early, come later, or pray somewhere in the stadium on dirty floors with lots of noise and lots of people around, which isn?t a huge problem. But we?d love to have a small area.??
Basically they want a mosque in the college basketball arena here, under the stands or what have you. Of course, what are the odds that they’ll get it? Don’t do that, Dawn, don’t look like it’s never going to happen. Here is why it’ll probably happen, or one of the reasons, from Investor’s Business Daily. ?Since Keith Ellison’s election to Congress?? He’s the first Muslim elected ??there’s been a lot of noise in the media about the growing clout of the 8 million-Muslim electorate. Eight million? ‘There are 8 million Muslims in America now,? boasted a spokeswoman for something called the Muslim Advancement Society. She appeared on CNN to talk about what a proud day it was for her and other Muslim-Americans to see a Muslim brother sworn into Congress for the first time. It seems the size of the Muslim population in America jumps by an additional million every other year or so. Just a couple of years ago the consensus number bandied about in the media was 7 million. Before 9/11 it was 6 million. Politicians in Washington are intimidated by the figure. They believe it.? They just see it as a voting bloc.
?But it’s a wildly inflated estimate manufactured by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, something that the media could easily refute if they dared ? simply by deconstructing CAIR’s unscientific methodology. While the number of Muslims is growing thanks to higher birthrates and immigration, it’s nowhere near CAIR’s claim. Even the most generous independent estimate puts it at half that size, or 4 million. Finding reliable data for Muslims in America is hard because the Census Bureau does not survey creed. So CAIR, which has an agenda to Islamize America, has overfilled the vacuum. To come up with its own figure, it hired a ?respected scholar? by the name of Ihsan Bagby to lead its ?study.? But Bagby not only lacks independence ? he’s a CAIR board member ? he’s not even a trained demographer. Worse, he admits the number he arrived at is a ?guesstimation.? Here’s how he came up with it.?
It’s a long, drawn-out process. They got about 1209 mosques. They interviewed 416 of them. They asked how many people were involved with their mosques in any way. The average response was 1,625, which is probably high given that two imams claim 50,000 in the nation’s largest mosque in the DC suburbs has only 3,000. Then he multiplied that fuzzy participation figure by 1,209 mosques, came up with two million mosqued Muslims. Next he multiplied that sum by a magical factor of three to capture Muslims who might not participate in mosque activities, and got the original six million guesstimate for the size of the Muslim population. ?CAIR then took the liberty of bumping up the Muslim count to 7 million. Now ? presto ? it’s at 8 million, and climbing. ?Today, 8 to 10 million Muslims live in the United States,? claims Navy Lt. Cmdr. Abuhena Mohammed Saifulislam, who serves as Muslim chaplain for the new Marine mosque at Quantico, Va.?
So now it’s up to eight to ten million, and this bunch at Ohio State / Northwestern, they want a mosque now in the basketball arena so they can pray and of course, if politicians, ?Eight to ten million Muslims out there, we could really make ’em mad by saying no.? If they’ll ignore the law on illegal immigrants because they’re afraid of that voting bloc, and that’s a larger number than Muslims, then it’s not a stretch to assume that by the time this is all said and done, we’re going to end up with a mosque in a basketball arena at a major institution of higher learning. It only takes one, and then we’ll get more. Mosque on campus, okay. In the basketball arena? Next will come the football stadium. Okay, folks. Okay.