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Congressman Will Not Apologize for Islamophobia
By The Associated Press
December 21, 2006
A
Republican congressman has told constituents that unless immigration is
tightened, "many more Muslims" will be elected and follow the lead of a recently
elected lawmaker who plans to use the Quran at his ceremonial
swearing-in.
Rep.
Virgil Goode, R-Va., made the comments in a letter sent earlier this month to
hundreds of constituents who had written to him about Rep.-elect Keith Ellison,
a Minnesota Democrat and the first Muslim elected to Congress. Goode's letter
triggered angry responses from a New
Jersey
congressman and an Islamic civil-rights group.
In
the letter, Goode wrote, "The Muslim representative from
Minnesota was
elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don't wake up
and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many
more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the
Koran."
Goode
said the U.S.
needs to stop undocumented immigration "totally" and reduce legal
immigration.
Goode
added: "I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the
United
States if
we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to
preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the
United
States of America and
to prevent our resources from being swamped."
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Ellison
was born in Detroit and
converted to Islam in college. He did not return telephone messages left
Wednesday.
Meanwhile,
Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., D-N.J., wrote to Goode on Wednesday saying that he was
"greatly disappointed and in fact startled" by Goode's
letter.
"I
take your remarks as personally offensive to the large community of Muslim
Americans I represent in the Eighth District of New Jersey," Pascrell
wrote.
The
Council on American-Islamic Relations called on Goode to
apologize.
"Representative
Goode's Islamophobic remarks send a message of intolerance that is unworthy of
anyone elected to public office," CAIR's national legislative director, Corey
Saylor, said Tuesday night. "There can be no reasonable defense for such
bigotry."
Goode
spokesperson Linwood Duncan said Wednesday that no apology was
forthcoming.
"The
only statement the congressman has is that he stands by the letter,"
Duncan
said.
The
letter was made public by John Cruickshank, the chairman of the Piedmont group
of the Sierra Club in central Virginia, who
had received it after writing to Goode about environmental issues.
Duncan said
that Goode's office had sent the letter to Cruickshank by mistake.
(AP)
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