Ad War is Launched Over ISB's Legal Battle
Ted Siefer
The Jewish Advocate
January 6, 2006
In an acknowledgement that a lawsuit filed by the Islamic Society of Boston has escalated tensions between Boston's Muslim and Jewish communities, Combined Jewish Philanthropies and the Jewish Community Relations Council issues a joint statement this week in solidarity with the David Project, one of the groups named in the suit.
The statement, published in a full-page advertisement in this week's Advocate, insists that the ability to raise concerns and answer questions must be respected "if we are to live together and sustain a healthy, diverse community."
The statement comes two weeks after the ISB took out an ad in the Advocate defending its lawsuit against the David Project and other groups and individuals it claims conspired against it. The ISB's ad appeals to members of the Boston community "not to buy into the poisoned rhetoric and attacks against our community undertaken by a few extremists who would divide us."
The ISB named the David Project and the group Citizens for Peace and Tolerance in a lawsuit filed earlier in the year against the Fox 25 News and the Boston Herald. the suit charges the parties, which have both actively raised concerns about the ties between ISB officials and Islamic extremist groups, with defamation and conspiring to undermine the ISB's $24 million mosque project in Roxbury.
Patty Jacobson, vice president of marketing and communications at CJP, said: "We wanted to run an ad now because we felt it was important to acknowledge the tension in the community. The Jewish community has a strong commitment to interfaith dialogue and collaboration."
The ISB's lawsuit, Jacobson said, "has had adverse impact on dialogue. It's hard for people to work together when they're in litigation."
Salma Kazmi, assistant director of the Islamic Society of Boston, also acknowledged that the lawsuit has been "polarizing" for the Boston Jewish and Muslim communities. But, she said, "we felt we couldn't just sit aside and continue to be on the receiving end of that kind of hostility. The fact that [the David Project] happened to be a Jewish organization was just unfortunate."
Kazmi said that she was confident that the majority in the Jewish community wouldn't go to the lengths that certain individuals went to in opposing the mosque project, but, she noted, "what I find troubling is that it is not being [recognized] internally in the Jewish community that this type of behavior is inappropriate for anyone to undertake.
Despite the litigation and increased tensions between local Muslims and Jews, a dialogue group founded three years ago by members of Temple Beth Shalom in Cambridge and the ISB has continued holding discussions on a regular basis. A talk was held in November titled "The Jew in Islam and the Muslim in Judaism," and another discussion is slated for this month. The meeting have involved lay members of the institutions and intentionally avoid politics, focusing instead on religious practices and beliefs.
David Dolev, the program director at Temple Beth Shalom who helps organize the talks, confirmed that the conflict with ISB has had a palpable effect on interfaith outreach efforts.
"People don't always differentiate between the ISB and Muslims in general," Dolev said. "Jews are very concerned. When they read what's going on in the paper, it epitomizes all the stereotypes they have anyway. That makes it another difficult thing we have to work through."
Noting that the ISB is one of the largest Muslim organizations in the state, Dolev said, "It's a big group to blacklist."
Dolev, along with Kazmi of the ISB, founded the Center for Jewish-Muslim relations, which, according to the group's Web site, aims to "maintain strong religious and social identities in the pluralistic society of the United states and remove stigmatizing and negative stereotypes of the other." Among the center's board of directors and advisors are Arthur Waldstein of JCRC and Lawrence Lowenthal of the American Jewish Committee.
Construction of the ISB mosque in Roxbury is currently stalled due to a shortage of funds. Asked where the money to fight its defamation lawsuit was coming from, Kazmi said that money was being donated by "a mix of people" specifically for that purpose.
