We've been aware of Jackson for some years and while it's difficult to pick so few, here are 10 quotes from the conservative bishop to give you a sense of how he views the world.

1. On gay people: "Their minds are perverted, they’re frankly very sick people psychologically, mentally and emotionally and they see everything through the lens of homosexuality. When they talk about love they’re not talking about love, they’re talking about homosexual sex."

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Today, however, the boundaries between rational political discourse and raving madness have been erased. The extremist peddlers of nightmare scenarios who were once thought to be charmingly eccentric at 1am are now advising elected representatives of the people to initiate investigations and draft bills addressing these non-existent threats. Here are just a few of the urban legends that are circulating in the halls of state and federal legislative bodies courtesy of the whack job broadcasting set.

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This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another. The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.

Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11, and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values and play into our enemies’ hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that.

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Of course right-wing bloggers hailed King as the winner in the debate – he wasn’t – and one sad sack even called Ellison “the jihadi Democrat.”

The fact is, we need more Keith Ellisons in Congress. Not just because he’s a great progressive voice, supporting the president but challenging him strongly on his questionable austerity politics, but also because he’s a patriotic American who’s also a Muslim. He's crucial right now.

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“I think we really have to consider, given the fact so many people hate us, that we're going to have to cut off Muslim students coming to this country for some period of time so that we can absorb what we've got and look at what we've got and decide whether some of the people here should be going, be sent home or sent to prison."

Later, Beckel took a moment to clarify and backpedal a bit "before I get complaints." Instead, he added Chinese students to the list of personas non grata, because, he said, they will just end up hacking us:

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by Scott Korb

Beacon Press, 2013

What inspired you to write Light Without Fire? 

In the wake of the Fort Hood mass shooting by Army Medical Corps officer Nadil Malik Hasan, Forbes published an essay under the headline “Going Muslim,” written by Tunku Varadarajan, who today often writes for The Daily Beast. At the time, Varadarajan was working at NYU, where I teach writing courses, often about religion. The coinage he explained this way:

“This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American—a friendly donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood—discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans.”

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In a post on the right-wing site RenewAmerica, Klayman argues that President Obama is responsible for the attacks in Boston because of political correctness, "orchestrated and furthered by Obama and his minions," because "Terrorists like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, to avoid even the appearance of prejudice against Muslims, are even given scholarships to prestigious schools and entrees into other venues of American society, which they can use as cover for their plots."

He continued: "Nor was there hardly any mention on any station or other press entity of even the possibility that Muslim terror was involved in the huge explosion that occurred in West, Texas, where a fertilizer plant blew up Wednesday, just days after the Boston Marathon bombing."

From the post:

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The older and apparently more radical of two brothers suspected in the deadly Boston Marathon terror bombings, objected to a sermon at a Cambridge mosque on Martin Luther King Day this year in which the speaker compared the Prophet Muhammad with King, known for his advocacy of nonviolence, a mosque official said.

Yusufi Vali, executive director of the Islamic Society of Boston, which runs the mosque, said Tsarnaev told the speaker, “You are a kafir [an unbeliever],” and said he was contaminating people’s minds and was a hypocrite.

Vali said, “The congregation then said, ‘You are the hypocrite.’ The congregation shouted him out of the mosque.”

Later, a respected volunteer talked with Tsarnaev and told him he needed to decide whether to stay and not shout out or stop coming to the congregation.

Vali said it was the second time that Tsarnaev had made an outburst during one of the speaker’s sermons.

“There was nothing about it that would suggest that he would kill a person,” said Vali.

Anwar Kazmi, a board member of the Islamic Society of Boston, discusses the brothers in this AP video:

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My answer to the question about sadness should be self-evident: yes, of course I am sad, and if you aren't sad, you have no soul or aren't paying attention. That's because it should be sad to anyone to see a city terrorized into lockdown mode and Americans maimed and killed. That's a tragedy for the victims, sad for Boston, sad for America and sad for whole communities who are already being persecuted for the actions of individuals.

As I wrote in my syndicated newspaper column yesterday, there are no definitive answers to something as horrible as all that. But there are huge questions. Here are three to ponder at the end of an awful week:

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“Police have to be in the community, they have to build up as many sources as they can, and they have to realize that the threat is coming from the Muslim community and increase surveillance there,” King, a New York Republican, told the National Review.

“We can’t be bound by political correctness,” he continued. “I think we need more police and more surveillance in the communities where the threat is coming from, whether it’s the Irish community with the Westies [an Irish-American gang in New York City], or the Italian community with the mafia, or the Muslim community with the Islamic terrorists.”

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Ahmed Ahmed, the plaintiffs' representative in the class-action case, said he bought a chicken sandwich at a Dearborn, Mich., McDonald's but found it wasn't actually halal. The six-figure settlement will be split among Ahmed, an area health clinic and the Arab American National Museum.

As the Associated Press reports:

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This has been most obvious in the context of recent mass shootings. In those awful episodes, a religious or ethnic minority group lacking such privilege would likely be collectively slandered and/or targeted with surveillance or profiling (or worse) if some of its individuals comprised most of the mass shooters. However, white male privilege means white men are not collectively denigrated/targeted for those shootings -- even though most come at the hands of white dudes.

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It's easiest to explain unexplainable -- or yet unknown -- things by forcing them into an existing worldview, so when a shred of evidence came along, such as an unsubstantiated New York Post report that police had detained a Saudi national, many on the right immediately took it and ran with it.

Of course, the Post's report -- which Fox News picked up -- has zero named sources, zero quotes, and was contradicted by the Boston commissioner, who said authorities have no suspects in custody yet, but why let that get in the way of what you're sure is true.

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The synagogue told Great Neck Patch that safety concerns prompted the cancellation. "As the notoriety and media exposure of the planned program this Sunday have increased, so has the legal liability and potential security exposure of our institution," the synagogue announced. Geller told the local news site that it is "a very sad day for freedom-loving peoples." This writer and her anti-racist counterparts contest that it decidedly is not. American left-leaning Jewish groups publicly rallied for the temple to cancel Geller's appearance. Jewish Voice for Peace sent out an email to members, reported the Jerusalem Post, that stated, "The kind of venom that she spews against Islam is completely inappropriate for a synagogue.”

Habeeb Ahmed, a member of the Nassau Commission on Human Rights, called Geller the "personification of an Islamophobe" and garnered interfaith opposition to her speaking engagement. Ever measured, Geller responded by calling Ahmed an "Islamic supremacist."

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The list has been compiled by the editors of The I Files, a one-stop online news source. We scour YouTube and other sources for the best documentaries and investigative videos. We’d also like to hear from you. Let us know about any reports or video footage that you think we should add to our list.

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“Iraq’s Secret War Files,” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

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The new report, Mapping Muslims, analyzes the effects of the New York Police Department (NYPD)’s infiltration into every facet of Muslim communities, from mosques, local shops, college organizations and more. The report -- released by the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition (MACLC), the Creating Law Enforcement and Accountability Project (CLEAR) and the Asian American Legal Defense Fund (AALDEF) -- interviewed 57 Muslims, mostly living in New York City. The interviewees included high school and college students, community organizers, lawyers, teachers, shopkeepers and others.

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When you think of Pakistan, acclaimed literary fiction is not your first thought. You’re thinking of the ubiquitous nation of 180 million that bleeds daily and leads sensationalist headlines declaring it the world’s “most dangerous place,” a title often  accompanied by encouraging descriptions such as “terrorist haven,” “chaos,” “explosive,” “nightmare,” and “failed state.”

You know Pakistan as the moody, unhinged sister of India, which hennas itself with ghastly violence seeped in extremism and sectarianism.

You know a country whose complex, messy and challenging narrative is reduced to caricatures paraded on news shows as the bearded, anti-American Rage Boys, angry, obscurant Mullahs, disfigured burqa’d women, and President Zardari’s well-groomed mustache.

However, if you look beyond the increasingly grim and sordid headlines and peer deeper into history, you will discover a Pakistan of brilliant, artistic richness as heard in the Qawwalis mastered by the late, great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or the philosophical meditations of Urdu poets Iqbal and Faiz.

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What makes Robertson's blithe dismissal of a quarter of the world's population as "angry people" so infuriating  isn't just that it's so ignorant – after all, when was the last time he said something that made sense? You don't exactly expect cultural sensitivity from the man who blamed a 2010 earthquake on Haiti's "pact with the devil." But in a country where, believe it or not, we have women and homosexuals and nearly 3 million Muslims, you'd think that at a certain point, being a bigot and a moron would not be the sort of thing cable companies and advertisers and talk-show bookers would want to promote. But then again, I'm the person who thought Amy Poehler and Will Arnett had the world's cutest marriage, so I may be hopelessly naive.

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