Wait, is being rude a felony now?
Apparently it is, at least in (of all places) Florida. The New York Post reported Saturday that “three men stormed a University of South Florida parking garage and harassed Muslim students during dawn prayer on Tuesday — an incident captured in videos that showed the group shouting slurs, waving bacon and crowding worshipers as they bowed.” For that “all three face a felony count of disturbing schools and religious assemblies under Florida’s hate-crime enhancement statute, along with misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct and disrupting a school or lawful assembly.”
Wait a minute. They said insulting words, waved bacon around, and got too close to the Muslims, and for that they’re facing felony charges? Yes, and it gets worse. The Post notes that “the charges followed a multi-day investigation sparked by footage showing the men approaching students during fajr prayer on the roof of the Collins Boulevard Parking Garage.”
Fajr is one of Islam’s five daily prayers and takes place in the early morning, as soon as a white thread can be distinguished from a black thread in natural light. The Post doesn’t bother to explain why the Muslim students were praying this prayer in a parking garage. Nor does it explain how the three men who are now facing felony charges happened to be in the same parking garage at a time of day when not many people are up and about.
This was no coincidence. There are plenty of mosques in south Florida, and specifically at the University of South Florida, as well as plenty of comfortable enclosed spaces. Yet these students opted instead to pray the fajr prayer in a parking garage, and evidently made a public enough show of it that these three men who have now been charged, who are Christian evangelists, knew they would be there.
Muslim public prayer is a declaration of supremacism and dominance, as we have recently seen in several European countries, as well as in New York City and Philadelphia, where large numbers of Muslims have taken over public spaces and even blocked streets for prayer. This is in line with the declaration of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, that “Islam must dominate, and not be dominated” (Sahih Al-Jami 2778).
Yet in reporting on the incident in Florida, the media has ignored all of that, and focuses entirely on the Christians’ response. According to the Post, the three men who were arrested were “Christopher Svochak of Waco, Texas; Richard Penskoski of Canyon, Okla., and Ricardo Yepez of Tampa.” One of them “carried a cardboard box reading ‘Kaaba 2.0 Jesus is Lord,’ while another wore a thobe emblazoned with ‘Jesus is God.’”
One of the Muslim students, Abu Tahir, said: “They walked close to our heads while we entered the bowing position, so close that we genuinely had a fear that they were going to stomp on our heads.” They didn’t. Tahir continued: “We had a thought in our head, do we break the prayer? Do we end the prayer to address whatever is going on?”
The Post reports that “students said the group stood inches away as they prayed, shouted insults including ‘Bow down to lord Jesus Christ’ and ‘Your prophet married a 6 year old,’ and taunted them with bacon immediately after the prayer ended.” It does not, however, explain who these students were. Were they the Muslim students who were engaging in the fajr prayer? Or were other University of South Florida students on hand at the crack of dawn to watch the fireworks?
Whatever may have been the source of these claims, Christopher Svochak disputes them, writing: “The media ran with lies claiming we ‘stomped around their heads,’ ‘forced bacon on them,’ and said things we never said. My full livestream proves every one of those claims false, but campus police caved to the pressure campaign from CAIR and the Muslim student mob and filed charges anyway.”
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Abu Tahir added: “We had no idea whether we were going to leave there safely.” Here again, however, the Muslim students did leave there safely. No one touched them. Are these three Christians being charged with felonies because the Muslim students were afraid someone was going to stomp on their heads, but didn’t, and prevent them from leaving safely, but didn’t?
Compounding the absurdity is the fact that while these Muslims in South Florida may have had to put up with some rude behavior, as we all do from time to time, Muslims in Nigeria are murdering Christians wholesale. Yet which phenomenon gets more international attention?
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