WASHINGTON, 23 February 2003 — We are told blessings come in strange ways, so maybe this weekend’s snowstorm was a blessing since many could not attend the Christian Coalition’s bizarre ‘forum’ on Islam.

But alas, such hope was short-lived. This week the Christian Coalition began contacting people “unable to attend due to inclement weather,” offering them a video of the event.

In anticipation of the forum, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) had asked the organizers “to offer mainstream Muslim leaders and scholars an opportunity to provide accurate and balanced information about Islam.”

And in a letter to the White House’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, the American Muslim Council (AMC), recommended that the Christian Coalition be “automatically disqualified from receiving any sort of federal funding” for sponsoring “such a bigoted event.”

“The symposium is intended to further educate Christians of faith and interested Americans about the true nature of Islam,” said Coalition President Roberta Combs, who noted in her keynote address that the seminar was “not designed to be a critical attack on one’s belief, but an opportunity to ‘inform’ by shedding a real light on Islam.”

Alas, the event did not disappoint those who came to hear the worst about Islam, as the three-hour symposium’s aim was to highlight Islam as a threat to Christianity, and featured five panelists known for their “outspoken” negative opinion of Islam, Coalition spokesman Ronn Torossian said.

Out of the many distortions about Islam, perhaps the most memorable came from William Koenig, who runs an evangelical news website. He suggested that the terrorist attack of 9/11 was God’s punishment.

“God is very serious and very active,” Koenig warned, explaining it was God’s intention “to wake us up” on the 11th of September 2001.

The reason for God’s wrath, he said, was due to the pressure put on Israel by American leaders and others, to give up its ‘covenant land.’

“The God of Israel is taking this seriously, and his fury is building,” Koenig warned.

Then a pastor in the crowd, moved by these words, stood up and blew into a long curled shofar (a ram’s horn used in Judaism for religious ceremonies). He blew it so hard that the walls of the hotel ballroom in Washington’s Capitol Hilton reverberated with the sound.

The most moderate voice on the panel was that of Daniel Pipes, one of America’s most outspoken critics of Muslim societies and regimes. Pipes repeated his frequently expressed argument that America’s real war should not be fought against terrorism but against militant Islam. “It is not a war on terrorism, but a war on jihad” that the US should be fighting, Pipes said.

Then came the zealots, otherwise known as “Christian Zionists.” Labib Michail, a Christian author of Egyptian origin, quoted from the Qu’ran to allegedly prove to the audience that “Islam and terrorism are associated,” and that Muslims “want to kill Christians by any means.”

Don Feder, a syndicated columnist, compared Islam to Nazism, and accused America’s leaders of appeasing the political manifestations of Islam just as European leaders appeased Nazi Germany in the 1930’s.

It is important to note several Christian organizations protested the forum.

Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, a Baptist minister and head of the Interfaith Alliance, sent a letter of protest, saying he was “astounded that you are holding an educational event on Islam without the involvement of even one Muslim.”