Today’s Daily Times features a story (behind their paywall) about a local Christian group’s e-mail campaign against a retreat for Muslim youth to be held later this month at the Mo-Ranch camp/conference center in Hunt, which is an affiliate of the Synod of the Sun of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
Randy Simmons, speaking for the Hill Country Oak Initiative, acknowledges that he expects no terrorist acts in the county, nor does he believe the youth group are terrorists, but he wants the organization to know that the community doesn’t trust them.
“What I do feel like the potential threat is if there is no resistance shown,” Simmons said. “We in the community are awake and we know who you are and what you are about. They’ve been operating under cover for a long time, and I don’t want to wake up one day and the next thing you know, we have a mosque and an Islamic settlement right here in Kerr County.”
Simmons calls on members of the Oak Initiative not to protest at Mo-Ranch, but he praises with faint damnation: “Truthfully, I can see some benefit in (protesting), but I have told (David Jordan, president of Mo-Ranch) that we are not going to do it, and I intend to honor that,” Simmons said. “But I can see some other people doing it.”
As the story makes clear, the Islamist Society of North America (which sponsors this conference through its youth arm, Muslim Youth of North America) specifically repudiates terrorism. The Department of Justice has identified ISNA as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development’s federal prosecution for illegally funneling millions of dollars to Hamas, but ISNA describes this designation as “a legal tactic to permit the government to seek the admission of evidence that would otherwise be excluded,” and is seeking to have their name removed from the list of co-conspirators.
The Hill Country Oak Initiative’s web site is pretty bare-bones and uninformative, but the parent organization’s site includes videos with titles like “Prophetic Perspective on Current Events” and “Marxism in America” that give some idea of their general viewpoint.