When I heard there was a indoor firing range in Hot Springs, Arkansas, only an hour away from me, and that this establishment doesn’t want Muslims there, I looked up their phone number, 1-501-767-9944, and called them. Before accusing them of Islamophobia, and threatening to urge others to boycott the place, I wanted to know if they had changed their policy to something more, well, sane.

The woman I spoke to corrected me, by telling me that her establishment was not banning Muslims, but simply making it known, on the Internet, that Muslims are not welcome there. She asked me, rather than reading all the stuff on the Internet written against her position, to read her statement at http://janmorganmedia.com/2014/09/business-muslim-free-zone/ — and I agreed to do so. Why not read her statement first? I saw no reason not to.

When I read it, I found one of the most shockingly ignorant pieces of writing on the subject of Islam which I have ever encountered. Just for starters, she uses the word “Islamist” in place of the word “Muslim,” an error I have never seen before, even though I have read plenty of disgusting anti-Islamic material. The two words don’t even have definitions which are close to each other!

Here’s a particularly appalling excerpt from the site:  “I view Islam as a theocracy, not a religion. Islam is the union of political, legal, and religious ideologies. In other words, law, religion and state are forged together to form what Muslims refer to as ‘The Nation of Islam.'” (Clearly, even though she claims to have read the Qur’an in its entirety, she has not heard of such things as the long, bloody Iran-Iraq War, fought between two majority-Muslim nations, only one of which — Iran — is, or was then, a theocracy.)

In actuality, many real Muslims (and well-educated non-Muslims, also) know that the Nation of Islam (or NOI, as I call it, for clarity) is a small, non-Islamic religion founded in Detroit, Michigan in 1930 — and that there is absolutely no connection, other than a similarity in the name, between the religion called Islam, which originated in the Middle East, and the very different religion practiced by the NOI. You can find the original religion called Islam (the real one) described right here — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam — on Wikipedia, which is an objective source, precisely because anyone can edit it. If, on the other hand, you look at Wikipedia’s corresponding article on the Nation of Islam — at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_of_Islam — you’ll see that Islam, and the NOI, have nothing in common except for a proper noun appropriated, without justification, from a centuries-old religion. The beliefs and practices of Islam, and the NOI, are no more alike than those of, say, Christians and Hindus.

I won’t try to catalog the numerous other mistakes in the post on her website, simply because they are so plentiful, but I do encourage you to look at this appalling website for yourself — just as the woman I spoke to on the phone asked me to do. If nothing else, the numerous writing errors (for example, “Muslims” should always be capitalized, and the writer really needs to use spell-check) should convince you that this place is a hotbed of ignorance.

This place deserves to be boycotted, permanently. They also deserve to go out of business, as all bigots should. They deserve to be “called out” for their ignorance, also, and that’s exactly what I am doing in this blog-post.

Let the boycott begin! Also, please call these people, and tell them what you think of their incredibly misinformed position. Their phone number, again, is 1-501-767-9944. Places like this are not helping the world become what it needs to be — a world where Christians, Muslims, those of other faiths, and the non-religious can coexist peacefully.

[Image credit:  I found the “empty head” image above, online, at http://school.discoveryeducation.com/clipart/images/ani-hello.gif — and believe it to be legal to repost this image. If I am mistaken, however, I will remove it, or pay reasonable royalties, at the request of the image’s owner.]