Miami-Dade Transit is pulling advertisements from 10 buses that South Florida Muslims have said are offensive to Islam.
The ads, which went up Tuesday, said “Fatwa on your head? Is your community or family threatening you?” and directed Muslims to a website encouraging them to leave Islam.
Robert Spencer, who heads New York-based Stop the Islamization of America, which purchased the ads for one-month as the first leg of a national campaign, said they were “offered in defense of religious liberty.”
But on Thursday, Miami-Dade Transit spokeswoman Karla Damian said that after reviewing the ads, the department decided they “may be offensive to Islam” and would remove them before the buses ran on Friday.
Damian said the ads were able to initially go up because Miami-Dade Transit has an outside company sell ad space and does not routinely review ads before they run.
The South Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations had critiqued the ads as promoting “bigotry” and making false statements about Islam.
“Islam guarantees freedom to and freedom from religion…. [We] reject as un-Islamic any extremist interpretation that sanctions the killing of any individual because she decided to ‘leave Islam’,” said director Muhammed Malik.
See also “Miami-Dade Transit bows to Sharia, pulls religious liberty bus ads as ‘offensive to Islam'” at Jihad Watch, and “Miami Transit pulls SIOA ‘Leaving Islam’ ads: living under Sharia in the USA” at Atlas Shrugs.
Update: Spencer and Geller have announced that they are suing Miami-Dade Transit for breach of contract and violation of their First Amendment rights.