Motown has no use for the anti-Muslim ads plastered across the sides of buses in New York City. Detroit’s SMART bus system has rejected the button-pushing placards that read “Fatwa on your head? Is your community or family threatening you? Leaving Islam?” – and direct Muslims to a Web site urging them to leave the “falsity of Islam.”

“It’s a purely anti-Muslim hate issue,” Dawud Walid of the Council on American-Islamic Relations told the Detroit News on Friday. “The SMART bus company, or any bus company, should not be used to marginalize a minority group.”

Defenders of the ads, dreamed up by Manhattan-based right wing blogger Pamela Geller and the New York-based Stop the Islamization of America, say it’s a free speech issue and they have sued. Americans have a right to know the truth; Islam is a religion of intolerance and violence,” said Michigan lawyer Richard Thompson, who filed the suit.

New York Daily News, 28 May 2010

See also “Bus agency sued for refusing Muslim defector ads”, Associated Press, 28 May 2010

And “The truth behind the ‘Leaving Islam’ campaign in Detroit”, Dawud Walid’s blog, 28 May 2010