By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
A nationwide grassroots organization has collected tens of thousands of signatures from Americans who are outraged over the suspension of a Tulsa Police Captain who refused to order his officers to attend an Islamic event sponsored by a group associated with the radical Muslim Brotherhood.
OneNewsNow.com is reporting that Tulsa Police Captain Paul Fields was ordered by his superiors to mandate attendance at a law enforcement appreciation day hosted by the Islamic Society of Tulsa. The day’s activities included a tour of the mosque, meeting the mosque’s leadership, and presentations of “beliefs, human rights, women.” The officers were also asked to “watch the 2-2:45 weekly congregational prayer service.”
When Captain Fields refused on the basis that it would violate his religious beliefs, he was suspended for two weeks without pay and threatened with being denied consideration for future promotions.
According to a lawsuit filed on behalf of Captain Fields by the Thomas More Law Center, participation in the event was originally supposed to be voluntary, but when no officers signed up to attend, managers made it a required event.
The day “had nothing to do with any official police function. It clearly fell outside of the police department’s policy on community policing, and based on comments made by police department officials in a closed door meeting, it was not ‘community outreach’ as it has been previously portrayed,” the law firm explained.
Meanwhile, Brigitte Gabriel, founder of ACT! for America and author of They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It, has taken up the cause of Captain Fields and has already collected tens of thousands of signatures petitioning the city to reinstate the officer.
“Can you imagine what the reaction of the ACLU [would] be if any police department or any governmental entity supported by tax dollars forced and made it mandatory for their police officers to…attend a prayer service [on] a Sunday morning at a church in the United States,” she asked.
Gabriel also points out that the Islamic Society of Tulsa is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
“The Islamic Society of Tulsa is a Muslim Brotherhood-connected Islamic center with close ties to ISNA — the Islamic Society of North America. The property title of the Islamic Society is held by NAIT — the North America Islamic Trust. Both ISNA and NAIT were named as unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial, which is the largest terrorism trial in the history of the United States [that] resulted in 108 guilty verdicts.”
Captain Fields’ legal team is now seeking court permission to amend their original complaint over the city’s actions to include damages that have occurred as a result of the punishment inflicted upon him by the city. These include the two week suspension without pay and the threat that he will not be considered for promotion for a time.
“We asked the court to amend our complaint to add the actual discipline,” said Richard Thompson, president of the Law Center, to WorldNetDaily.com (WND).
The amendment also includes an additional First Amendment claim because city officials told Fields that part of the discipline was for allowing the public to know about the dispute.
“If this had been a Muslim officer told to go to a Christian prayer service and the Muslim officer refused because it would violate his Islamic faith, there would have been no reaction at all,” Thompson told WND. “But this happened because this was a Christian officer who said the orders would violate his Christian principles.”
Click here to sign the petition to reinstate Captain Fields.
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