Listening in the crowd was Faizan Syed, the director of the Missouri chapter of the Council on American–Islamic Relations. Before the meeting, he'd joined the dozens of protesters outside the auditorium to deliver his own message — that anti-Muslim memes and messages aren't "conversation." They aren't excusable.
And, Syed notes during an interview, people who have been exposed for sharing racist messages never seem to want to apologize.
"What kind of conversation is [Heyen] trying to start? That our community would be better without Muslims?" Syed says. "That's the real conversation."
The examples aren't hard to find. Syed points out that a mosque in Connecticut was burned just this weekend in an apparent act of arson. In his speeches and outreach for CAIR, Syed — whose efforts were the subject of an RFTcover story in May 2017 — often describes his experience working to rebuild Joplin after a tornado devastated the city in 2011. Two years later, a self-described "crazy as shit" Iraq war veteran burned down the Joplin Islamic Center.
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