No, you can provide no evidence that it was not an

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Detailed Analysis

According to this widely circulated protest message, every Friday afternoon, large numbers of Muslims block streets in various locations in New York City, including Madison Avenue, in order to pray. The message claims that mosques in New York cannot hold all those wishing to worship, so Muslims take over nearby streets each and every Friday afternoon, thereby disrupting normal traffic flow. The message includes several photographs depicting large groups of Muslims praying on Madison Avenue in New York.

The photographs are genuine and do indeed show large numbers of Muslims praying on Madison Avenue. However, the accompanying description is highly misleading and inaccurate.

The photographs show scenes from the annual Muslim Day Parade that takes place every September or October in New York City. The key word here is "annual".

The mass prayer sessions depicted in the photographs do not take place every Friday in New York as claimed in the message. Muslim worshippers do not block New York streets every Friday afternoon. Claims that such disruptive, street-based prayer sessions occur every week are simply untrue.

The Muslim Day Parade has taken place in New York City since the mid 1980's, in September or October. A history of the Muslim Day Parade published on the parade's official website notes:

New York City is the capital of the world and center of economic, business, social and cultural activities. When it comes to social and cultural activities, it houses many ethnic groups from around the world such as Irish, Italian, Latin, Afro-American, Catholic, Jewish and Muslim.

Up until 1985, all these groups were celebrating their ethic and cultural heritage in one form or the other, which included street activities, festivals and parades with the exception of the Muslims.

So, in 1984, few Muslim brothers got together, thought that when there are so many cultural shows and parades are being held in the City then Muslims should also demonstrate their different cultural beauties along with our Islamic values.

Muslim representation in the City and State was zero. So they planned about having a United American Muslim Day Parade in New York City which will provide a platform to the Muslim community in this Tri-State are to get together and join the main stream political arena of this country as we have adopted it as our homeland. We are here for good our children have to carry on our Islamic Values in the future when we will be gone.

The parade history states that the first Muslim Day Parade took place in September 1985 and the event has been held every year since.

The first three photographs in the message depict scenes from the 2008 Muslim Day Parade. The same photographs can be viewed in a post about the parade published on the Atlas Shrugs blog in October 2008. The last photograph in the sequence can be seen on the same blog in a post about the 2009 Muslim Day Parade.

The 2010 parade was held on 26 September. An article about the parade published in the New York Times reports:

The scene seemed surreal, yet oddly poignant: at a silent, deserted intersection in the center of Midtown Manhattan, beneath bland corporate logos and brick office buildings, hundreds of Muslims knelt on a sprawling tarpaulin, faced due east and commenced the midday call to prayer.

The ceremony, held along a blocked-off portion of Madison Avenue, marked the start of the American Muslim Day Parade on Sunday, an annual event, first held in 1985, that brings together Muslims of many ethnicities and nationalities who worship in the New York region.

Like the many other official parades that take place each year in New York City, the Muslim Day Parade is properly planned and organized prior to the event and has the necessary authorization and permits from the New York City authorities. And, to reiterate, the parade and the prayer sessions that are part of the event take place only once per year, not every week as claimed in this protest message.

Finally, it should be noted that the supposed Edmund Burke quote included at the end of the message - "For evil to flourish, all that is needed is for good people to do nothing" - may well be misattributed. Edmund Burke was an 18th century Irish political philosopher and politician who is often thought of as the father of modern conservatism. Information about the supposed quote on Wikiquote notes:

This is probably the most quoted statement attributed to Burke, and an extraordinary number of variants of it exist, but all without any definite original source.

These very extensively used "quotations" may be based on a paraphrase of some of Burke's ideas, but he is not known to have ever declared them in such a manner in any of his writings. It may have been adapted from these lines of Burke's in his Thoughts on the Cause of Present Discontents (1770): "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

Burke's alleged quote bears a striking resemblance to the narrated theme of Sergei Bondarchuk's Soviet film adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's book "War and Peace", in which the narrator declares "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing", although since the original is in Russian various translations to English are possible.

Bookmark and Share References
HISTORY OF MUSLIM DAY PARADE
ISLAMISTS DAY PARADE GETS UGLY
NYC: RAINING ON A MUSLIM DAY PARADE 2009
For Muslims, Day of Celebration Amid Controversy
Wikiquote: Edmund Burke

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