Minneapolis officials have approved loudspeaker broadcasts of the Muslim call to prayer all five times per day – making it the first major American city to do so.
The Minneapolis City Council on Thursday unanimously agreed to amend the city’s noise ordinance, allowing the “adhan” — Arabic for “announcement”–to sound five times a day, year-round.
The call to prayer had previously been broadcast three times a day, but the noise ordinance prevented dawn and late evening calls to prayer at certain times of the year. With this change, the call to prayer may be sounded over loudspeakers at 7:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m.
Thursday's vote, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, marked the capstone of a years-long effort to allow more calls to be broadcast in Minneapolis, whose burgeoning population of East African immigrants has led to mosques dotting the landscape.
There are an estimated 80,000 Muslims in the Minneapolis area, most of them from Somalia, and almost all of them immigrated to the U.S. subsequent to 1990. They have elected a Somali Muslim, Ilhan Omar, as the U.S. Representative of Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District.
Three Minneapolis City Council members — Aisha Chughtai, Jeremiah Ellison and Jamal Osman — identify as Muslim. “In a body of 13, that's a real caucus,” Ellison said before the unanimous 12-0 vote (one member was absent). Not only was the council vote unanimous, the decision drew no organized community opposition. Mayor Jacob Frey is expected to sign the measure within a week.
* * *
In other religious news, Pentagon officials cancelled a contract for chaplaincy services at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, the sprawling army hospital complex in Bethesda, Maryland, just north of the District of Columbia. The contract was with Holy Name College Friary, a group of Franciscan priests, which had provided chaplaincy services for Catholic patients at Walter Reed for nearly 20 years.
Pentagon officials followed up with a “cease and desist” letter that arrived during Holy Week, ordering the priests to stop providing care. The contract for chaplaincy services was given to Mack Global, LLC, a secular contracting firm, whose most prominent claim, on its web site, is that it is female-owned.
Republicans lawmakers in both the Senate and the House are demanding answers from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. “Forcing priests to stop providing care during Holy Week is not only morally wrong, but also a violation of the First Amendment,” House Republicans wrote in their letter last Wednesday.
In related news, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan issued a subpoena to FBI Director Christopher Wray on Monday for documents relating to the Richmond field office’s plans to insert confidential informants—spies—into Latin Mass Catholic parishes. Jordan has uncovered evidence that the FBI was already running at least one such confidential informant.
It is increasingly clear, given these stories plus the Mark Houck case and similar persecution of anti-abortion Catholics, that the “Biden Administration” has an anti-Catholic bias, pattern, and practice. This is yet more evidence that the senile Joe Biden, who is of Irish ethnicity and strongly Roman Catholic himself, has very little to do with “his” administration beyond reading the lines put up for him on teleprompters. More likely it is being run by a Marxist/Muslim cabal represented by Barack Hussein Obama and Valerie Jarrett.