Free Republic

Rana Elmir, an American Muslim and deputy director of the ACLU of Michigan, says that she “emphatically” refuses to condemn jihadist terrorists “just because I’m Muslim.” In her provocative article in Monday’s Washington Post, Elmir claims that she is often asked to condemn Islamic terrorism, to which she replies: “I emphatically refuse.” She then goes on to compare the systematic slaughters wrought under the name of Islamic terrorism with “the terror advanced by mostly white men at the alarming rate of one mass killing every two weeks in this country.” Elmir draws a parallel between the Islamic State and “Dylann...

The deputy director of the ACLU of Michigan said in an op-ed Monday that she refuses to condemn radical Islamic terrorism in order to prove her allegiance to the United States. Rana Elmir wrote that she's "consistently and aggressively asked" to condemn Islamic terrorism, and is tired of having her religious views linked to atrocities like the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and in Paris and San Bernardino this year. "I emphatically refuse," she wrote in an opinion piece in The Washington Post. The op-ed was titled: "Stop asking me to condemn terrorists just because I'm Muslim."

Reproductive rights groups opposed to Michigan's new abortion insurance law will not seek to overturn it at the ballot box in 2014. The ACLU of Michigan, along with state chapters of Planned Parenthood and the National Organization of Women, had been considering a referendum to repeal the law, which prohibits insurers from covering most abortions unless a woman or her employer has purchased an additional rider in advance. "The timing is just not right for a referendum or initiative at this point," Rana Elmir, deputy director for the ACLU of Michigan, said Tuesday. "Our research indicates that there's a growing...