Advocacy Groups Debate Meaning of ‘Jihad’ in Billboard Duel

PHILANTHROPY TODAY

Image courtesy of The New York Times

ILLINOIS---Muslim and pro-Israel organizations are staging an advertising battle in Chicago over whether the word “jihad” has violent connotations, according to The New York Times. The Chicago chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, asserts in a series of billboards on buses that jihad means “to struggle” and applies the term to everyday life, as in an ad featuring a woman in a head scarf lifting weights who says, “My jihad is to stay fit despite my busy schedule. What’s yours?” A pro-Israel group called the American Freedom Defense Initiative responded with similarly styled ads featuring photos and warlike quotations attributed to Osama bin Laden and Faisal Shahzad, who attempted to set off a bomb in New York’s Times Square in 2010. [link]

Two ads sponsored by American Freedom Defense Initiative founded by Pamela Geller