MOSCOW, September 21 (RIA Novosi) - Posters containing Anti-Islamic messages will appear on New-York buses and urban panels next week, Telegraph reported on Saturday.
"These hateful messages serve only to divide and stigmatize when we should be coming together as one city," said New York mayor Bill de Blasio in a statement, published by New York Daily News on Friday.
The posters will contain two photos: one of them features American journalist James Foley shortly before his beheading by a member of the Islamic State, known as “Jihadi John”. The other picture shows a British rapper Abdel Bary, who is the first among those suspected by British intelligence services of being Foley’s executor. Bary is also suspected of having conducted two other beheadings of an American journalist and a British aid worker. The slogan printed on the poster says “Yesterday’s moderate is today’s headline”.
The advertising campaign has been launched by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), an anti-Islamic organization also known by the name “Stop Islamization of America”. The organization became notorious after running a series of similar ad campaigns delivering anti-Islamic messages and depicting moderate Muslims as terrorists.
De Blasio heavily criticized the campaign calling it “outrageous, inflammatory and wrong”. He blamed its organizers for being narrow-minded and intolerant and called for New York citizens to “share a better, loftier and nobler view of humanity.”
The Anti-Muslim advertisements will appear on 100 New-York buses and two subway stations next week. The campaign is impending to be extended as AFDI launched a public appeal in order to raise additional $20,000.
