A government official in the US state of Michigan who posted a call on Facebook to kill all Muslims has said he “owe[s] nobody an apology.”
The Independent reports that Jeff Sieting, the president of a small village in northern Michigan, was recently discovered to have posted anti-Muslim messages on his Facebook page.
One post is titled “Kill them all, every last one.” The post calls Muslims “dangerously destructive to society” and compares Islam to a “flesh-eating bacteria” and a “death cult.”
The President declined to apologise for his posts at a recent village meeting,
“I owe nobody an apology for exercising my First Amendment rights,” he said, adding later: “I don’t expect everyone to see things the way I do.”
Last month, residents staged a demonstration in downtown Kalkaska to protest the “disturbing, hateful and Islamophobic rants” of the village President – and to demand his resignation.
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Mr Sieting maintains the effort to remove him is a result of non-residents’ outrage at the pro-Donald Trump sign displayed in his hotel.
The FBI reports that anti-Muslim hate crimes increased by 67 per cent in 2015 – the year Mr Trump declared his candidacy, and the last year for which statistics are available. The number of anti-Muslim hate crimes that year were the highest they had been since 2001.
