FYI
Reform Bahai Faith
www.reformbahai.org
reformbahai@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
January 7, 2008
Re: Civil Action No. 64 C 1878
The Honorable Amy J. St. Eve
United States District Court
Northern District of Illinois
Courtroom 1241, Chambers 1260
Everett McKinley Dirksen Federal Building
219 South Dearborn Street
Chicago, Illinois 60604
Dear Judge St. Eve:
The Reform Bahai Faith submits to the Court that the NSA of Wilmette,
while publicly hiding behind a facade of liberalism, is
essentially practicing Islamic "takfir," in the words of the scholar of
Islam Bernard Lewis, "recognizing and denouncing apostasy,"
labeling people "kafir" or infidels, and issuing "fatwas" or decrees,
denying the very existence of other Bahais and denominations,
all indicative of the worst in the Shiite Islamic heritage of the Bahai
Faith-practices Baha'u'llah specifically rejected, teaching
tolerance of different religious views congruent with modern Western
custom and practice. Nothing could be more diametrically
opposed to the democracy of our civic and legal order. The NSA of Wilmette
is essentially seeking to use the Court in a type of
jihad.
Although the Reform Bahai Faith is not a party to Civil Action No. 64 C
1878, we have knowledge of what we believe are malicious and
slanderous misrepresentations made to the Court on behalf of the NSA of
Wilmette in Document 49-2:
"14. The Web site at 'reformbahai.org' is the site of an outspoken critic
of NSA named Frederick Glaysher. While the Web site gives
the impression that an organization is associated with Mr. Glaysher, there
is no such organization. On information and belief, Mr.
Glaysher's claims are simply not taken seriously by any one. The Web site
is merely a stage, in a comer of the Web, for Mr. Glaysher's
unusual fixation upon, and animus toward, NSA. This, of course, is not
evidence of a Baha'i Faith denomination. The attached
affidavit of Tracey Giertz indicates there was no content at this site
until September 3, 2004. See id at ¶ 18."
The NSA of Wilmette offers the Court no "information" but ad hominem and
slanderous vilification, which it has routinely used
against other Bahai denominations since as early as the 1930s. Tracey
Giertz, in her affidavit ends with Paragraph 16, making no
mention of the Reform Bahai Faith or www.reformbahai.org, only the Free
Bahais. Neither I nor the Reform Bahai Faith has ever had
any interest in, or ownership of, the Free Bahais and their website. Nor
have I or the Reform Bahai Faith ever been involved in any
way with the Unitarian Bahais and their website. Our website was available
online beginning August 19, 2004. By chance, the Reform
Bahai website is registered through the same registration service as the
Free Bahais, GoDaddy.com, one of the least expensive, used
by over 25 million people, and which protects personal information from
identity thieves. The Archive service Tracey Giertz used
often takes a week or two to find and document new websites.
With approximately [deleted] members, most of whom are US citizens, Reform
Bahais indeed do exist and are actively seeking to grow
and develop in accordance with the rights and obligations of the
Constitution and Bill of Rights. The NSA is seeking to use the
ruling of a US Court against Bahai denominations who hold other religious
opinions and thereby prohibit the "free exercise"of their
and our First Amendment rights.
I also wish to inform the Court that the Reform Bahai Press has just
published its first book of Bahai writings, The Universal
Principles of the Reform Bahai Faith, available for sale throughout the
country and much of the world since December 14, 2007. I
have enclosed a copy of the book for the Court as further evidence of our
existence as a growing, independent Bahai denomination.
The Reform Bahai Faith does not use either an apostrophe nor diacritical
marks in the generic word Bahai, a spelling widely used in
the USA since as early as 1900.
The Reform Bahai Faith emphatically presents before the Court the fact
that it does not look to other Bahai denominations for its
understanding of the Teachings of Baha'u'llah, especially all those
denominations who are named parties, all of which we believe are
based upon a fraudulent will and testament, purporting to be that of
Abdu'l-Baha, and which document gave birth to the
fundamentalist religious organization that has initiated the lawsuit
before the Court, pretending to be a mere corporation. We
provided the Court with a certified copy from the Library of Congress of
Dr. C. Ainsworth Mitchell's Report on the Writing Shown on
the Photographs of the Alleged Will of Abdu'l-Baha on March 8, 2007.
The animus of the NSA of Wilmette against the Reform Bahai Faith stems,
among those reasons already alluded to, from the fact that
the Reform Bahai Faith does not believe in an eventual Bahai theocracy;
but a separation of church and state; rejects the
infallibility of any Bahai Universal House of Justice; accepts that women
can serve at all elected levels, including someday on a
properly elected Bahai Universal House of Justice, unlike the corrupt one
now located in Haifa, Israel.
We draw the attention of the Court to twenty-six pages of selections from
Mirza Ahmad Sohrab's Broken Silence: The Story of Today's
Struggle for Religious Freedom (1942), documenting the attempts by the NSA
of Wilmette to trademark and copyright the generic term
Bahai in 1928, though Bahais of different belief already existed at that
time in Ruth White and others; the 1941 case before Judge
Valente of the New York Supreme Court, in New York County; both revealing
the unmitigated viciousness that the NSA has directed in
the past against American citizens who were Bahais holding different
religious convictions. Available via the Internet, Excerpts
regarding the 1941 New York Supreme Court Case before Judge Valente:
http://www.fglaysher.com/bahaicensorship/archives/BrokenSilence,CourtCase.pdf
We again appeal to the Court to protect our Constitutional rights to
religious freedom and liberty.
Most respectfully yours,
Reform Bahai Faith
Enclosure: The Universal Principles of the Reform Bahai Faith. Reform
Bahai Press, 2008. 148 pages.
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