US: Calls for the resignation of a Boston talk-radio host have intensified as his on-air, inflammatory, anti-Muslim remarks have been played and replayed on US airwaves.
Responding to a caller's suggestion that Americans should befriend Muslims living in the US, radio host Mr Jay Severin, of WTTK-FM's "Extreme Games" show, said "You think we should befriend them . . . I think we should kill them."
Mr Severin had earlier suggested that American Muslims were not loyal Americans and could not be trusted: "I believe that Muslims in this country are a fifth column," he said. "The vast majority of Muslims in this country are very obviously loyal, not to the United States, but to their religion." Mr Severin also suggested that American Muslims wanted to create a "United States of Islam". Mr Severin said: "I'm worried that when the time comes for them to stand up and be counted, the reason they are here is to take over our culture and eventually take over our country."
Leading calls for Mr Severin's resignation has been the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which received complaints in the wake of Mr Severin's comments from concerned American Muslims.
"We believe a mere reprimand and apology is insufficient and demand that he be taken off the air," said CAIR's chairman, Mr Omar Ahmad, in a statement.
Mr Ahmad added that, in his opinion, Mr Severin would already have been fired if he had attacked any other ethnic or religious group in America.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the government agency charged with regulating radio and television in the US, also received complaints about Mr Severin's comments. However, The Village Voice newspaper reported the FCC as saying "it doesn't have rules regarding violence or calls to violence". It cannot, therefore, intervene. For its part, WTTK-FM responded by saying it would stand by Mr Severin and would not be seeking his resignation. As the controversy broke, the station refused to release a recording of Mr Severin's on-air comments.
However, when a recording was obtained by the media independently, WTTK-FM reacted to renewed calls for Mr Severin's resignation by again asserting that the station would not be firing him.
Mr Severin himself addressed the controversy following his initial comments. "To anyone who may have been offended by misunderstanding or misconstruing my remarks, I want you to know that I regret that. This is never my intention," he said.
He also offered what the Boston Globe's Scot Lehigh has termed "a classic non-apology apology". "I certainly regret any discomfort that may have been caused by the misunderstanding of my remarks," Mr Severin said.
For now it looks as though Mr Severin will ride out the controversy.
According to CAIR, the comments on WTTK-FM come in the context of a sharp increase in anti-Muslim rhetoric in the US since four US contract workers were brutally killed in Fallujah, Iraq, last month.
Recent attacks on Muslims in the US include a shooting at a mosque in Texas, as well as arson attacks on Muslim businesses and e-mailed threats to Islamic centres.
In a report being released today, CAIR says that hate crimes against Muslims in the US have more than doubled in the last year. According to the report, entitled Unpatriotic Acts: on the status of Muslim civil rights in the United States, the state of California is the worst offender, with the most reported incidents of hate crimes against Muslims.