During last week’s community outreach forum in Manchester, Tennessee, hundreds of activists protested outside and a raucous indoor crowd heckled a U.S. attorney, an FBI agent and advocates who spoke about American Muslims and hate crimes.
In one video, several members of the audience can be heard cheering at the mention of a mosque burning in Columbia, Tennessee, to which the speaker, rightfully, responds, “Shame on you.” (That portion can be seen and heard at the 1:30:00 mark in the full video below).
The event, “Public Discourse in a Diverse Society,” was intended to address discrimination against Muslims and drew Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller to the town of about 10,000. Despite the outbursts and heckling, Spencer and Geller maintained that the protesters were there in peace and that any claims to the contrary were manufactured by the “mainstream media.”
“The claim that someone in the crowd was ‘afraid’ of the other audience members, as if these patriots who came out to defend the freedom of speech were some gang of menacing thugs, bent on silencing their foes by force, was utterly preposterous,” Spencer argued.
Below is the full community forum meeting.