In an August 26 Washington Times op-ed, Frank Gaffney wrote that protesters at a recent rally against the planned Islamic community center in Manhattan “had come together ... in informed opposition to the impetus behind that mosque: Shariah.” Gaffney added: “In fact, throughout the crowd could be seen signs with just the word 'Shariah' lettered in dripping, blood-red ink.”

As Media Matters has noted, recent rallies in protest of Park51 have been full of right-wing hate, featuring signs laden with anti-Muslim bigotry. Gaffney himself has promoted such anti-Muslim rhetoric.

From Gaffney's op-ed:

To be sure, the rally held two blocks from the World Trade Center was not a decisive defeat of the enemy like that dealt by the storied British “Desert Rats” to Hitler's Afrika Korps in November 1942. But there was something pivotal about the fact that throngs of ordinary Americans - many of them family or friends of those who died on Sept. 11, 2001 - had come together to stand for hours in an intermittent rain not just to contest the construction of a mega-mosque at a wholly inappropriate location, but in informed opposition to the impetus behind that mosque: Shariah.

In fact, throughout the crowd could be seen signs with just the word “Shariah” lettered in dripping, blood-red ink. The prospect that the tide is beginning now to turn in our era's war for the Free World can be found in those signs. They bespeak a recognition of the danger posed by the brutally repressive, totalitarian and anti-constitutional program that is espoused by the authorities of Islam. Shariah, the law of Saudi Arabia and Iran, is what Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the prime mover behind the Ground Zero Mosque, says he wants to “bring to America.”