William Boykin is a board member of the Oak Initiative and the executive vice president of the Family Research Council. He was formerly the United States Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
Boykin asserts that “[Islam] should not be protected under the First Amendment,” that there should be “no mosques in America,” that Islam is a “totalitarian way of life,” and that there can be no interfaith dialogue or cooperation between Muslims and Christians.
In 2003, President Bush rebuked Boykin for his anti-Muslim stance. Writing in the New York Times on October 20, 2003, Brian Knowlton reported, “Boykin had said, among other things, that Muslims worship an ‘idol,’ not a ‘real God,’ and that America’s enemy in the fight with Islamic extremism was ‘a guy called Satan.’”
Mayor Richard Meehan of Ocean City, Md., ignored requests to reconsider inviting Boykin to speak at the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast on January 26, 2012. After advocacy and veteran groups raised similar concerns about a scheduled Boykin speech at West Point, the general withdrew from the event.
In June 2012, Boykin claimed Dearborn, Michigan is “almost one hundred percent Muslim and operating under sharia law now.”
In 2013, Boykin warned, “If you are tied to the mainstream media you will never know anything about the true nature of Islam.”
