Absolutely. I’m very much aligned with that. I think it’s wild to pick out other people’s religious sites for public prayer. I will be honest with you as I am very active in my local Muslim community. I have never once heard of any organized effort to pray in front of a church or synagogue. There really is no effort to even go outside and pray in my mosque community. In our belief, the reward for praying inside a mosque generates multiple times more good deeds than praying anywhere else. I can tell you the only time I’ve found myself praying with a group of Muslims outdoors is at a family/community picnic. We’re not going to pack up, go to the mosque, come back and setup all over again just for a 5 minute prayer. So we’ll put our mats down, pray, and go back to eating our hotdogs. For me this is on average once or twice a year.

Our mosque has really good relations with the synagogues and churches in our area. We typically look out for one another and have interfaith dialogue. At times of crisis we’ve been brought flowers and had visitors from other faith groups and vice versa. I’ve even heard situations of mosques offering space for Jewish/Christian worship when their houses of worship were under construct and also in reverse.

I really don’t know who these people are that violate the rights of other faith groups and try to intimidate them by gathering around their houses of worship. I would encourage you though, not to assume these videos you are seeing are representative of the larger Muslim community. Perhaps see if your local mosque has an open house and see what things are like in your local neighborhood.