Bob Siegel has uploaded yesterday’s hour long show to his ‘Radio Archives‘ section. To access the show you can listen on this page. Bob Siegel comments:

Mayor John B. O’Reilly of Dearborn, Michigan came on the radio program, along with Christian Apologist, David Wood, one of four Christians arrested while sharing the gospel with Muslims. They each offered contrasting interpretations of these events that are causing controversy all over the internet. This interview is rare and stimulating for two reasons:

1) It aired without commercial interruptions, non stop for about 45 minutes.

2) Both men talked respectfully and neither cut off the other. There was no cross talk. As a result, the audience is left with an excellent conversation with which to make up their own minds about the facts.

If you listen to the show on Mr. Siegel’s website, the actual interview starts about at about 12:55 in his recording. It turns out my recording from yesterday only missed a few minutes of the interview. Once the show has buffered on his site you can skip ahead to hear the interview. You can also download the MP3 directly

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(right-click, hit ‘Save Link As…’).

David Wood has posted his reflections of the show on his blog Answering Muslims. He asks some questions which bear repeating:

(1) The mayor continues to refer to “free speech zones.” But as Nabeel pointed out, in the very cases the mayor appeals to, the courts ruled that people are free to walk around holding discussions (as we were doing). Does the mayor have a court case where a court ruled that people are not allowed to hold a dialogue in public?

(2) The mayor acknowledges that security last year was poorly trained, and that additional training was needed for this year. But the point of our video last year was that security was harassing Christians and attacking us for asking a question at a booth. If the mayor admits that they behaved poorly due to insufficient training, why demonize us for making this public? The fact is that the additional training was required specifically because we drew attention to injustice. Shouldn’t the mayor be thanking us for making the festival a better, safer place?

(3) The mayor says that the sidewalk and street are no longer public sites during the Arab Festival. Is a site no longer a public site, even if it’s a public event on public property?

(4) If the mayor really thinks that people can’t have an open, honest discussion on camera, why does he keep going on television and radio programs?

(5) Why does the mayor think that Muslims are incapable of having a discussion when cameras are involved? Why do Dearborn leaders think that having a public discussion with Muslims is equivalent to inciting a riot? It seems that the mayor and the police department have a lower view of Muslims than we do. We’ve had open dialogues and debates with Muslims in numerous places, and we’ve never had a problem. We believe that Muslims are quite capable of public dialogue, even on camera. But as soon as we get to Dearborn, we find police intervening to prevent a riot as soon as dialogue starts. Do they believe that Muslims, by nature, will respond violently when someone answers their questions? Isn’t this an insult to Muslims?

(6) If the problem is that we were supposedly blocking a tent entrance, why not arrest the Muslims who approached us? (We don’t advocate arresting people for having discussions, but given the mayor’s comments about the presence of a crowd violating festival rules, this question obviously arises.) We were on our way out of the festival so that Nabeel could eat his falafel. If people form a crowd around us, and a crowd is illegal, shouldn’t the crowd have been arrested, rather than the people who were peacefully responding to questions and recording the dialogue? Or was there a fear that arresting these Muslims (who, according to Dearborn leaders, are too violent for dialogue and prone to riot) would lead to a riot, and that the peaceful Christians should instead be targeted (to the cheers of Muslims)?

(7) If it’s illegal to draw a crowd, and celebrities draw crowds, is it illegal for celebrities to attend the Dearborn Arab Festival? Would Rima Fakih be arrested if she showed up? Would she be stripped down to a tank-top and tossed in a jail cell, the way Negeen was?

(8) The mayor says that the letter he wrote was nothing more than his personal opinion. Does the mayor believe that it is permissible for the leader of a city to favor one side and spread bias against the other when a court case is pending? Is it even possible to get an unbiased jury in Dearborn now?

(9) In his final remarks, the mayor says that there were no problems until Acts 17 showed up. But we know that rights were routinely being violated last year. Christians were being harassed. Double standards have been in place for years. We’re just the ones who catch these things on tape and expose what’s going on in Dearborn. Does the mayor think that harassing Christians isn’t a problem, and that it only becomes a problem when the harassment is exposed by Acts 17 and the city starts receiving complaints?