Update: Whole Foods, via its Twitter feed, claims that the email in question was sent by one of its twelve operation regions, that the promotion is continuing nationwide and that the email in question is being “addressed and corrected.”

Apparently, Whole Foods has decided that it can make more money catering to anti-Muslim extremists than it can catering to American Muslims and supporters of religious liberty.

Last month, in what seemed like a fairly straight-forward business move for a large grocery chain, Whole Foods announced a promotion of a line of Halal products for Ramadan.

Unsurprisingly, when the anti-Muslim blogosphere caught whiff of this, they started throwing a fit, calling Whole Foods “jihadist” and “anti-Israel” for daring to sell Halal food to Muslim customers.

And the company listened. According to the Houston Press, an internal email was sent to stores around the country saying “It is probably best that we don’t specifically call out or ‘promote’ Ramadan … We should not highlight Ramadan in signage in our stores as that could be considered ‘Celebrating or promoting’ Ramadan.”

Whole Foods is a private company and can advertise its products however it wants. But it’s disturbing that the Internet protests of a really fringe group were enough to prompt the company to bail out of an entirely innocuous seasonal marketing campaign.

The anti-Muslim Right’s apparently successful Whole Foods gambit comes straight out of the “Invent the danger of ‘creeping Sharia” section of PFAW’s Right-Wing Playbook on Anti-Muslim Extremism.

In case you missed it, here’s what New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie had to say about Sharia scare tactics — in a different context — at a press conference last week: