The official Right in this country did not tell it like it is: Feisal Abdul Rauf, Chairman of the Cordoba Initiative, and the man behind the mosque in lower Manhattan, was picked by the Bush administration to serve as the American emissary to Muslim countries. Did you know this? I was under the impression that the Imam was B. Hussein’s pick.
I find nothing outrageous about the Imam’s opinion, also mine, that America’s adventurous foreign policy is a necessary condition for Muslim aggression. But that’s not the entire story. Rauff would never admit that our meddling abroad is far from a sufficient condition for Muslim aggression.
However, when Abdul Rauf, in this clip, soothingly says that Islam and America are organically bound, and then proceeds to describe the American Founding Fathers, without mentioning their Christian background and beliefs, as non-parochial men of faith—then I get the creeps.
Rauf sees the three faiths as enmeshed and America’s history as intertwined with Islam and Muslims. At least so he says. Taqiyya, anyone?
Before Governor Janet Brewer of Arizona there was Mayor Lou Barletta of Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Born and bred. In 2007, I wrote about this much-loved local leader, who has legitimately and faithfully represented his constituents—Republican and Democratic—in attempting to salvage a community ravaged by unchecked immigration.
Unwilling to wait for Washington, Mayor Louis Barletta of Hazleton attempted to reclaim his town by passing local ordinances to crack down on those who employ or rent to illegals. Barletta’s Illegal Immigration Relief Act was found to conflict with the unenforced Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, and, therefore, to be in violation of the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. This, even though the Supreme Court itself has conceded that not every ‘state enactment …which deals with aliens is a regulation of immigration.’
As I said at the time, I am not thrilled that to defend his town a mayor has been forced to circumscribe renting and hiring. Still less am I enamored of the ACLU and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund usurping a beloved Hazleton home boy—in the past, Barletta has won both Republican and Democratic nominations overwhelmingly.
Having become aliens in their hometown, Hazleton residents imagined that the Constitution allowed them a measure of autonomy over how they lived their lives. How wrong they were.
Provocative to say the least: Dr. Fleming (to mimic the “Dr. Johnson” sobriquet) of Chronicles magazine makes mincemeatof the popular argument that the Ground Zero Mosque monsters cannot be “denied a permit because that would infringe their religious freedom.”
I, of course, argued from private property rights, recommending immigration policies as the broader remedy to an incompatible culture. Construction boycotts would work as a local solution.
“Religious freedom,” writes Dr. Fleming, “is a gift of a society or commonwealth, not a natural right. This is partly because religion is not faith–what one believes or feels–but an organized public action. Thus the public or republic has the right and duty to protect itself from alien or malignant cults. In a diverse Christian society, naturally, the various churches have had to learn to tolerate each other, though in practice toleration is generally a sign of indifference. Church becomes that thing you do or don’t do on one day a week. It is like the beautiful jewel you take out of the box every once in a while to admire and feel good about yourself for owning. But religion is more like a wedding ring, a visible symbol of an enduring commitment.”
“The idea of Christians according religious freedom to Muslims who define themselves in part by their hatred of Christianity and who have oppressed Christians whenever they have had the power to do so, is preposterous. It is worse than preposterous, because the point of the exercise is not to liberate Muslims but to enslave Christians.”
“The Hard Left—whether Marxists, Libertarians, or Multi-Culturalists—take their stand on freedom of religion, while the Soft Left (otherwise known as Conservatives) say that while there is a freedom of religion, it does not quite extend to Satanists or Muslims wanting to build a mosque at Ground Zero, though a mosque anywhere else is just fine and dandy.”
Nothing if not original is our friend at Chronicles.
UPDATE I (Sept. 8): “International Burn a Koran Day” is set to take place in a decidedly provincial setting in Florida, America. It would be a tourist curiosity if not for the media having so hyped up Terry Loony Tunes Jones’ act. Ron Paul has it right:
UPDATE II (Sept. 19):Pat Buchanan is even righter that Ron:
“This episode reveals the gulf between us and the Islamic world. Despite all our talk of universal values, tens of millions of Muslims, in countries not only hostile but friendly, believe that a sacrilege against their faith, like the burning of theQuran by a single American oddball, justifies the killing of Americans. What kind of compatibility can there be between us?
What do we have in common with people who believe that evangelism by other faiths in their societies merits the death penalty, as do conversions to Christianity, while promiscuity and adultery justify stonings, lashings and beheadings.
And what does it say about our ability to fight and win a ‘long war’ in the Islamic world if our war effort can be crippled by a solitary pastor with 50 families in his church who decides to have a book burning?”
UPDATE III:Julia Goren wants to know, “Why is there so much more tolerance of extremism in the name of tyranny than in the name of liberty? Why is tyranny more politically correct than liberty?”
Germany has a Geert Wilders, only more outspoken. His name is Thilo Sarrazin, and he is a board member of Germany’s central bank. His new book, Germany Does Itself In, is flying off the shelves. Via Yahoo News:
“In the book, Sarrazin says Europe’s top economy is being undermined, overwhelmed and made ‘more stupid’ by poorly educated, fast-breeding, badly integrated and unproductive Muslim immigrants and their offspring.
‘If I want to hear the muezzin’s call to prayer, then I’ll go to the Orient,’ he says, saying that allowing in millions of ‘guest workers’ in the 1960s and 1970s was a ‘gigantic error.’
He also says that Turkish and Kurdish ‘clans’ have a ‘long tradition of inbreeding,’ leading to higher rates of birth defects, and ponders whether this might be one reason for immigrants’ poor school performance, Spiegel said.
This and his comment to a newspaper that ‘all Jews share a certain gene’, critics say, is akin to the kind of pseudo-science used by the Nazis.”
[SNIP]
Yes, Sarrazin must be a racist. Germany must be racist, because, as we all know—and having been so indoctrinated—people are all the same. Give them sufficient nutrition and democracy, and differences dissolve. You may note and record difference between individuals, but don’t dare to examine aggregates. Hey, isn’t it the job of science to draw conclusions based on a representative sample of a group? Don’t this man’s observations comport with the kind of reality science might affirm? Should we perhpas ban science so as to spare ourselves from reality?
UPDATE (Sept. 7):CNSNews.com: “As of Sunday, Sept. 5, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had a backlog of fugitive illegal aliens of 506,232 people. …
The fugitive illegal aliens are individuals who were apprehended by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for being in the United States illegally and then were released ahead of their court proceedings and deemed fugitive when they failed to appear in court.”
