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?
Geert Wilders included. So says anti-mosque activist, Pamella Geller. Yet the media is silent. Did you hear anything? I did not. Who are the bums working for?
UPDATE (Sept. 13): I did not read Geert’s speech. Larry Auster contends that in it, “Wilders Was Not Wilders.” Auster postulates that the dictates of the Geller-Spencer duo account for Wilders’ weak, soft message. Some time ago, I delineated clearly how America’s incoherent anti-Islamization contingent differs from the fierce and focused Wilders.
In “Dhimmis At Ground Zero?”, I pointed out that by requesting kindness and consideration from those they regard as conquistadors, these anti-mosque activists run the risk of sounding like dhimmis.
“Such pleas,” I pointed out, “remind me of the victim impact statement so popular in our Courts. How humiliating and futile is it to plead for contrition from sadists who’ve amply proved they are incapable of such sentiment, and derive sadistic pleasure from watching their victims squirm.”
Nor am I convinced that the Washington Post was wrong when it implied that, by prancing around with Pamella, Spencer, a serious scholar of Islam, was undermining his well-established bona fides.
Moreover, this is the first time to my knowledge that Wilders has ever done this. In his career as an internationally known Islam opponent over the last six years, he has adopted consecutively harder-line positions on Islam, never reverting to an earlier, weaker position once he had taken a stronger position. Among Wilders’s many admirable traits is his remarkable consistency. So I found his speech on Saturday not only disappointing, but unsettling.
Pamela Geller, a passionate activist, deserves credit for having driven the mosque issue. But the way she has driven the mosque issue may well have had the effect of weakening the anti-Islamization cause, by reducing the meaning of anti-Islamization to “no mosque at Ground Zero.”
Geert Wilders included. So says anti-mosque activist, Pamella Geller. Yet the media is silent. Did you hear anything? I did not. Who are the bums working for?
UPDATE (Sept. 13): I did not read Geert’s speech. Larry Auster contends that in it, “Wilders Was Not Wilders.” Auster postulates that the dictates of the Geller-Spencer duo account for Wilders’ weak, soft message. Some time ago, I delineated clearly how America’s incoherent anti-Islamization contingent differs from the fierce and focused Wilders.
In “Dhimmis At Ground Zero?”, I pointed out that by requesting kindness and consideration from those they regard as conquistadors, these anti-mosque activists run the risk of sounding like dhimmis.
“Such pleas,” I pointed out, “remind me of the victim impact statement so popular in our Courts. How humiliating and futile is it to plead for contrition from sadists who’ve amply proved they are incapable of such sentiment, and derive sadistic pleasure from watching their victims squirm.”
Nor am I convinced that the Washington Post was wrong when it implied that, by prancing around with Pamella, Spencer, a serious scholar of Islam, was undermining his well-established bona fides.
Moreover, this is the first time to my knowledge that Wilders has ever done this. In his career as an internationally known Islam opponent over the last six years, he has adopted consecutively harder-line positions on Islam, never reverting to an earlier, weaker position once he had taken a stronger position. Among Wilders’s many admirable traits is his remarkable consistency. So I found his speech on Saturday not only disappointing, but unsettling.
Pamela Geller, a passionate activist, deserves credit for having driven the mosque issue. But the way she has driven the mosque issue may well have had the effect of weakening the anti-Islamization cause, by reducing the meaning of anti-Islamization to “no mosque at Ground Zero.”
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?”
