Marilyn Penn, blogging at Political Mavens, had this great piece last week:

When it comes to provocateurs who are anti-American, the bastions of liberalism march in lockstep to defend whatever freedom is at stake.  Refusing to say the pledge of allegiance?  Freedom of speech.  Nazi march through a community of survivors?  Same and warum nicht? Building a mosque at Ground Zero?  Freedom of religion.  Defacing Christian or Jewish symbols in artwork?  Art trumps religion so long as it’s not Danish cartoons or a South Park show lampooning Mohammed.  Publishing the Pentagon Papers or Wiki-Leaks?  Freedom of the press.  Strangely, when the provocation comes from the right in the person of Terry Jones, now labeled the Koran-burning pastor, the civil liberties guardians are silent.  Where is Michael Bloomberg to declaim that if we don’t continue in our tradition of free expression, the terrorists will have won?  Where are the cadre of celebrities usually trotted out to protest censorship of any kind?  We know how many times Americans have burned flags and draft cards and used patriotic symbols as objects of degradation – all part of our unrivalled liberty.  What, besides kowardice, makes the Koran eligible for exception from the rule?

The New York Times, publisher of both the Pentagon Papers and Assange’s Wiki-Leaks, refused to print even one of the Danish cartoons though it’s a newspaper that goes out of its way to illustrate its articles in dramatic and confrontational ways.  The Sunday Times of April 3rd features an oversized photo of Palestinians attending the funeral of three Hamas terrorists;  the size of the image would be appropriate for the funeral of an assassinated head of state.  There is no commensurate photo for the 19 non-Muslim people killed and the 81 injured in Afghanistan in the brutal murders of UN workers ordered as retaliation for the Koran burning.  The headline calls these murders deadly protests as if they were the unintended consequence of an unruly mob rather than the deliberate acts of violence which also extended to torching a girl’s high school in a part of the world that insists on keeping its women veiled and uneducated.

One need not sympathize with Terry Jones who certainly intended that his act create a firestorm far beyond the limited book-burning.  Whether from the left or the right, people who burn books are not examples of America’s most rational voices of objection – we can do better than that and should.  We should however, also be mindful of the hypocrisy in our civil libertarians when they ignore the bill of rights they summon to justify the same behavior  from their own political spectrum.  Let’s not pretend that jihadi murder requires incitement to be turned against us.  The press in particular should recall that Daniel Pearl was decapitated on camera to the jubilation of the Muslim world for no reason other than his being an American Jewish journalist.  For radical Islam, provocation requires nothing more than our existence.

 

Diana West has written a great piece on the silence of the mainstream media regarding the terrible ordeal that CBS News’ Lara Logan recently suffered at the hands of an Egyptian mob.

For those who don’t know the story (which might not be so far-fetched, considering the lack of reporting and outrage), ten days ago, Lara Logan, a CBS News correspondent, was sexually assaulted by a mob screaming “Jew, Jew!” in Egypt’s Tahrir Square. She was flown out of Cairo by a network-chartered jet hours later and the story was quelled.

When the story finally broke several days later, I could understand why it was kept quiet. After all, the ordeal was bad enough for Logan, and if it were possible to keep it out of the news and avert the need for her to relive it through everyone else’s eyes and ears, all the better.

But, once the story did break, there was no longer any excuse to cover up details—especially details that would not inflict additional hardship on her, and especially details that are relevant to the story!

The detail in particular that all the media has been silent about, until the NY Post finally came out with it was the fact that the animals who were assaulting her were shouting “Jew! Jew!” as they did it.

Political columnist and author Diana West, shining the spotlight on the guilty-as-usual mainstream media, gave a great analogy to show the hypocrisy of the MSM, and had a few more poignant points on the subject:

Such a news blackout is hard to imagine if, for example, a star correspondent had been similarly violated by a mob of tea party-goers at, say, a massive Glenn Beck rally — and particularly if other correspondents had previously suffered unprecedented assaults and threats from the same crowd. A keening outcry would have arisen from the heart of the MSM (mainstream media) against the mob, accompanied by a natural zeal to investigate cultural or other reasons for the brutality. Not excuses. And not disinterest.

But in this singular Logan case we’ve seen both. First, only after news queries indicated the story was breaking did CBS on Tuesday release a brief rap sheet on the Friday crime. We were told of Logan’s accidental separation from her crew in the crowd. The prolonged assault by over 200 people “whipped into a frenzy.” The rescue by a group of women and 20 soldiers. What CBS didn’t mention — what was later attributed to an unnamed network source — was that as the thugs assaulted the 39-year-old journalist and mother of two, they shouted, “Jew! Jew!”

This essential piece of the story, this clue to the hysterical, obsessive anti-Semitism of the Islamic world including Egypt, was broken by the New York Post. It has sparked little comment, which in itself is worth comment. Imagine, again, if a tea party mob were implicated in such an assault, and, as if in answer to fervent leftist fantasy, it came out that 200 Constitution-loving thugs had been yelling racial slurs. The MSM would directly attribute it the fact that George Washington owned slaves.

But Islam, even with its Koranically enjoined anti-Semitism and misogyny, isn’t considered a factor here. Islam might as well not exist. Islamic misogyny might as well not exist. Islamic anti-Semitism might as well not exist. But imagine further if the foundational documents of the tea party movement, its official leaders and heroes, were steeped in equivalent hatred and misogyny. There would be no instinctive reaction in the MSM to universalize the attack and strip away all possible cultural or (considering those shouts of “Jew! Jew!” in the Logan case) religious context.

But that’s exactly what happened here. It took a tweet from a movie critic even to broach the misogyny topic in the MSM when Roger Ebert wrote, “The attack on Lara Logan brings Middle East attitudes toward women into sad focus.” (Given that Israel is in the otherwise Islamically dominated “Middle East,” Ebert is employing the quasi-accepted euphemism for Muslim.) Those few reports that even discuss the anti-Semitic angle do so without comment, or let it go slack, as when Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, noting the “undertones of pogromist anti-Semitism,” only concluded that “not everyone in Tahrir Square that night had democracy on their mind.” (The light might have dawnethed more brightly had the MSM actually reported on the widespread anti-Semitic iconography visible in the demonstrations, as amply archived by John Rosenthal at Pajamas Media.)

Missing is any acknowledgement of the fact — the overwhelming, highly upsetting but nonetheless unavoidable fact — that Islam’s teachings on women and particularly Jews are literally hateful. And that’s the Koranic truth, as copiously expressed by the late Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, Grand Imam of Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, approximately Sunni Islam’s “pope.” As he put it, and with plenty of canonical support: Jews “are the enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs.”

Rather than consider the sources of violent animus that appear to have been manifested in the assault on Logan, who, by the way, is not a Jew, the MSM let it all go. The crowd was “whipped into a frenzy” just as CBS said. But was the frenzy cultural? Religious? Don’t ask, and certainly don’t tell.

That would spoil the story.

The BBC, usually known for its notoriously biased programming against Israel, does occasionally run a rare honest piece deserving of praise. Recently, it did just that, with a program highlighting the fact that school children in Britain are being taught anti-Semitic and homophobic propaganda in the form of actual Saudi curriculum textbooks—delivered straight from the Saudi Ministry of Education.

The BBC program, called “Panorama”, found more than 40 Saudi-run schools and clubs in Britain teaching Muslim children aged 6 and over some of the following interesting lessons:

* how the hands and feet of thieves should be chopped off.

* children are asked in one lesson to list the “reprehensible” qualities of Jews.

* Jews are “cursed by God” and are compared to monkeys and pigs.

* how the punishment for gay sex is death, including further discussion of whether it should be carried out by stoning, burning with fire or throwing the homosexual off of a cliff.

* How non-believers (of Islam) are punished with “hellfire” after death.

* Zionists seek to establish world domination by sowing global conflicts.

You can watch the program in two parts here:

Emboldened by the world’s liberals’ brainless habit of swallowing whole every cockamamie lie concocted by the Palestinians even as they are often brazenly caught in the act (e.g., staging fake funerals), the Palestinian Authority has really upped the ante now with the mother of all lies: that the Western Wall Was ‘not Jewish’ until the 16th century!

Arutz 7 reports:

The Palestinian Authority’s rewriting of the Bible has reached a new peak – or low – with a “scientific study” claiming that Jews did not begin to claim a connection to the Western Wall (Kotel) until 500 years ago.

The Western Wall, also known in pre-State times as the “Wailing Wall,” is the outer wall of the Second Temple compound, the only remaining structure from the compound,  and has been a symbol of the deepest connection between most of the Jewish world, both religious and secular, and Judaism for two  thousand years following the destruction of the Second Temple on the 9th of the Jewish month of Av  in 70 C.E. From that date until the present, Jews came to mourn at the Wall, including the Spanish Jewish poet and philosopher Yehudah Halevi who is believed to have been killed while praying there in 1141.

However, “Jews did not worship at the Wailing Wall at any time until the Balfour Declaration of 1917,” according to a report on the “study” posted by the PA Undersecretary of the Ministry of Information D. Mutawakkil Taha.

Writing on the official PA website, he added that the report quotes the “Jewish Encyclopedia, published in 1917” that “the Western Wall became part of the Jewish religious tradition around the year 1520, as a result of Jewish immigration from Spain, after the Ottoman conquest the year 1517… This was not part of the wall of the so-called Jewish Temple.”

Jews do not claim the Wall is part of the Temple building, but of the compound surrounding it..

The Ministry of Information also stated that a basis for the study’s denial of an ancient Jewish connection to the Western Wall is a Reform Judaism leader’s comment that “there is no sanctity to the Western Wall in Judaism.”

…

The Temple Mount site itself is the holiest site in Judaism, but the Arab world the past several years has conducted a campaign the past several years to deny Biblical accounts of the Jewish First and Second Temples.

The campaign also has included rewriting interpretations of the Bible, claiming that the “Binding of Isaac” actually was the “binding of Ishmael,” the forefather Abraham’s first son by the maidservant of his wife Sarah, who later gave birth to Isaac.

Muslim clerics, despite protests by Israeli archaeologists, also have removedtons of debris from the Temple Mount area as part of an effort to eliminate any discoveries of remnants of the First and Second Temples.

Bill O’Reilly made an appearance on The View today and drove the washed-up, has-been Whoopi Goldberg and Joy “Who?” Behar off the set, with them ranting and sputtering the whole way out. (If only those two nincompoops didn’t bother coming back, it would have vastly improved the show, I’m sure.) At least Barbara Walters pointed out the stupidity of her colleagues to the raucous audience immediately afterwards, most of whom must have thought they came to see The View and ended up at Jerry Springer.

Here’s a video clip of the excitement:

Mark Steyn has written a piece on the West’s growing habit of nauseatingly kowtowing to Islam and walking on eggshells whenever anything Islamic comes into the picture, to the point of employing blatant and ridiculous double standards. This is Steyn truly at his best!

He writes:

While I’ve been talking about free speech in Copenhagen, several free speech issues arose in North America. I was asked about them both at the Sappho Award event and in various interviews, so here’s a few thoughts for what they’re worth:

Too many people in the free world have internalized Islam’s view of them. A couple of years ago, I visited Guantanamo and subsequently wrote that, if I had to summon up Gitmo in a single image, it would be the brand-new copy of the Koran in each cell: To reassure incoming prisoners that the filthy infidels haven’t touched the sacred book with their unclean hands, the Korans are hung from the walls in pristine, sterilized surgical masks. It’s one thing for Muslims to regard infidels as unclean, but it’s hard to see why it’s in the interests of us infidels to string along with it and thereby validate their bigotry. What does that degree of prostration before their prejudices tell them about us? It’s a problem that Muslims think we’re unclean. It’s a far worse problem that we go along with it.

Take this no-name pastor from an obscure church who was threatening to burn the Koran. He didn’t burn any buildings or women and children. He didn’t even burn a book. He hadn’t actually laid a finger on a Koran, and yet the mere suggestion that he might do so prompted the president of the United States to denounce him, and the secretary of state, and the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, various G7 leaders, and golly, even Angelina Jolie. President Obama has never said a word about honor killings of Muslim women. Secretary Clinton has never said a word about female genital mutilation. General Petraeus has never said a word about the rampant buggery of pre-pubescent boys by Pushtun men in Kandahar. But let an obscure man in Florida so much as raise the possibility that he might disrespect a book – an inanimate object – and the most powerful figures in the Western world feel they have to weigh in.

Aside from all that, this obscure church’s website has been shut down, its insurance policy has been canceled, its mortgage has been called in by its bankers. Why? As Diana West wrote, why was it necessary or even seemly to make this pastor a non-person? Another one of Obama’s famous “teaching moments”? In this case teaching us that Islamic law now applies to all? Only a couple of weeks ago, the president, at his most condescendingly ineffectual, presumed to lecture his moronic subjects about the First Amendment rights of Imam Rauf. Where’s the condescending lecture on Pastor Jones’ First Amendment rights?

When someone destroys a Bible, U.S. government officials don’t line up to attack him. President Obama bowed lower than a fawning maitre d’ before the King of Saudi Arabia, a man whose regime destroys Bibles as a matter of state policy, and a man whose depraved religious police forces schoolgirls fleeing from a burning building back into the flames to die because they’d committed the sin of trying to escape without wearing their head scarves. If you show a representation of Mohammed, European commissioners and foreign ministers line up to denounce you. If you show a representation of Jesus Christ immersed in your own urine, you get a government grant for producing a widely admired work of art. Likewise, if you write a play about Jesus having gay sex with Judas Iscariot.

So just to clarify the ground rules, if you insult Christ, the media report the issue as freedom of expression: A healthy society has to have bold, brave, transgressive artists willing to question and challenge our assumptions, etc. But, if it’s Mohammed, the issue is no longer freedom of expression but the need for “respect” and “sensitivity” toward Islam, and all those bold brave transgressive artists don’t have a thing to say about it.

Maybe Pastor Jones doesn’t have any First Amendment rights. Musing on Koran burning, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer argued:

[Oliver Wendell] Holmes said it doesn’t mean you can shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater… Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the being trampled to death?

This is a particularly obtuse remark even by the standards of contemporary American jurists. As I’ve said before, the fire-in-a-crowded-theater shtick is the first refuge of the brain-dead. But it’s worth noting the repellent modification Justice Breyer makes to Holmes’ argument: If someone shouts fire in a gaslit Broadway theatre of 1893, people will panic. By definition, panic is an involuntary reaction. If someone threatens to burn a Koran, belligerent Muslims do not panic – they bully, they intimidate, they threaten, they burn and they kill. Those are conscious acts, at least if you take the view that Muslims are as fully human as the rest of us and therefore responsible for their choices. As my colleague Jonah Goldberg points out, Justice Breyer’s remarks seem to assume that Muslims are not fully human.

More importantly, the logic of Breyer’s halfwit intervention is to incentivize violence, and undermine law itself. What he seems to be telling the world is that Americans’ constitutional rights will bend to intimidation. If Koran-burning rates a First Amendment exemption because Muslims are willing to kill over it, maybe Catholics should threaten to kill over the next gay-Jesus play, and Broadway could have its First Amendment rights reined in. Maybe the next time Janeane Garafolo goes on MSNBC and calls Obama’s opponents racists, the Tea Partiers should rampage around town and NBC’s free-speech rights would be withdrawn.

Meanwhile, in smaller ways, Islamic intimidation continues. One reason why I am skeptical that the Internet will prove the great beacon of liberty on our darkening planet is because most of the anonymous entities that make it happen are run by people marinated in jelly-spined political correctness. In Canada, an ISP called Bluehost knocked Marginalized Action Dinosaur off the air in response to a complaint by Asad Raza, a laughably litigious doctor in Brampton, Ontario. Had his name been Gordy McHoser, I doubt even the nancy boys at Bluehost would have given him the time of day. A similar fate briefly befell our old pal the Binksmeister at FreeMarkSteyn.com: In other words, a website set up to protest Islamic legal jihad was shut down by the same phenomenon. In America, The New York Times has already proposed giving “some government commission” control over Google’s search algorithm; the City of Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence was adopted and the Constitution signed, is now so removed from the spirit of the First Amendment that it’s demanding bloggers pay a $300 “privilege” license for expressing their opinions online. The statists grow ever more comfortable in discussing openly the government management of your computer. But, even if they don’t formally take it over, look at the people who run publishing houses, movie studios, schools and universities, and ask yourself whether you really want to bet the future on the commitment to free speech of those who run ISPs. SteynOnline, for example, is already banned by the Internet gatekeepers from the computers at both Marriott Hotels and Toronto Airport.

But forget about notorious rightwing hatemongers like me. Look at how liberal progressives protect their own. Do you remember a lady called Molly Norris? She’s the dopey Seattle cartoonist who cooked up “Everybody Draws Mohammed” Day, and then, when she realized what she’d stumbled into, tried to back out of it. I regard Miss Norris as (to rewrite Stalin) a useless idiot, and she wrote to Mark’s Mailbox to object. I stand by what I wrote then, especially the bit about her crappy peace-sign T-shirt. Now The Seattle Weekly informs us:

You may have noticed that Molly Norris’ comic is not in the paper this week. That’s because there is no more Molly.

On the advice of the FBI, she’s been forced to go into hiding. If you want to measure the decline in western civilization’s sense of self-preservation, go back to Valentine’s Day 1989, get out the Fleet Street reports on the Salman Rushdie fatwa, and read the outrage of his fellow London literati at what was being done to one of the mainstays of the Hampstead dinner-party circuit. Then compare it with the feeble passivity of Molly Norris’ own colleagues at an American cartoonist being forced to abandon her life: “There is no more Molly”? That’s all the gutless pussies of The Seattle Weekly can say? As James Taranto notes in The Wall Street Journal, even much sought-after Ramadan-banquet constitutional scholar Barack Obama is remarkably silent:

Now Molly Norris, an American citizen, is forced into hiding because she exercised her right to free speech. Will President Obama say a word on her behalf? Does he believe in the First Amendment for anyone other than Muslims?

Who knows? Given his highly selective enthusiasms, you can hardly blame a third of Americans for figuring their president must be Muslim. In a way, that’s the least pathetic explanation: The alternative is that he’s just a craven squish. Which is odd considering he is, supposedly, the most powerful man in the world.

Listen to what President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, The Seattle Weekly and Bluehost internet services are telling us about where we’re headed. As I said in America Alone, multiculturalism seems to operate to the same even-handedness as the old Cold War joke in which the American tells the Soviet guy that “in my country everyone is free to criticize the President”, and the Soviet guy replies, “Same here. In my country everyone is free to criticize your President.” Under one-way multiculturalism, the Muslim world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west’s inheritance, and, likewise, the western world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west’s inheritance. If one has to choose, on balance Islam’s loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than western liberals’ loathing of their own.

It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. Every time Muslims either commit violence or threaten it, we reward them by capitulating. Indeed, President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, and all the rest are now telling Islam, you don’t have to kill anyone, you don’t even have to threaten to kill anyone. We’ll be your enforcers. We’ll demand that the most footling and insignificant of our own citizens submit to the universal jurisdiction of Islam. So Obama and Breyer are now the “good cop” to the crazies’ “bad cop”. Ooh, no, you can’t say anything about Islam, because my friend here gets a little excitable, and you really don’t want to get him worked up. The same people who tell us “Islam is a religion of peace” then turn around and tell us you have to be quiet, you have to shut up because otherwise these guys will go bananas and kill a bunch of people.

While I was in Denmark, one of the usual Islamobozos lit up prematurely in a Copenhagen hotel. Not mine, I’m happy to say. He wound up burning only himself, but his targets were my comrades at the newspaper Jyllands-Posten. I wouldn’t want to upset Justice Breyer by yelling “Fire!” over a smoldering jihadist, but one day even these idiots will get lucky. I didn’t like the Danish Security Police presence at the Copenhagen conference, and I preferred being footloose and fancy-free when I was prowling the more menacing parts of Rosengard across the water in Malmö the following evening. No one should lose his name, his home, his life, his liberty because ideological thugs are too insecure to take a joke. But Molly Norris is merely the latest squishy liberal to learn that, when the chips are down, your fellow lefties won’t be there for you.

A tip of the ol’ homburg to my Dad for finding this gem.

James Taranto, in his WSJ Best of the Web Today column last week, commented on Mayor Bloomberg’s asinine comments regarding the Ground Zero Mosque:

Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, has an op-ed in today’s New York Post defending the Ground Zero mosque. Actually, the Post informs us, it’s an adaptation of “Bloomberg’s prepared remarks for his annual Ramadan celebration at Gracie Mansion yesterday.”

It is a low performance. Bloomberg panders to his audience by slandering the two-thirds or so of Americans who take offense at the idea of a fancy new mosque near the site of an Islamic supremacist atrocity:

Islam did not attack the World Trade Center–al Qaeda did. To implicate all of Islam for the actions of a few who twisted a great religion is unfair and un-American.

The substance of this statement is unremarkable: Obviously it is wrong to implicate all of Islam in the 9/11 attacks.

But the mayor employs scurrilous McCarthyite rhetoric in an attempt to inflame emotions and divert attention from a point that should be equally obvious: The Ground Zero mosque planners have implicated themselves by seeking to exploit the symbolism of the site, whatever their purpose is in doing so.

Taranto points out one obvious flaw in Bloomberg’s statement: that the mosque supporters have essentially inserted themselves into the controversy by the very fact that they deliberately chose the site of the mosque solely based on the symbolism of the site and the opportunity to exploit that symbolism. THAT is why we are targeting them, and NOT simply because they are Muslim.

Another entirely different flaw in Bloomberg’s statement that I have yet to see anyone pick up on is the fact that Bloomberg simply shifts the blame from “Islam” to “al Qaeda”.

Using Bloomberg’s own logic for defending “Islam” in that ridiculous statement, one could just as easily say that it wasn’t all of al Qaeda who attacked us on 9/11; it was only those 19 hijackers! So, if he wants to be so technical about over-generalizing, why is he careful not to attribute the attacks to “Islam” (in whose name they were carried out), but not similarly careful when  attributing them to al Qaeda (also in whose name they were carried out)?

Ultimately, if one truly wants to be “fair” about it, one should do the judging not by religion or organization, per se, but by affiliation. In other words, anyone who affiliates themselves with individuals who publicly support such terrorist attacks should be equally condemned. As George W. Bush succinctly stated: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” It’s that simple.

So, if those behind the Ground Zero Mosque have been known to be affiliated with terrorists or supporters of terrorists (as has been widely reported), then it doesn’t matter whether they are with “al Qaeda” or with “Islam” in general. They chose to be with the terrorists, and they don’t belong in this country, let alone at Ground Zero.

Last week, Obama came out with the outrageous statement, “Islam has always been part of America and that American Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to our country.”

Thankfully, this bizarre statement did not go unanswered in the media. The Washington Times jumped on it with the following great editorial (emphasis in the following is my own):

President Obama says Islam has always been part of America, which raises the question, does the president know something about American history that we don’t?

It has become customary for presidents to offer greetings to various religious communities on the occasion of their most holy days. Presidents Ford and Carter both issued Ramadan messages, as did Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush. The Ramadan greeting became intensely political during Mr. Bush’s tenure because he was seeking to dispel the charge that the war on terrorism was a crusade against Islam. But Mr. Obama has used the occasion of Ramadan to rewrite U.S. history and give Islam a prominence in American annals that it has not earned.

In this year’s greeting, Mr. Obama said the rituals of Ramadan “remind us of the principles that we hold in common and Islam’s role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings. Ramadan is a celebration of a faith known for great diversity and racial equality. And here in the United States, Ramadan is a reminder that Islam has always been part of America and that American Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to our country.”

That Islam has had a major role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings may come as a surprise to Muslim women. Young Afghan girls who are having acid thrown in their faces on the way to school might want to offer their perspectives. That Islam is “known” for diversity and racial equality is also a bit of a reach. This certainly does not refer to religious diversity, which is nonexistent in many Muslim-majority states. This is a plaudit better reserved for a speech at the opening of a synagogue in Mecca.

Most puzzling is the president’s claim that “Islam has always been part of America.” Islam had no influence on the origins and development of the United States. It contributed nothing to early American political culture, art, literature, music or any other aspect of the early nation.

Throughout most of American history, the Muslim world was perceived as remote, alien and belligerent. Perhaps the president was thinking about the Barbary Pirates and their role in the founding of the U.S. Navy, or Andrew Jackson’s dispatch of frigates against Muslim pirates in Sumatra in the 1830s. Maybe he was recalling Rutherford B. Hayes’ 1880 statement regarding Morocco on “the necessity, in accordance with the humane and enlightened spirit of the age, of putting an end to the persecutions, which have been so prevalent in that country, of persons of a faith other than the Moslem, and especially of the Hebrew residents of Morocco.” Or Grover Cleveland’s 1896 comment on the continuing massacre of Armenian Christians: “We have been afflicted by continued and not infrequent reports of the wanton destruction of homes and the bloody butchery of men, women and children, made martyrs to their profession of Christian faith. … It so mars the humane and enlightened civilization that belongs to the close of the nineteenth century that it seems hardly possible that the earnest demand of good people throughout the Christian world for its corrective treatment will remain unanswered.”

It also is customary in the United States to search for obscure contributions made by in-vogue minority groups as a feel-good way of promoting inclusion. One of the earliest Muslims to come to the United States was a 17th-century Egyptian named Norsereddin, who settled in the Catskills and was described by one chronicler as “haughty, morose, unprincipled, cruel and dissipated.” Spurned by the princess of an Indian tribe that had befriended him, he managed through a subterfuge to poison her. He was later run down by the betrayed Indians, who burned him alive. It is not the kind of tale that makes it into politically correct history books.

Rich Trzupek posted a great post on the FrontPage Magazine blog which, in its final paragraph, really summed up the sentiments of the average American on the Ground Zero mosque issue succinctly and sharply:

If, as the project’s sponsors claim, Muslims want to promote healing and reconciliation, Americans of all stripes have made it abundantly clear that two blocks from Ground Zero is the wrong place to do it. It is a strange sort of “reconciliation” when the aggrieved party is expected to endure an insult as part of the healing process. Muslims are forever droning on about how the west needs to be more respectful of their culture and traditions. And, should someone offend Muslim sensibilities – by portraying Muhammad in cartoon form, for example – riots, protests and murders inevitably follow. Yet, when the sandal is on the other foot, the people whose lives were changed forever after an attack made in the name of a religion are supposed to meekly accept an edifice celebrating that same religion in the very place where the attack happened. Ground Zero is sacred ground to Americans and building a mosque upon it is no more acceptable to us than constructing a synagogue in Mecca would be to Muslims, the difference being that only one of those two projects would ever stand a chance of moving forward.

For a while now, I’ve been listening to the arguments for and against the mosque at Ground Zero. When I first heard of the idea, I was deeply offended and outraged that anyone could even suggest such an insensitive idea. I was then flabbergasted to see that despite the clear public outrage, not too many people were going to do anything about it (well, people with the ability to, anyway), including the mayor, Michael Bloomberg! (Where are you, Rudy Giuliani?!)

I then tried to listen to both sides of the argument, and to the claims that this was an effort to showcase “moderate Islam” in the most visible location. I also listened to the arguments for freedom of religion and tried to think of it from the Muslims’ point of view.

As hard as I tried, though, it was impossible for me to understand how these people thought they were going to promote the “sensitivities” of “moderate Islam”, along with interfaith dialog and reconciliation, when they’re essentially steamrolling their way over everyone’s feelings, forcing their way into everyone’s faces uninvited, and establishing their new mosque on a foundation of controversy, animosity, and lawsuits?  Who are they really fooling then, thinking that this will foster a healing process?

Well, finally, someone has written a clear and concise piece echoing those very sentiments, using an example from the past. Pope John Paul II, in his great wisdom and sensitivity, forced his own nuns to abandon an Auschwitz convent for the sake of sensitivity to Jews, despite the nuns’ inability to understand what the offense was when they were only praying for them with pure intentions, and despite the law being on their side. This is clearly a great example to follow, although admittedly not an easy one, as it involves sacrificing one’s own plans for the sake of repercussions one may not even understand or feel are warranted.

Here is the piece, written in today’s WSJ by William McGurn:

With every passing day, the dispute over the planned Islamic Center near Ground Zero grows more acrimonious. These feelings will probably only get worse today, when the New York City Landmark Preservation Commission is expected to remove another hurdle by ruling against landmark status for the undistinguished old building the center will replace.

So maybe it’s time to look beyond the lawyers and landmark preservation commissions and regulatory agencies. When we do, it will be hard to find a better example than the grace and wisdom Pope John Paul II exhibited during a similar clash involving another hallowed site on whose grounds innocents were also murdered: Auschwitz.

In the 1980s, Carmelite nuns moved into an abandoned building on the edge of the former Nazi death camp to pray for the souls taken there. As with the dispute over the mosque near Ground Zero, the convent’s presence escalated into a clash not only between different faiths but between competing historical narratives. As with today’s clash too, it seemed intractable until the Polish pope stepped in.

For Jews, Auschwitz is a symbol of the Shoah, and the presence of a convent looked like an effort to Christianize a place of Jewish suffering. Suspicions were further aroused by a fundraising brochure from an outside Catholic group, which referred to the convent as a “guarantee of the conversion of strayed brothers.” The protests mounted over the course of several years and various interfaith agreements, and pointed to the real strains that remained between Poles and Jews over a shared history with very different perspectives.

Many Catholics, not just in Poland, could not understand how nuns begging God’s forgiveness and praying for the souls of the departed could possibly offend anyone. There was also a nationalist element. Many members of the Polish resistance had also been murdered at Auschwitz. And again like our present controversy at Ground Zero, intemperate reactions and statements from both sides only inflamed passions.

So what did Pope John Paul II do? He waited, and he counseled. And when he saw that the nuns were not budging—and that their presence was doing more harm than good—he asked the Carmelites to move. He acknowledged that his letter would probably be a trial to each of the sisters, but asked them to accept it while continuing to pursue their mission in that same city at another convent that had been built for them.

Let’s remember what this means. By their own lights, the nuns believed they were doing only good. They may have had a legal title to be where they were. And it is likely that they never would have been forced to move by local authorities had they insisted on staying.

There’s a lesson here. Even those who favor this new Islamic Center surely can appreciate why some American feelings are rubbed raw by the idea of a mosque at a place where Islamic terrorists killed more than 2,700 innocent people. If feelings in Auschwitz were raw after nearly half a century, it’s not hard to see why they would remain raw at Ground Zero after less than a decade.

On the other hand, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is right about the law: Our freedom of religion means nothing if it doesn’t mean freedom of religion for all. Indeed, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty—a sort of ACLU for freedom of religion—has spent decades defending churches, synagogues, mosques and even a Zoroastrian temple against public officials who have tried to invoke zoning laws or arcane regulations to keep them off a property.

Yet not all big questions can—or should—be reduced to legal right. Living together as neighbors in a free and inescapably diverse society requires more skills than just knowing how to hire sharp lawyers. Sometimes it requires leaders willing to sound a grace note, even yielding to the feelings of others who may not see our plans the same way we do.

For their part, the two people at the heart of this center—Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife, Daisy Khan—defend the center as an antidote to 9/11. “Our religion has been hijacked by the extremists,” Ms. Khan told National Public Radio, “and this center is going to create that counter-momentum which will amplify the voices of the moderate Muslims.”

Perhaps. But it’s hard to argue with the Anti-Defamation League’s assessment that the controversy created by building the center at this location “is counterproductive to the healing process.”

Without doubt Pope John Paul II did not share the more malevolent interpretations attached to the presence of the Carmelites at Auschwitz. By asking the nuns to withdraw, he didn’t concede them either. What he did was recognize that having the right to do something doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.

Watch this outstanding commentary by a Londoner on the idea of a mosque at Ground Zero:

About two weeks ago, Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States came to the University of California at Irvine to speak, by invitation of the university’s faculty.  Muslim hecklers in the crowd interrupted him almost a dozen times, to the point where Professor Mark Petracca, chairman of the university’s Political Science department, issued a justifiably harsh and insightful reprimand:

This is no way for our undergraduate students to behave. We have an opportunity to hear from a policy-maker relevant to one of the most important issues facing this planet, and you are preventing not only yourself from hearing him but hundreds of other people in this room and hundreds of other people in an overflow room. Shame on you! This is not an example of free speech.

This was particularly insightful because he made sure to call them on their presumable “free speech” defense, which is an incredible farce. Too many people use “free speech” as a cover to stifle other people’s opinions. One such clown is Salam al Marayati, the Executive Director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

As Dr. Albert Arking eloquently puts it:

Salam al Marayati is asserting a new civil right that has not heretofore been recognized: the right to deny other people their rights.  He defends the action of the 11 students at UC Irvine who were arrested for attempting to prevent Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren from speaking.  The defense amounts to an assertion that the students were exercising their rights when they repeatedly interrupted Ambassador Oren with loud shouting.  The hecklers ignored the moderator, who implored the protesters to allow the speaker to be heard, after which there would be time for questions and discussion.

In making such an assertion, Mr. Marayati is making the work of his organization, in protecting the rights of Muslims against discrimination, that much more difficult.  How would the Muslim Public Affairs Council react to someone asserting a right to prevent Muslims from speaking?

Of course, we all know the answer to that likely rhetorical final question, because anyone following Palestinian politics knows quite well the double standards that are employed almost as a matter of Palestinian policy. So, what’s considered “free speech” for a Palestinian would of course be “hate speech” or “discriminatory speech” for an Israeli.

To watch these Muslim students disgracing themselves (and to hear Michael Oren speak), the video can be viewed here:

This story is almost too crazy to believe, but knowing how psychotic Qaddafi is, it’s really hardly surprising.

Reuters is reporting on a “party” that Qaddafi had arranged with 200 Italian women, having recruited them with an ad asking for women “between 18 and 35 years old, at least 1.70 meters (5 foot, 7 inches) tall, well-dressed but not in mini-skirts or low cut dresses.”

They were told that “they would receive 60 euros ($90) and ‘some Libyan gifts’” for attending what they expected to be a party.

Instead, Qaddafi arrived and “gave them a lesson on Libya and the role of women in Islam.” Then, after approximately two hours “the lesson, including questions and answers through an interpreter, concluded with an exhortation by [Qaddafi] to ‘convert to Islam’ and with each woman given a copy of the Koran and a book of sayings by [Qaddafi].”

Among his bizarre ramblings that night included the gem of a claim that “Jesus was not crucified but that ‘someone who looked like him’ was put to death in his place.”

Priceless.

Here’s a video news report of it by al-Jazeera:

The Jerusalem Post today provides some statistical insight into Nobel Prize winners:

When US President Barack Obama reached out to the Muslim world in his landmark speech in Cairo on June 4, he listed the achievements of Muslims throughout history.

Among them, he singled out that they had won Nobel prizes. But Obama, who wanted to find favor with Muslims, did them a favor by not getting into numbers.

Since the prize was first given in 1901, it has been bestowed upon exactly nine Muslims. Now, thanks to Ada Yonath, the tiny state of Israel, home to just 7.4 million people, has equaled the achievement of some 1.5 billion Muslims, who make up roughly one fifth of the world’s population.

And that’s just Israelis. There are only about 13.3 million Jews in the world today, yet Yonath will become the 171st Jew to win the Nobel Prize.

Yonath is the first Israeli woman to win the prize. The Muslims who have won it are also eight men and one woman.

But the list of Muslims includes a couple of dubious awards given to people who will not by any means be remembered fondly by much of the world.

Yasser Arafat shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in 1994 for the Oslo diplomatic process. Norwegian Kaare Kristiansen resigned from the Nobel Committee in protest.

International Atomic Energy Association director Mohamed ElBaradei won the Peace Prize in 2005, but if Iran succeeds in obtaining nuclear weapons, ElBaradei could be remembered not for peace, but for the deaths of thousands or even millions of people.

The rest of the Muslims who have won it are less controversial: Peace Prize winners Anwar Sadat, Shirin Abadi and Mohammad Yunus; Abdus Salam in physics; Ahmed Zewail in chemistry; and Naguib Mahfouz and Orhan Pamuk in literature. Obama was referring to Zewail when he talked about American Muslims who had won the prize.

With Nobel number nine, Israel now has won more prizes than Spain and China and only one less than Australia.