Note To 9/11 Mosque Defenders: Sure, We Can All Get Along – Just Not With Jihad Sympathizers
Pages: 1 2 |
|
 Print This Post
|
The controversy has nothing to do with letting Muslims into the country, living in harmony with them, or even whether or not mosques can be built in New York City. The mildest problem here is that it’s grossly insensitive to place a cultural artifact near the site of a terrible crime committed by members of that culture – not unlike a Japanese shrine at Pearl Harbor. And as critics have pointed out, there are several issues rather more serious. NRB’s Joseph Klein has noted that the man spearheading the project, Feisal Abdul Rauf, supports sharia law, says terrorism won’t end until the Islamic world gets more apologies from the West, and that there’s another mosque currently under construction elsewhere in the Big Apple without protest from “Islamophobes.” Leaders like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Governor Sarah Palin point out that the mosque’s true purpose is to mark the site of a victory in the global jihad. And there is reason to suspect that the mosque’s funding ties it even more directly to terrorism.
You wouldn’t know it reading Wurtzel, though. She alludes to the fact that the people behind the mosque might be unsavory, but that’s okay too, because it’s smart to “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”:
If the destroyers of civilization—which is what many believe Muslims to be—come to you with irenic intent, insisting that they want to pay homage and honor to a disaster caused by the evildoers of their own kind, it strikes me as a good idea to just work with them. Not because you like them or agree with, but because they are here and that’s that, and it seems that when they are trying to be decent, the wisest move is to respond in kind. That way, if something goes wrong later on—if members of the American Muslim community turn out to be bad actors—we have our warm reception of Cordoba House to hold up as evidence of our goodwill. It’s a bargaining chip.
How about these bargaining chips: we’re innocent. Our last president freed millions of Muslims from oppression while bending over backwards to proclaim Islam a “religion of peace.” Our current one is maintaining our military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan only because he has to, wants to get out of both countries, and levels a disproportionate level of blame for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict away from its Muslim participants.
America has given the Islamic world so many bargaining chips that to offer any more would no longer be negotiation: it would be surrender.
_____
Hailing from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, Calvin Freiburger is a political science major at Hillsdale College. He also writes for the Hillsdale Forum and his personal website, Calvin Freiburger Online.
