Posted on 08/17/2010 8:13:39 AM PDT by KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle
The president is furiously backtracking; Republicans are clawing over each other to demonize Muslims; Democrats are dead silent. It’s time to face reality. Whether or not the “ground zero” mosque ever gets built, the political debate is over. Decency lost.
So almost nine years after September 11, we need to confront a few painful truths. First, while the military and counterintelligence aspects of the struggle against al Qaeda will likely last long into the future, the “war of ideas” is over. America has thrown in the towel.
Remember when George W. Bush and his neoconservative allies used to say that the “war on terror” was a struggle on behalf of Muslims, decent folks who wanted nothing more than to live free like you and me? Remember when Karen Hughes paid millions to produce glitzy videos of Muslim Americans testifying about how free they were to practice their religion in the USA? Remember Bush’s second inaugural, when he said “America's ideal of freedom” is “sustained in our national life by the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran?”
upon a time, Republicans were so confident that the vast majority of Muslims preferred freedom to jihad that they believed the U.S. could install democracy in Iraq within months. Now, confronted with a group of Muslim Americans who want to build a cultural center that includes Jews and Christians on the board (how many churches and synagogues do that?), GOP leaders call them terrorists because they don’t share Benjamin Netanyahu’s view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Once upon a time, the “war on terror” was supposed to bring American values to Saudi Arabia. Now Newt Gingrich says we shouldn’t build a mosque in Lower Manhattan until the Saudis build churches and synagogues in Mecca—which is to say, we’re bringing Saudi values to the United States. I wonder how David Petraeus feels about all this. There he is, slogging away in the Hindu Kush, desperately trying to be culturally sensitive, watching GIs get killed because Afghans believe the U.S. is waging a war on Islam, and back home, the super-patriots on Fox News have… declared war on Islam.
So please, no more talk about those idealistic neoconservatives who are willing to expend blood and treasure so Afghans and Iraqis can live free. People in Basra and Kandahar had better hope that America’s counterinsurgency warriors create a society in which they can practice their religion free of intimidation and insult. Because it’s now clear they can’t do so on the lower tip of the island of Manhattan.
And from now on, let’s stop condescending to the French about their anti-headscarf laws. Until a month ago or so, I genuinely believed that no such law could ever pass in the U.S. How naïve. After the right’s despicable performance over the last month, can anyone seriously doubt that if the U.S. had as large, and religiously traditional, a Muslim population as France, that Republicans would be clamoring for Congress to regulate their “Islamofascist” garb? Perhaps they’d merely propose that Muslim women be prohibited from wearing the headscarf within a mile of military bases that house families that have lost loved ones in the “war on terror.” We have to be sensitive, after all.
Words I never thought I’d write: I pine for George W. Bush. Whatever his flaws, the man respected religion, all religion. Maybe it was because he had been an addict himself, and knew from hanging around prisons that Allah had saved as many broken souls as Jesus Christ. Until a month or so ago, I genuinely believed that the American right had become a religiously ecumenical place. Right-wing Baptists loved right-wing Catholics and they both loved right-wing Orthodox Jews. All you had to do to join the big tent was denounce feminists, Hollywood, and gays. But when push came to shove, Sarah Palin didn’t care about Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s position on gay marriage. In today’s GOP, even bigotry doesn’t spare you from bigotry. I wonder what Mitt Romney was thinking, as he added his voice to the anti-Muslim chorus. He surely knows that absent the religious right’s hostility to Mormons, he’d likely have been the GOP’s 2008 presidential nominee. I look forward to his paeans to religious freedom when anti-Mormonism rears its head again in 2012.
And oh yes, my fellow Jews, who are so thrilled to be locked arm in arm with the heirs of Pat Robertson and Father Coughlin against the Islamic threat. Evidently, it’s never crossed your mind that the religious hatred you have helped unleash could turn once again against us. Of course not, we’re insiders in this society now: Our synagogues grace the toniest of suburbs; our rabbis speak flawless English; we Jews are now effortlessly white. Barely anyone even remembers that folks in Lower Manhattan once considered us alien and dangerous, too.
Congratulations, Republicans, you’ve safeguarded ground zero against the insidious threat of religious liberty. I’ve always found going there a deeply moving experience, but for the time being, at least, I’ve lost my desire to go. Hallowed ground? After the unforgivable events of the last month, it’s become a little less hallowed for me.
Ping.
Most people do not recognize that what happens in a mosque is sedition. Pure and simple. Islam is not just a “religion”, it is a cult, it is it’s own government, its judicial...is in its sharia, and its military (jihadis) all rolled into one with one intent ...and that is to rule wherever they take root. It is a invasive, systemic infection looking to take over the host once it has quantum.
This is not just a “religion”, but something that cloaks itself in those terms so it should not be given the same treatment contemplated under the first amendment. The Korans rules in Sharia are to consume whatever government there is wherever it goes. To supplant and replace.
The sooner America learns this , the better.
Obama? Obama and Company? Should be tried for treason in this issue for promoting the establishment of a foreign government on our soils. As a Muslim, he knows this, he knows sharia, but is looking to deceive America.
All of the sudden the no-prayer-in-public-schools and no public-ten-comandments crowd is getting religion.
“Republicans are clawing over each other to demonize Muslims”
No one needs to demonize Muslims. Their very Sharia ‘law’ and perpetual preaching of hatred for all Non-Muslims, does that for them.
Soebarkah falsely represented himself as a Christian so that he could be elected in a Christian Country.
THE MASK CAME OFF AT THE IFTAHR DINNER.
Again, GFY Peter.
All the TV networks control all the TV channels and they all support Obama. The idiot public who watch TV support Islam and Obama’s saudi booses who have major investments in all TV networks.
Hey Smarty! you knoes summthing!
Here! Add this
http://thehayride.com/2010/08/louisiana-at-leading-edge-in-fight-against-shariah/#more-5392
and this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib9rofXQl6w&feature=player_embedded
So, Mr. Beinart, will the last thought that goes through your infidel head as an Islamonazi sword saws through your brain stem be about your 'intolerance' of your executioner?
Beinart's head is so far up his %%% that he can't see who it is that is standing between the Jews and their annihilation by radical muslims. (Hint: It's not his fellow liberals.)
Pure hyperbole. Islamists can practice their religion on the lower tip of the island of Manhattan all they want. I'm pretty sure the good people of NYC would simply walk around them if they chose to drop down on their knees to pray in the middle of the sidewalk down there. (even though they might look questioningly at them while doing so)
What the American people have a problem with is the erection of a symbolic symbol of victory over America on the lower tip of the island of Manhattan. Surely even you, Peter, can't be that ignorant!
I have an idea for a restaurant next door...
Bacon tastes good, pork chops taste good. Willing to donate for that cause.
Well played, sir.
No, America has NOT disgraced itself.
We just don’t have the stomach to be lectured about “tolerance” by people who don’t have the common f$$$in’ decency to listen to the objections of the victims families in regards to the victory mosque.
In our PoliticallyCorrect society, we are taught to yield to anything that MIGHT be offensive to any and every group, no matter HOW silly it might seem, yet when we have a case of American citizens ACTUALLY being offended at the sight of a mosques so near the still un-recovered remains of their loved ones, we are simply supposed to bend over and take it?
Bullspit....ignore the cries of “racism” and fight this damned mosque...
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