How Fox Betrayed Petraeus

New York Times ^ | August 21st 2010 | Frank Rich

[Cardhu]

THE “ground zero mosque,” as you may well know by now, is not at ground zero. It’s not a mosque but an Islamic cultural center containing a prayer room. It’s not going to determine President Obama’s political future or the elections of 2010 or 2012. Still, the battle that has broken out over this project in Lower Manhattan — on the “hallowed ground” of a shuttered Burlington Coat Factory store one block from the New York Dolls Gentlemen’s Club — will prove eventful all the same. And the consequences will be far more profound than any midterm election results or any of the grand debates now raging 24/7 over the parameters of tolerance, religious freedom, and the real estate gospel of location, location, location.

Here’s what’s been lost in all the screaming. The prime movers in the campaign against the “ground zero mosque” just happen to be among the last cheerleaders for America’s nine-year war in Afghanistan. The wrecking ball they’re wielding is not merely pounding Park51, as the project is known, but is demolishing America’s already frail support for that war, which is dedicated to nation-building in a nation whose most conspicuous asset besides opium is actual mosques.

So virulent is the Islamophobic hysteria of the neocon and Fox News right — abetted by the useful idiocy of the Anti-Defamation League, Harry Reid and other cowed Democrats — that it has also rendered Gen. David Petraeus’s last-ditch counterinsurgency strategy for fighting the war inoperative. How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?

You’d think that American hawks invested in the Afghanistan “surge” would not act against their own professed interests. But they couldn’t stop themselves from placing cynical domestic politics over country.

[firebrand]

Doesn’t really need a barf alert. You can tell by the title that it’s going to ruin the carpet. All that remains is to read it and find out by what convoluted logic Rich is going to make his “point.”

It seems to have escaped his notice that

1. We are fighting in Afghanistan to defeat the imposition of Sharia law on the Afghan people.

2. We are fighting the mosque to defeat the imposition of Sharia law here.

The Muslims that Petraeus is trying to recruit would be on our side in this. If anything is going to persuade them not to help us, it is the Wikileaks exposure of their names in public, something I’m sure the leak-lovin New York Times applauds.

The mosque supporters are doing backwards somersaults to twist this very plain issue around to their advantage—note Rauf’s wife saying it is metastasized anti-Semitism!

The terrorists have gone one step too far and refuse to admit it. They have revealed how little they know us. And how much they hate us. They are starting to see a side of America they should have known existed. So now every lie and twist must be employed to try to undo what they have done.