An Inescapable Trap For Elitists

I’m all for the Ground Zero mosque in New York City. But I have a few conditions. If, as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says, commitment to diversity and tolerance is what New York’s firefighters and other first responders gave their lives for on September 11, 2001, then all sides need to show the same level of commitment to that principle. So I suggest that we all embrace Fox News host Greg Gutfeld’s idea of a Muslim gay bar next door to the Ground Zero Mosque. And I would go a little farther. On the opposite side of the mosque, we should have a barbecue restaurant that specializes in North Carolina pulled pork sandwiches and Kansas City spare ribs. And across the street we need a Fredrick’s of Hollywood storefront. And perhaps a Larry Flynt strip club behind the mosque. Then we’ll find out who truly is intolerant.

And if Michael Bloomberg, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, and all the other elitist snobs who condemned opponents of the mosque, fail to embrace the gay Muslim bar concept with the same enthusiastic sanctimony they defended the mosque with, then they too will be exposed for the frauds they are. It’s a deliciously inescapable trap from which these pious elitists cannot escape.

On a weekend that heard Americans who oppose the construction of the mosque disparaged as racist bigots and worse, we also learned that 10 Christian missionaries, who provided decades of free medical care to impoverished Afghans, were executed by the Taliban for the intolerable crime of possessing bibles and promoting Christianity. And America responded by denying that the missionaries did anything so awful as encourage Christianity or possess forbidden books, as though doing so would have justified their murders.

In truth, the missionaries were promoting Christianity by showing the contrast between how they express their faith and how the Taliban goons practice theirs.

Time magazine, of all places, graphically showed its typically ostrich-like readers what the real stakes are. A recent cover showed a woman whose nose and ears had been cut off because, like the missionaries, she had transgressed against Islamic law: Her crime was that she had fled her in-laws’ home, where she had been treated as a slave and beaten routinely. Slavery is tolerable. Bibles are not.

The brutality of her life is how women are supposed to be treated. Christians and other infidels are to be killed. And yet the political class in this country clings bitterly to their doctrinaire belief that we can make peace with extremists by appeasing their demands while asking nothing in return.

Now only a true blockhead really believes that the location for this mosque was chosen for any other reason than to serve as a deliberate provocation against American sensibilities. Even the name of this mosque, Cordoba House, is provocative. Cordoba is a city in Spain established by Muslims during the Moorish occupation of the Iberian Peninsula. Islam still considers Spain its rightful property and calls it by its Moorish name, Andalusia.

The words of the mosque’s imam, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, were only slightly more temperate than Ward Churchill’s or Jeremiah Wright’s but departed not one iota in substance. We brought the attacks upon ourselves. We deserved what we got. Imam Rauf won’t even concede that Hamas is a terrorist organization.

If one wants to justify construction of this mosque as a distasteful but necessary defense of the concept of religious liberty and private property rights, then fine. But don’t tell me that it’s essential to nurturing a peaceful understanding between the western world and Islam.

On the other hand, this is private property. And the financing is non-public. And, unless there exists a legitimate reason for denying construction there, then opponents do not have a legal leg to stand on.

That’s why we have to get creative. Up until now, tolerance and acceptance of diversity is only demanded of the dominant Western culture. We can take note that synagogues and Christian churches are forbidden in Saudi Arabia and almost unheard of in Iran or Afghanistan, but we really can’t do a darned thing about it. But this is our soil and we do retain some sovereignty over our own soil. The same liberties that Imam Rauf is exploiting to trample American sensibilities can be turned against him. Let’s see how he likes it. Let’s see how the tolerance Gestapo likes it.