Silence out of fear.

Dorothy Rabinowitz is an exceptionally clear headed and courageous writer for the Wall Street Journal. Her subject today is the controversy over the Ground Zero Mosque. It seems that every politically correct member of the Ruling Class is in favor of it. Only the people of the Country Class are opposed and for this they are being accused of being anti-American religious bigots.

The purpose of these denunciations is to instill fear. On the one hand the Country Class fear the threat posed by radical Islam – the version of Islam that seems to be supported by Arab governments. On the other hand, there’s the fear of being labeled a bigot or worse.

It’s this second fear the allowed Major Hasan to murder his fellow soldiers.

Such values ["higher values" than the safety of the American people] were the rationale for the official will to ignore the highly suspicious behavior of Maj. Nidal Hasan, who went on to murder 13 Americans at Fort Hood. A silence maintained despite all his commanders and colleagues knew about his raging hostility to the U.S. military and his strident advocacy on behalf of political Islam.

Those who knew—and they were many—chose silence out of fear of seeming insensitive to a Muslim. As one who had said nothing in the interest of this higher good later explained, Maj. Hasan was, after all, one of the few top-ranking Muslim officers the army had.

After the Times Square bomber was stopped, Mayor Bloomberg tried to find any reason, any at all - except for the obvious one - for the attempted bombing.

It's hard to know the sort of rabble the mayor had in mind when he told a television interviewer, prior to Shahzad's identification, that it "could be anything," someone mentally disturbed, or "somebody with a political agenda who doesn't like the health-care bill." Nowhere in the range of colorful possibilities the mayor raised was there any mention of the most likely explanation—another terrorist attempt by a soldier of radical Islam, the one that occurred to virtually every American who had heard the reports.

The last two years have seen what happens when the Ruling Class holds all the reins of power.  They are ready and willing to impose any and all of their personal wants and desires on the American people without any regard for their assent. 

In a way, it's a useful lesson.  This is the world ruled by the people who write the editorial pages of the NY Times, the Washington Post and the Virginian Pilot.  They are shaping a world much more to their liking, and to hell with the wishes of the people who they consider an ignorant rabble. 

Now that we, the Country Class, can see their desires more clearly, there is the inevitable reaction.

Rabinowitz ends:

The center may be built where planned. But it will not go easy or without consequence to the politicians intent on jamming the project down the public throat, in the name of principle. Liberal piety may have met its match in the raw memory of 9/11, and in citizens who have come to know pure demagoguery when they hear it. They have had, of late, plenty of practice.

Amen.