Mark Steyn: "The Non-War on Non-Terror"

It looks like that mosque at Ground Zero in New York is on again. 

Is the Ground Zero Mosque back? According to Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer (who helped get it nixed almost a decade ago), a Muslim "cultural center" is once again in the works just a few feet from where their coreligionists killed 3,000 people and left a smoking crater. The principal evidence is a sentence at the end of a report on a neighboring property:

Construction has also yet to begin on 51 Park Place, which is slated to become a 71-foot-tall, 16,000-square-foot Islamic cultural center.

On the other hand, the developer - Sharif El-Gamal - is said to be debt-riddled, with $10 million in unpaid bills and crews no longer prepared to swallow the assurance that the check's in the mail.
If that's the only obstacle, then the mosque will be built, albeit after a cash injection from some obliging Saudi or Emirati. The mosque will rise because what started on September 12th 2001 as a politic euphemism - "the war on terror" - has become a form of self-castration: unless you're flying a plane into a skyscraper or riding your rental vehicle up onto the sidewalk, almost any other Islamic provocation is not only unobjectionable but has to be actively encouraged. That, after all, is how it went last time round. Recall that both the President of the United States and the Mayor of New York City were all in favor of the Ground Zero Mosque.

Because we now have Democrat members of Congress who basically agree with the people who made the crater in New York that their co-religionists want to convert to a Moslem shrine.  

And so the Ground Zero Mosque goes quiet, but it never quite goes away. 9/11 was "the day that everything changed" mainly in the sense that the urge to self-prostrate became pathological: precisely because America was attacked in the name of Islamic supremacism, it is no longer acceptable to object to Islamic supremacism.

Read the whole thing.  

Today I Am A Muslim, Too (From Small Dead Animals)

Come celebrate by joining in the 24 Hour Clitoridectomy.

Mark Steyn: 

A mob of nearly four thousand Muslims has attacked Coptic homes this evening in the village of Soul, Atfif in Helwan Governorate, 30 kilometers from Cairo, and torched the Church of St. Mina and St. George…

This incident was triggered by a relationship between 40-year-old Copt Ashraf Iskander and a Muslim woman. Yesterday a “reconciliation” meeting was arranged between the relevant Coptic and Muslim families and together with the Muslim elders it was decided that Ashraf Iskander would have to leave the village because Muslims torched his house.

The father of the Muslim woman was killed by his cousin because he did not kill his daughter to preserve the family’s honor, which led the woman’s brother to avenge the death of his father by killing the cousin. The village Muslims blamed the Christians.

The Muslim mob attacked the church, exploding 5-6 gas cylinders inside the church, pulled down the cross and the domes and burnt everything inside…Witnesses said the mob chanted “Allahu Akbar” and vowed to conduct their morning prayers on the church plot after razing it.

You too can become a Muslim for a day and show your solidarity with Russell Simmons and Kim Kardashian.... and Ashraf Iskander

Oh, THAT Moderate Islam!

For reasons that seem to escape most people who imagine that all religions are somehow the same, the issue of what defines  Moderate Muslims® seems to be open to question.  Some of the most prominent Moderate Muslims include people like Anwar Al-Awlaki who was invited to rub shoulders with the Pentagon brass because he was the kind of Moderate they could use to reach out to the millions of others just like him.  We hope that here are not millions of other just like him because he inspired -  among others – the Fort Hood assassin,, the Christmas Day bomber and several of the 9/11 hijackers.

Then there is another award winning Moderate Muslim,® Muzzamil Hassan who cut off his wife’s head after she filed for divorce.  It remains to be seen whether this act falls within the orbit of “Moderate” when applied to Islam.

The question is not fully settled because in Pakistan Moderate Muslims® are threatening those who agree with murdered Governor Taseer with death.

JAMES TARANTO is a national treasure as the Wall Street Journal's editor of "Best of the Web."

He found the following story in a Reuters dispatch from Islamabad:

A Moderate School of Islam

"Five hundred Pakistani religious scholars have warned that anyone who expresses grief over the assassination of a senior ruling party official who opposed the country's blasphemy law could suffer the same fate," Reuters reports:

The Jamaat-e-Ahl-e-Sunnat Pakistan group of scholars making the veiled threat is actually from a moderate school of Islam in Pakistan.

It is a vocal critic of Taliban militants violently opposed to the government and its ally Washington.

The group is one of the largest representing scholars from the mainstream Barelvi sect of Sunni Muslims. Although moderate, they have been leading protests in favour of the blasphemy law.

The hardline stand taken by the moderates illustrates how difficult it can be for Washington, which sees Islamabad as indispensable in its war on militancy, to persuade Pakistani leaders to crack down harder on religious extremism.

So a moderate Muslim is one who calls for the murder of those who oppose strict blasphemy laws and for the murder of those who grieve the victims of such murders. To be clear, that's according to Reuters, not us. And as evidenced by its careful use of the phrase "war on militancy," Reuters is very precise about the use of language.

Reuters reports that

Taseer, a liberal politician close to President Asif Ali Zardari, had championed the cause of a Christian woman sentenced to death under the blasphemy laws which critics say are used to target religious minorities, often to settle personal scores.

The Taliban wing of the Democrat party has not decided on the proper manner of showing gratitude for the killing.  There are reports that the faculty at UC Berkeley praised the moderation, "courage" and religious zeal of the killer, saying his action had made Muslims and their supporters around the world proud and showing that those opposed to moderate Muslims building a mosque at Ground Zero were wild eyed religious bigots.

The bodyguard who killed Taseer, identified as Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, who also used moderation, only shooting Taseer 14 times from a distance of about six feet.  Then he ran out of bullets.

The continuum between nonviolent political Islam and the the jihadists

In the Wall Street Journal M. Zuhdi Jasser refers to the fact that the war between radical Islam and the West is fought on several levels: the violent Jihadists and "political Islam."  He refers to what Iman Rauf is doing is simply war via political means:

As an American Muslim, I look at that pit of devastation and contemplate the thousands of lives undone there within seconds. I pray for the ongoing strength to fight the fanatics who did this, and who continue their war against my country with both overt violence and covert strategies that aim to undo the very freedoms for which so many have fought and died.

Imam Rauf may not appear to the untrained eye to be an Islamist, but by making Ground Zero an Islamic rather than an American issue, and by failing to firmly condemn terrorist groups like Hamas, he shows his true allegiance.

Islamists in "moderate" disguise are still Islamists. In their own more subtle ways, the WTC mosque organizers end up serving the same aims of the separatist and supremacist wings of political Islam. In this epic struggle of the 21st century, we cannot afford to ignore the continuum between nonviolent political Islam and the militancy it ultimately fuels among the jihadists.

I think most Americans understand this which explains their resistance to building the Ground Zero Mosque.  I think even most Liberals understand this, but they don't like America enough to care.

"Oh yeah, that would be a great spot for a mosque"

Via American Digest

"He’s a Holocaust survivor? Obviously he didn’t learn his lesson.”

Pro Ground Zero Mega Mosque ranter curses out Holocaust survivor for protesting mosque.

71% of Americans opposed to Ground Zero MegaMosque

Ground Zero Imam Says U.S. Worse than al-Qaeda

Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugged:

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf: "We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al Qaida has on its hands of innocent non Muslims. You may remember that the US-led sanctions against Iraq led to the death of over half a million Iraqi children. This has been documented by the United Nations. And when Madeleine Albright, who has become a friend of mine over the last couple of years, when she was Secretary of State and was asked whether this was worth it, said it was worth it.

No mention of the 270 million victims of over a millennium of jihadi wars, land appropriations, cultural annihilation and enslavement. No mention of the recent slaughter by Muslims of Christians, Hindus, Jews, non-believers in Indonesia, Thailand, Ethiopia, Somalia, Philippines, Lebanon, Israel, Russia, China................ no candor, no criticism of Islam.

Imam Feisal: "The West needs to begin to see themselves through the eyes of the Arab and Muslim world, and when you do you will see the predicament that exists within the Muslim community."

On the question of reforming Islam and expunging the texts of the threat doctrine and mandated violence and conquest:

Imam Feisal: On the issue of the reformation, in terms of what is again intended by it, Islam does not need a reformation.

The Imam Speaks

Ramirez.

Rauf on the Road

From the Rosett Report dated 8/19/2010.  The Imam Has Landed … So When Does He Phone Home?

...the State Department, after two weeks of hemming and hawing, finally confirming on Wednesday the bare-bones dates of his taxpayer-funded travels to Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

But I can report a recent sighting, of sorts. Not a sighting of Rauf himself, mind you. Nor the sound of his voice. But late Thursday night, New York time — Thursday morning in the Middle East — I phoned the U.S. Embassy in Bahrain, the first stop on Rauf’s “public diplomacy” tour.

Asked if the imam had arrived in Bahrain, an embassy official told me: “Yes, that’s correct.”

And that, folks, is the sum total right now of the information available to the American public about the taxpayer-funded public outreach activities these next few days of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf in Bahrain.

For someone raising $100 million building cultural bridges, the Imama is remarkably silent.

From Rosett's August 16th report:

By now, there is information in Rauf’s silence. He launched his Ground Zero mosque and Islamic center project in the name of “dialogue,” “outreach” and “bridge-building” in lower Manhattan. In doing so, he trampled on raw feelings, and set off a divisive debate. Rauf’s apparent dismissal of public questions as not worth his time, while he travels to the Middle East on U.S. taxpayer money, suggests enormous contempt for the American public.

I would say that goes double for the Ruling Class heading the US Government.

KeepAmericaSafe.com: WE REMEMBER

Heart rending video.

Ground Zero Mosque: Follow the money, continued.

The person who bought the old Burlington Coat factory a year ago was

... a waiter at Sarafina Restaurant (NY) in 2002 and worked as an apartment rental agent on commission only, yet this Muslim man managed to save up enough cash to purchase a little piece of Islamic Paradise right in the heart of downtown New York City. I guess Allah is Akbar after all!

(more here)


The property was bought for cash(according to the video)so that means a waiter made over $5 million since 2002. I would like to see the tax records of Sharif El-Gamal, the "developer" from Soho Properties.

Follow the money.