Early this week, disgraced
former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich warned that "a commitment to
religious freedom and God-given rights is being replaced by a secular
oppression..." Just hours after those
words appeared on Human Events, Gingrich issued
a statement forcefully opposing the construction of a community center and
mosque in downtown Manhattan, two blocks from Ground Zero.
Gingrich's affinity for religious freedom and his belief in God-given rights
it would seem, doesn't extend to Americans who are
Muslim. Such outright bigotry and blatant hypocrisy from Gingrich, an
avid historian and former college professor, is even more repulsive when you
consider his reasoning.
"There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New
York," he writes, "so long as there are no churches or
synagogues in Saudi Arabia."
Gingrich, who has been railing against the so-called secular socialist machine
for trying to take religion out of the public square, and who, like most
conservatives, decries the
influence of foreign law, wants the U.S. to apply the same standards on
Muslims that Saudi Arabia applies to those who are not Muslim.
That's rich.
As the Washington
Monthly's Steve Benen, after noting that conservatives continually
justify despicable acts of torture on the premise that other nations and
non-state actors employ such tactics, points out, "We're not supposed to
lower ourselves to the levels of those we find offensive."
Gingrich's clarion call continues: "Those Islamists and their
apologists who argue for 'religious toleration' are arrogantly
dishonest." What makes them Islamists, apologists or even dishonest?
Gingrich doesn't say but if you ask him, he'll likely tell you about the Katusha
rockets that Hamas has fired into Sderot or how Iran is hell-bent on acquiring
nuclear weapons. Anything and everything to take the subject away from the
"religious freedom and God-given rights" to which American Muslims
are entitled.
To understand Gingrich's paranoia that "America is experiencing an
Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our
civilization," one must delve deeply into the polarizing, overzealous and
paranoid minds of professional Muslim-baiters and the politicians who depend on
their support and cater to their illiberal demands.
Many of them are monomaniacs who have made it their life's mission to defeat
Islam and "expose" all Muslims as radical Islamofascists. If
one asks them for evidence to support their claim that no Muslim can be
trusted, they will likely mention a purported plot by Muslim
Brotherhood operatives to destroy America from within. The
Council on American Islamic Relations and their
intern/spies are routinely placed at the epicenter of the evil conspiracy.
Among these folks, any and all Muslims who "refudiate" such insane theories -- who denounce
violence and terror, profess their loyalty to the American system, take part in
the democratic process and who have assimilated into the American landscape --
are cleverly employing taqiyya, which, as any Muslim-baiter would tell
you, is religiously sanctioned deception. The same
was said about Jews decades ago and anti-Semites once evoked the specter of
"Judeo-Bolshevism" the way that Muslim-baiters and politicians like
Gingrich today warn of "Islamofascism." But none of those awful
facts really matter, even to a historian such as Gingrich, because facts have
long been accused of being part of the secular-socialist machine.
Gingrich's stand against the mosque project and his attempt to smear its
backers as "Islamists" and apologists earns him his anti-Jihad bona
fides, and with that, the support of an increasingly mistrustful and hateful
electorate which lives off of tying American Muslims to every heinous act that
occurs anywhere that remotely sounds Islamic. In this world, if the media
fails to make the connection, they are clearly part of the soft-jihad.
Here is the key: The connection rarely has to be solid. In fact, the
more specious the connection, the more the Muslim-baiter will be seen by others
as a patriot and an enterprising investigative reporter. For instance,
the New York Times' Robert
Wright highlights one smear that has been contrived to defame the man
leading the effort to bring the project to fruition. The imam behind the
project is not to be trusted because conservatives say that "[his] wife
has an uncle who used to be 'a leader' of a mosque that now
has a Web site that links to the Web site of an allegedly radical
organization." If you can't keep up with all of that nonsense, then
you're complacent about the Jihad.
Any and all statements against violence made by Muslims must always be
placed in the right conservative context: scare quotes. Gingrich does
this masterfully. That simple act in effect says that Muslims who preach
peace are actually jihadists.
As Gingrich and his buddies believe, either you are with them or you are,
through your dhimmitude, a proto-Jihadist. No, you're worse since you probably
support a second genocide against Jews.
(Prominent Muslim-baiters have argued that Muslims instigated the Nazi
holocaust!) Now that you've learned all
of these made up facts, you simply do not have an excuse to not fight! Wake up
and oppose the "Ground Zero Mosque" the "Islamization of America" and
prove to those who hate the freedom in America that those freedoms, as Newt
argues, don't actually apply to all Americans.
Cross-posted on PoliticalCorrection.org