San Francisco Gay Pride parade float

Our lords and masters of the national elite may have been defeated in the election last November, but they are still our rulers.

Just to drive home the point of who is in charge in this country, the liberal establishment took the lame duck congress it controls and delivered its own special Christmas present to a prized constituency. Now those second-class citizens who fail to attend elite institutions, who live outside the coastal cities and suburbs which call the shots, who bitterly cling to God and guns and are stupid enough to serve in the US military for chump change will have to accept as their equals (and often, undoubtedly, their superiors in rank and command) persons who choose to define themselves on the basis of an inclination to engage in certain kinds of unconventional (intrinsically non-reproductive) sexual activities.

Liberals don’t themselves actually serve in the military anymore. Liberals usually do not even support the military operations in which members of the armed forces risk their lives. Liberals frequently make strong efforts to undermine and delegitimitize the causes for which Americans serving in the military are fighting. Liberals routinely provide aid and comfort to the enemy opposing US forces in the field. Liberals undermine domestic support for our military’s efforts, destroy our national morale, and work tirelessly to bring about our Armed Forces’ failure and withdrawal. Liberals devote their energy to voiding and rendering useless all the American military’s efforts and sacrifices. But the liberals get to tell the American military with whom they will have to shower, beside whom they will have to sleep, who will be serving beside them, and on whom they will have to depend in action.

A certain amount of social friction and the occasional incident of abuse of authority to obtain affection is obviously an insignificant price for the American Armed Forces to pay to permit those wiser and better than themselves to deliver social equality to the oppressed and despised. Besides, along with the burden of providing a new field for the social engineering of a better future for all of mankind comes very possibly a rise to new social acceptability for the American military. Columbia’s President Lee Bollinger is quoted today predicting that, along with transgendered roommates and more interesting activities in the showers, military personnel can look forward to a “new era” in the relationship between American universities and “the uniforms that guard them while they sleep.”

Isn’t that just ducky? They may allow recruiters back on Ivy League campuses, just so long as drag queens can join the Marine Corps.

Mayor Bloomberg and reputable members of the establishment in general view people objecting to the erection of mosque and Islamic cultural center in the vicinity of the fallen World Trade Center towers as bigots and yahoos, who irrationally insist on blaming the overwhelmingly larger body of moderate Muslims for the crimes committed by a small number of unrepresentative extremists.

The Muslim religious leader behind the Ground Zero Mosque project is Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. The defense of the Ground Zero Mosque project is intimately associated with
the identification of Abdul Rauf as a moderate Muslim, a reasonable representative of a different religious denomination who is not our enemy and who does not deserve to bear any sort of guilt for Islamic extremism or acts of terrorism.

Yet, Imam Abdul Rauf has made a number of somewhat controversial public statements.

On September 29, 2001, a mere nineteen days after the attacks, when asked by CBS if the U.S. deserved the attacks, Rauf answered: “I wouldn’t say that the United States deserved what happened. But the United States’ policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.”

The interviewer inquired how the US was “an accessory,” and Abdul Rauf replied, “Because we have been accessory to a lot of innocent lives dying in the world. In fact, in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the USA.”

In a June interview this year with WABC radio in New York, Abdul Rauf evaded answering whether he agreed with the U.S. State Department’s designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization. “I’m not a politician. I try to avoid the issues. The issue of terrorism is a very complex question.”

Clifford D. May offers this completely devastating rejoinder.

No, actually, it’s quite simple: Whatever your grievances, you do not express them by murdering other people’s children. Not accepting that proposition does not make you a terrorist. But it disqualifies you as an anti-terrorist and identifies you as an anti-anti-terrorist.

A thought experiment: I am grieved by Saudi policies — for example, Saudi religious discrimination, oppression of women, and persecution of homosexuals. If I were to express these grievances by blowing up a Saudi kindergarten, do you think Imam Feisal would say (1) the Saudi Royal family must share responsibility for the carnage, and (2) whether or not I had committed an act of terrorism is a “very complex question”?

How can well-educated, sophisticated people apply such a preposterous double-standard in their thinking that they will perform gymnastic contortions to defend and apologize for a Muslim community leader with all sorts of unsavory personal connections and instantly exclude from legitimate discussion anyone who would criticize the symbolism of the Ground Zero Mosque project or question the bona fides of its organizer?

May explains:

[M]ulticulturalism and moral relativism, doctrines devoutly embraced by the intellectual classes, render “everything the equal of everything else.” As a consequence, some very smart people have “lost the ability to make the most elementary distinctions.” Except one: They reflexively regard those from the Third World as virtuous and those from the West as steeped in blame, shame, and guilt.

So if Imam Feisal says he’s a moderate, he must be a moderate. Why read his books or inquire into what he preaches in his mosque or with whom he associates on his frequent trips to Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and other exotic locales? Would we ask such questions of a Baptist minister building a church near Ground Zero?