Last night you allocuted on the Ground Zero mosque with the clear clarity of clearness that so often characterizes your public discourse:
But let me be clear: as a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.
Today you muddied up the place, sloshing some really very Hillaryesque dishwater all over it:
I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That’s what our country is about. And I think it’s very important as difficult as some of these issues are that we stay focused on who we are as a people and what our values are all about.
For God's sake, Mr. Obama, you are not the mayor of Podunk arguing with the City Council over sewer versus septic; you are the president of the United States of America, the greatest country in the world! It may be that your utterances are sounding like indefensible rubbish to more and more of us, but at the very least you, the presidential enunciator of them, ought to have the courage to defend them—especially when they’re already in writing.
Mr. Obama rehashes his Inaugural address, lamely, and makes some really rather condescending assertions about Muslims in American history to an audience including questionable guests (the Islamic Society of North America was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case) at this year’s Ramadan iftar at the White House (h/t Jennifer Rubin):
Like so many other immigrants, generations of Muslims came here to forge their future. They became farmers and merchants, worked in mills and factories, and helped lay the railroads. They helped build America. They founded the first Islamic center in New York City in the 1890s. They built America’s first mosque on the prairie of North Dakota. And perhaps the oldest surviving mosque in America—still in use today—is in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Today, our nation is strengthened by millions of Muslim Americans. They excel in every walk of life. Muslim American communities—including mosques in all fifty states—also serve their neighbors. Muslim Americans protect our communities as police, firefighters and first responders. Muslim American clerics have spoken out against terror and extremism, reaffirming that Islam teaches that one must save human life, not take it. And Muslim Americans serve with honor in our military.
How about the Sikhs who arrived here from India in the 1800s to work on farms and railways in order to secure better lives for themselves and become good Americans? Should they get a dinner? And what about the Buddhists and Taoists who came from China, and, as little more than slave labor, really helped lay the railroads, and nevertheless managed to forge a remarkable future here? Where’s their dinner?
And while we’re on the subject of religion and Mr. Obama’s self-righteous touting of his own embrace of diversity, the practice of hosting an annual iftar was established by George W. Bush in November of 2001. It was an extremely ill-conceived effort then, to persuade the world in the period immediately following the Islamofascist slaughter of 3,000 Americans that we were not Islam-allergic, and it remains so today, almost a decade later. Islamofascists are still trying, and succeeding, to kill Americans, and no amount of genuflecting at White House dinners will make it otherwise.
What is more, Mr. Obama may insist that it is so until the day he and the rest of his crew of tone-deaf incompetents are escorted via Marine One to Andrews Air Force Base and hence off to forge their own future, but we are not just fighting al Qaeda. Our enemy—the West's enemy—is a web of Islamic terrorists and state sponsors that includes Hamas, Hizballah, Islamic Jihad, al Aksa Martyrs' Brigade, Ansar al Islam, Cuba, Iran, Sudan, Syria, Harakat ul Mujahidin, among a long and probably growing list of others.
Which brings us to the Obamic endorsement of the Ground Zero Mosque project, an act of appeasement on the order of his Cairo speech, his flirtation with the despots of Iran, and his refusal to name terrorist names: It will avail him the same scornful response he’s received repeatedly already, and it will keep the rest of us in harm’s way.
Notwithstanding either the inclinations of Journolisters to do concrete damage to their political opposites, or Christopher Hitchens’s suspicion that his intellectual adversaries would take pleasure in seeing him suffer a mortal illness, it is possible to think ill of someone without actually wishing him ill. And thus I’ve been sorry to learn that Mr. Hitchens has lately had the terrible misfortune of discovering he’s got cancer, an enemy that creeps upon you, still as the grave and in the dead of night, so to speak, and, whether bidden—rough living, such as he has done, “knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light”—or not, drops you with a brutal double whack to your knees, first with the news of its existence and then with the cure.
Writing about itin the September issue of Vanity Fair, he boasts “I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.” It may be he’s been playing chicken with Death for years. It’s something in any event he seems to want to brag about. Nevertheless, the fierce atheist wants to live, too, just like the rest of us: “Will I really not live to see my children married?” he asks. “To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?”
As for being bored by cancer, that’s simply ludicrous, and not at all believable, even from such a candle-burner and lover of the “lovely light” as he claims to have been. If it bored him, he wouldn’t be writing about it. Anyway, nobody who has cancer is bored by it. On the contrary: it—or rather escaping it in order to stay alive—becomes the subject of greatest fascination to the people who’ve got it. Indeed, they may often need to talk about it, just as Mr. Hitchens does, though not, on the whole, tocatalogue their emetic emissions or the dissolution of their sexuality (“In the war against Thanatos, if we must term it a war, the immediate loss of Eros is a huge initial sacrifice”) with the gusto and flair with which he does so, and not, most of them, certainly, in the pages of a glossy gossip rag featuring a very undressed Lady Gaga on the cover and a “profile” of her inside.
However, that’s his venue and metier, so talk about it there he will, and not without some pathos, and even, dare one say it, not without an indirect though no doubt unwitting appeal to a Higher Power:
I am quietly resolved to resist bodily as best I can, even if only passively, and to seek the most advanced advice. . . . Against me is the blind, emotionless alien, cheered on by some who have long wished me ill. But on the side of my continued life is a group of brilliant and selfless physicians plus an astonishing number of prayer groups.
For to Whom, one can’t help asking, does he think those prayer groups are praying?
Libya (Libya!) schools the rest of the Arab world—and in the process the internecine “Palestinians” themselves—in how to succeed at delivering aid to Gaza if you really, really want to. Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, a son of Muammar and president of the Gaddafi Foundation, tells Ashark Al-Awsatin a July 18 interview about the deal struck by the Israelis, the Egyptians, and the Libyans to get building materials and pre-fab houses—and $50 million—into Gaza, by diverting the Gaza-bound Amalthea to El-Arish and offloading “around 2,000 tons of aid and a number of Libyan, Arab, and foreign activists” there for distribution through the Rafah and Awja crossings. No blockade running, nor a single armed “humanitarian,” nor a single stabbing, nor a single beating, nor a single death required.
“[As] the saying goes ‘do you want the grapes or to kill the vineyard guard?’” Mr. Gaddafi asks.
We want the grapes, and now we have them, so there is no need to create problems. Our goal was not to confront the Israeli navy, but Gaza reconstruction and helping our Palestinian brothers. . . . This is a lesson for the Arabs, if they knew how to come to agreements and work well, it would have been possible for us to achieve more. . . . I see this as a lesson for the Arabs, it was also revealing about the true position of the Palestinian officials . . . for they let us down. There are conflicts between them taking place at the expense of ordinary Palestinians; everybody wants to see a show or spectacle or confrontation, rather than help . . . they all want to kill the vineyard guard at the expense of getting the grapes. . . . We believe that without work such as that which we are undertaking, the Gaza blockade would continue forever because all Palestinian factions are content with the status quo and the blockade will not be lifted when all Palestinian parties are seeking to exploit the suffering of their people to serve their own political agendas.
Interesting point that, about the exploitation by “Palestinian” parties of the suffering of their own people to serve their own political agendas. Of course one has heard such stuff before, most notably and often from members of the great neocon-Zionist conspiracy—but from the lips of an Arab actually in a position to do something to help? In public? Rarely, if ever at all. As for help, $50 million is a nice little tip—Mr. Gaddafi says it’s just a start—out of the abundant Muammarian coffers, but what of the riyals and dinars and dirhams in the hoards of the oil-drenched Saudi “king,” the gassy al-Thanis of Qatar, and the rest of the members of the Arab League who routinely shed crocodile tears over the fate of those same suffering people? They can’t seem to get their hands out of their own pockets, except maybe when it’s to fund the fanning out into the world of an extremist Islam, or the killing of one of those vineyard guards.
Brent Bozell takes after the modern art world’s latest affront to art and our sensibilities, describing an episode of the Bravo show “Work of Art” in which contestants are introduced to Andres Serrano, author of “Piss Christ,” and then sent off to create their own assaultive pieces of revoltingness. This they do with all the alacrity and joy (or lack of it) of all the hairdressers, would-be fashion designers, and pet-groomers who contest for prizes on similar shows, and if you care to know more about the “works of art” they produce, read on in Mr. Bozell’s mind-curling piece. (Note—you’ll find some disappointment among the judges: not enough semen.)
“There is no outcry,” he concludes, “because our popular culture is thoroughly rotten. There reaches a point where you have to say it: I believe in evil. Satan is laughing.”
It is an appalling show, making no more of art than the mostly-lavishly-gay bunch of groomers who are presumably otherwise out of work make of pet care on the grooming show, with the ludicrous dye jobs and hairstyles they perpetrate against innocent dogs. But I can’t say I can bring myself to agree with him about Satan. I, too, believe in evil, and I’d say Satan’s found a far more mellifluous laughing-ground among the Muslims, who please themselves to bury women up to their heads and stone them to death for “adultery,” murder their own daughters for “mingling,” and practice forms of human sacrifice—selling their sons to Pashtun pedophiles, for one, or celebrating their childrens’ deaths in suicide bombings, for another. To name just a few of the ways Islam holds the Satan laugh hand at the moment. So enough with the wah, wah, wah, Brent. Bad as it may be here at culture-rotten central (or not), it’s worse out there among the practitioners of the culture and religion of peace.
