Cordoba Mosque at Ground Zero (Part 1)
Those looking for an example of the amazing alliance between West-hating secular-Leftists and West-Hating Muslim-Supremacists should pick up a newspaper. Within its pages you will find that the greatest indicator of bigotry is an unfashionable curiosity about the financing, mission, and sensitivity of the Cordoba Mosque and Cultural Center.
Ironically, secularists who believe that a nativity scene is a violation of Church and State also find that the first amendment grants a right to build a mosque anywhere you want! Also, in order to distract from legitimate questions, journalists increasingly write belligerent and intellectually bankrupt statements like this one by Hamdan Azhar in the Christian Science Monitor:
"The entire controversy has in large part been fabricated and perpetuated by Islamophobic extremists who make money by fomenting suspicion and intolerance toward the 'other.'" (“Ground Zero Mosque: Islamophobic extremists are fueling the controversy” - CSMonitor.com)
Maybe we should learn a lesson or two from the tolerant response by Muslims when the Salvation Army decided to build a Youth Camp in Mecca. Oh wait, that never happened! Why? Because non-Muslims can't build camps in Mecca. In fact non-Muslims can’t even enter the city! (talk about intolerance toward the "other")
Tragically, the civic authorities in NYC are unwilling to withstand the name-calling tactics of Pro-Sharia intimidation groups. They failed to give the Burlington Coat Factory building landmark status even though less culturally significant and architecturally similar buildings have previously received such status. Politicians like Mayor Bloomberg display a tendency Alexander Solzhenitsyn once described well: "The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barbarity, except concessions and smiles."
Like progressivism, Islam advances most speedily on the wheels of deceit. Whereas Islamists authorize deceit by Muslim scholarship, Progressives authorize deceit through leftist scholarship.
Here's how it happens in Progressive thought:
1. Truth gives way to truths.
2. Truths in turn become preference statements.
3. These in turn become manipulation tools.
4. When language lacks the power to be truthful, it must settle for being useful.
5. Voila, dishonesty wheels! Let's roll!
An obligation to truthfulness instead becomes an opportunity to say what is expedient in order to get what you want, which is why Sherilynn Dodd, Dean of Sarah Lawrence College in New York, can manage aggressively dishonest spin like this:
"The name Cordoba House…is particularly fitting -- an evocation of the rich interactions of Christians, Muslims and Jews in Medieval Spain. Medieval Spain was not often a paradise of tolerance and peace. But where peoples lived together, the understanding spawned by that coexistence gave the lie to the notion that Muslims, Jews and Christians must by nature be opposed, and created a more cohesive, fecund, peaceful and plural society." (Nothing New about Mosques in New York - CNN.com)
Apparently, Ms. Dodd’s expertise on "minorities in pluralistic societies" doesn't include the fact that some of those rich interactions included organized killings of thousands of Jews, and the perpetual 2nd class "dhimmi" status of Jews and Christians under sharia.
As the late critic Leslie Fielder remarked,
“The final conclusion would seem to be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions and providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense."
Islam abolishes truth somewhat more directly than the leftists, they both disguise their deceitful ends by fictitious means. The Quran writes Muslims a blank dishonesty check that they can cash whenever they feel the need to hide their motives.
"Anyone who, after accepting faith in Allah, utters Unbelief, except under compulsion, his heart remaining firm in Faith - but such as open their breast to Unbelief, on them is Wrath from Allah, and theirs will be a dreadful Penalty." Surah 16: 106
Basically, you can deny Allah externally as long you don't deny Allah internally. Put another way, the ends (Sharia in America) justify the means (pretending to want interfaith dialogue). This is called Taqiyya.
Cordoba House is not yet open, but it is already encouraging interfaith dialogue. Here’s how the dialogue goes:
Cordoba Promoters: We want to heal wounds caused by 9/11 by building a memorial mosque near the ruins of a terrorist attack.
Jews, Christians, Hindu’s & agnostics: Please don't. A mosque here pours salt in the wound and will cause more harm than good. Please build it somewhere else in Manhattan.
Cordoba Promoters: Shut up!
[End of Interfaith Dialogue]
The only mutual understanding that the Cordoba mosque has brought about thus far is between Islam and the media. Their shared love for power and their hatred for the West seems to overcome their seemingly incompatible social priorities.
Decades before the Huffington Post, Malcolm Muggeridge wrote:
"The media in themselves have no power, any more than nuclear weapons have; both have power only to the extent that they can influence and exploit the weaknesses and wretchedness of men--their carnality which makes them vulnerable to the pornographer, their greed and vanity which delivers them into the hands of the advertiser, their credulity which makes them so susceptible to the fraudulent prospectuses of ideologues and politicians; above all, their arrogance, which induces them to fall so readily for any agitator or agitation, revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, which brings to their nostrils the acrid scent of power."
Added by Zach Franzen - Dave Edwards for Congress Campaign
