Cordoba House: A “Man-Caused” Disaster

Guest Commentary by Edward Cline:

In March of 2009, the German magazine Der Spiegel interviewed Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano.

SPIEGEL: Madame Secretary, in your first testimony to the US Congress as Homeland Security Secretary you never mentioned the word "terrorism." Does Islamist terrorism suddenly no longer pose a threat to your country?

Napolitano: Of course it does. I presume there is always a threat from terrorism. In my speech, although I did not use the word "terrorism," I referred to "man-caused" disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.

Political catastrophes, such as the French Revolution and the rise of Nazi Germany, can certainly be deemed “man-caused” disasters. But what is the “politics of fear,” and what is its antonym? Appropriately, Napolitano may have been subconsciously paraphrasing Franklin D. Roosevelt in his first inaugural address in March 1933, when he stated, “let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

Napolitano, like Attorney General Eric Holder and others in the Obama administration, prefer to leave the “terror” nameless and unjustified, and nothing to fear. After all, fear by Americans of the terror of Islamic jihad would obstruct the “reaching out” to our enemies, because Obama and his administration do not plan to combat Islam. Napolitano’s evasive “nuance” is a nemesis.

In the wake of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission’s decision on August 3rd that the shuttered Burlington Coat Factory building two blocks from Ground Zero, and damaged when a hijacked plane slammed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11, did not merit “landmark” status, the furor over the decision and the Cordoba mosque (now being referred to as the “9/11 mosque”) has been growing. The decision paved the way for its demolition and construction in its place of Cordoba House, billed publicly as a “community center” but in reality a mosque that will serve as a symbol of conquest ten years after the “tragic” event.

The moving “spirits” behind the mosque, Imam Feisal Rauf and his wife, Daisy Khan, often refer to the nearly 3,000 people who were slaughtered on 9/11 as practically “fatalities” or “tragic victims.” On the contrary, because Islam has been waging war against the West for decades, and in particular against the United States, “fatalities” or “victims” is a deliberately misleading term. Fatalities occur in accidents or natural disasters. The correct term in the context of Islamic jihad is casualties. War causes casualties, not fatalities or victims.

Even those wise to the Islamic jihad mistakenly refer to the Americans who perished on 9/11 as “innocent victims.” But in the eyes of Islam, they were all guilty, as much the enemy as an American soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Indeed, Rauf holds the U.S. responsible for goading those bad “extremists” into attacking the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and very likely the White House. This is consistent with the Muslim attitude towards the Muslim rapes of Muslim and non-Muslim women. Somehow, because of some act of “immodesty,“ the rape victims invite assault, and are guiltier than are their assailants.

Hailing the Landmarks Commission‘s decision, The Washington Post exhibited its typical pious, liberal/left amnesia:

We understand the sensitivities and the emotions that have accompanied every decision related to Lower Manhattan since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But many of the protests used the murderous actions of 19 Muslim fanatics on that awful day to smear the entire religion of Islam. To succumb to that kind of bigotry would be to give in to the extremists who want to finish what those hijackers started.

I detest Islam because it is one of the most degrading, anti-mind, anti-individual, collectivist creeds in existence. I detest it for all the crimes it has committed throughout history, perhaps more than I do the crimes committed by the Catholic Church in its heyday, perhaps more than the atrocities committed by any religious creed. I understand the sensitivities and emotions of all their victims. So, if that is bigotry, I will make the most of it. For Islam is distinct from all other creeds for the reason that it is, from top to bottom, virulently anti-life.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs famously toes the liberal/left party line, as evident in his response to a question about President Barack Obama’s position on the Ground Zero mosque.

I think this is rightly a matter for the local community….I think you’ve heard this administration and the last administration talk about the fact that we’re not at war with a religion, but with an idea that has corrupted a religion. But that hasn’t been said. I’m not from here going to get involved in a local decision-making like that….Again, I think it is a decision that is appropriately debated at the local level….

We are not at war "with a religion," but with "an idea that has corrupted a religion"? Islam is a "corrupted religion"? I am surprised that CAIR, the ISNA and MPAC have not jumped on such a derogatory and insulting remark and demanded an apology. But, Gibbs' remark is based on an ignorance of Islam. A “religion of peace” that encourages in its principal documents conquest, slavery, dhimmitude, honor killings, child marriage, pedophilia, and intolerance cannot be "corrupted." No, Mr. Gibbs, An idea did not corrupt Islam. The idea you allude to -- which is indiscriminate killing and universal submission -- resides in it. It is corruption incarnate.

It is a testament to the corrupting and emasculating influence of political correctness that so many people cannot or will not grasp the fact that Islam is just as much a political ideology as it is a religion. These two elements are as integral to its identity and driving force as the arms of a swastika. Take away one swastika arm, and the one left is a meaningless zigzag: this could represent the vitriolic blueprint for conquest. But remove instead that arm, and one has in the other arm an unintegrated, wholly arbitrary litany of bizarre imperatives passing as a moral code. All of it, of course, purportedly authored by a rapacious, brutal, murderous, pedophilic barbarian who is also the creed’s saintly “prophet.” Without both arms, Islam would have an identity antithetical to what it actually is.

The comparison of Islam here with Nazism is not a throw-away analogy. Islam and Nazism share fundamental ideological tenets and premises. It is no coincidence that Islam is compatible with Nazism. Hitler and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem agreed wholeheartedly on that point. That agreement was not confined exclusively to their mutual hatred of Jews. The Grand Mufti envied Hitler for the whole of his ideology and for having brought it to fruition.

Islam is Islam. It means to conquer. The Cordoba mosque will serve as a field headquarters for more Islamic dawa, meaning indoctrination, proselytizing, recruitment, and fund-raising, behind the façade of a “community center.“ Rauf repeats the line we have heard from Presidents Bush and Obama, that the 9/11 hijackers were "extremists" or "Muslim fanatics." Or have Bush and Obama simply parroted what they have been told by spokesmen like Rauf (via CAIR, the ISNA, and other “civic” organizations)? They were enacting the core tenets of Islam. Islam means "submission," and the community board and the Landmark Preservation Commission submitted. The talking heads of the MSM denigrate anyone who opposes the mosque on moral grounds by calling them "racist" or "demagogues" or “bigoted.”

Imam Rauf, the prime mover behind the mosque, has terrorist ties, and it is known to just about everyone but the Washington Post and the rest of the establishment press that when such figureheads talk of "peace" and "interfaith dialogue" in English to dhimmis and kaffirs, in Arabic they mean the opposite. And it is in Arabic that they mean what they say.

Those who hail the Landmarks Commission decision as a victory for “religious freedom“, such as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, should wake up and smell the blood, because it is not roses or religious freedom the Islamists are offering. It is submission and creeping Sharia law.

On August 6th The Daily Telegraph (London) featured an article that seemed to address the ignorance of politicians on the subject of Islam, “Our dangerous dalliance with radical Islam.” To date it has generated nearly 500 responses, the majority of them castigating Andrew Gilligan, the writer, for his dangerous dalliance with dhimmitude. One reader, “Mark,” wrote:

Mr. Gilligan, you have fallen for the pabulum that there is a distinction to be made between Islamism and Islam. And you have made that distinction – erroneously.

There is but one Islam, and that's Islam proper. No self-respecting Muslim would talk of Islamism, for he would know that such a term is a nonsense made up by ill-informed kufaar, or infidels.

To be a Muslim means to submit to the will of Allah (the root verb is salama), and to follow his messenger, Muhammad. All Muslims believe that Muhammad was the perfect man – al insaan al kamil. Good Muslims follow his lead and his example.

What Westerners call good Muslims, Muslims call fallen ones! They are moderate by dint of the fact that they do not follow correctly and closely the teachings of their prophet. Once they do, they become, in the eyes of people like you, Islamists.

We have a huge problem here in the West. First of all, we have to learn about Islam, and understand it; then we have to be determined to take the action it will take to purge the West of this cancer. If we cannot bring ourselves to do this, we will go down.

For yourinformation, Islam has snuffed out each and every culture it has been allowed into. Ours will be no different.

My own response, which iterated many points I have made in past commentaries, garnered over eighty reader recommendations:

Mr. Gilligan writes: "Islam is a religion, practiced by millions of British citizens who have never sought to overthrow anything in their lives. Islamism is a revolutionary political doctrine, supported by a small minority of Muslims, whose aim is to overthrow secular democratic government and replace it with Islamic government." On the contrary, Islam is a political/religious ideology. Its core tenets sanction and encourage conquest, murder, or enslavement of infidels, dhimmis, and kaffirs. Sharia law is its political element. The political element aims to establish Islam as the only "true" faith, allowing no others. It does not allow "tolerance" or "interfaith dialogue."

Prominent spokesmen for Islam (the so-called "non-violent" kind) practice taqiya, or lying to beguile non-Muslims into thinking that Islam is “pacific“; this is sanctioned by the Koran to advance Islam by stealth or fraud. Islam cannot be "reformed" into a non-belligerent creed without gutting the Koran and associated tracts of their violent imperatives. If those are removed, what's left would be a "pacific" creed skin to the Quaker or Amish. If "pacific," non-violent Muslims are the majority, why do they not volubly condemn their "violent" brethren? Because they choose not to, or because they fear the consequences. Wake up, Mr. Gilligan: You've been lied to. You are a perfect dhimmi.

One reader opened with the statement that he was a “practicing Muslim.” The rest of what he had to say was agreement with Gilligan that there is a distinction to be made between Islam and “radical Islam” or “Islamism,“ His comments amounted to an apologia for Islam.

But, what is a “practicing Muslim”? A practicing Muslim, one who applies the core teachings of his creed, is a terrorist. All other Muslims are passive, sham Muslims, much like most of their to-be-conquered, or to-be-enslaved, or to-be-slain Christian opposites of all sects, the “go to church on Sunday” believers. Sham Muslims are the silent dross who do not, or dare not, question the core tenets of Islam that motivate their more “activist” or consistent brethren. Sham Muslims exist merely to spur the population intifada in Western countries, to vote “Muslim” if political candidates demonstrate a sympathy for their alleged oppression, and to donate money to Islamic “charities,” which are basically fund-raising venues for terrorists.

Ten years ago it would have been inconceivable that anyone would suggest, let alone approve, the construction of a mosque on or anywhere near Ground Zero. But over the decade the enemy took the measure of the United States -- or at least of its political and cultural leaders -- and grew confident that it could mark its victory with such a mosque and gain the support of that leadership.

Cordoba House, if allowed to flaunt its triumph over America, will indeed be a moral and political “man-caused” disaster.

Crossposted at The Dougout