Victor Davis Hanson On Imam Rauf

PASTORIUS CUTTING IN ON ALWAYS ON WATCH'S POST:

Victor Davis Hanson brilliantly sums up the situation for anyone who might think American condemnation of the Mosque epitomizes "American bigotry". Check this out:

Note that the world is not talking about banning the burqa in France, or shutting down a mosque in Germany. Much less are we familiar with the Russians leveling Muslim Grozny or the Chinese rounding up and jailing or shooting Muslims. And, of course, few care that the Saudis, whether the public or the government, would jail a Christian who built a church in Riyadh, or kill a nonbeliever who tried to enter Mecca. 

No, the world is not talking about all those issues. Instead, the world is looking to America, simultaneously to condemn and to emulate. The rest of the world does not know what to do in the face of the Hydra-headed Islamic beast. America, along with nations like Denmark and Israel, is attempting to deal with the situation on largest scale of basic principles, rather than on a piecemeal issue by issue basis.

(With a hat tip to Cube)

From National Review Online:

The Cynical Brilliance of Imam Rauf

Almost everything about the proposed Ground Zero mosque was cynically brilliant.

Start with the notion of a “Cordoba Initiative.” In the elite modern Western mind, Cordoba has been transmogrified into a mythical Lala Land of interfaith tolerance. To invoke the city is to prove one’s ecumenical credentials. Just ask our president, who, in his June 2009 Cairo speech, fantastically claimed that the Muslim city taught us tolerance while Christians were launching the Inquisition (1478) — quite a feat two and a half centuries after most of the Muslims of Cordoba had fled, converted, or been cleansed during the city’s fall (1236) to the Christian forces of the Reconquista. But no matter, we got the president’s drift about who was supposedly tolerant and who was not.

In truth, apart from a brief cultural renaissance, Cordoba, during its five centuries of Islamic rule, was not especially tolerant of nonbelievers. And, like most medieval cities, it was plagued by coups, assassinations, and right-wing clerical intolerance; it was a place where books were both burned and written. But that is not the point of citing Cordoba. Surely Feisal Abdul Rauf knows all that and more: Cordoba is as much a mythical construct of a long-ago multicultural paradise so dear to elite liberals as it is a fantasy rallying cry to Islamists to reclaim the lost Al-Andalus.

So Cordoba is a two-birds-with-one-stone evocation: in the liberal West proof of one’s ecumenical bona fides; in the Middle East proof of one’s Islamist bona fides. It would be easy to find a city emblematic of interfaith outreach other than the Andalusian Cordoba — from Jerusalem to Ann Arbor — but then the irony would be lost.

Then we come to Imam Rauf himself. To his liberal defenders, he is a sort of respectable Deepak Chopra who at respectable places like Aspen mouths pop platitudes of interfaith tolerance — so much so that our own State Department has employed him, apparently for quite some time, for goodwill gallivanting abroad.

But to those in the Middle East, he is known equally well for doing what he can, as a Western liberal, to contextualize terrorism, bin Laden, and Islamic extremism within the tired Western postmodern tropes of cultural relativism...

An excellent essay! Read the whole thing HERE. Worth your time.