American Spectator:

The Sharia-Compliant American Left
By George Neumayr on 9.23.10

Vladimir Lenin said that westerners too dumb to recognize his plans to "hang them" would "sell me the rope -- on credit." And they did, engaging in decades of excuse-making for Communist totalitarianism. But without the Soviets around, the American left needed new anti-western totalitarians to mollify, and the leaders of militant Islam satisfied that itch.

In the 1970s, the American left embraced the Ayatollah Khomeini. Jimmy Carter's United Nations representative, Andrew Young, said that in time Khomeini would be seen as "some kind of saint." The BBC and New York Times defended Khomeini as a potential progressive during his days as a Parisian layabout in exile. Carter's ambassador to Iran assured the skeptical that "Khomeini is a Gandhi-like figure."

Today's American left displays its useful idiocy by insisting after each new act of Islamic terrorism that "Islam is a religion of peace." MSNBC is the unofficial headquarters for these useful idiots and now numbers the mugging and giggling morning host and "Republican" lightweight Joe Scarborough as a member in good standing. In between goofing around with Carter adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski's stuck-up daughter Mika, Scarborough often shills for the Gandhi-like figures of Islam today. He longs for that glorious day when fellow Republicans abandon their bigotry and see a mosque near the ruins of the World Trade Center as American as apple pie.

Eugene Robinson, whom MSNBC hosts incessantly introduce as a "Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist" before his insight-free appearances, wrote a column this week titled "Sharia the new Red menace?" Robinson chuckled at Newt Gingrich's recent comment that Sharia law is seeping into western countries through "stealth jihadis."

"The 'stealth jihadis,' I suppose, must be like the 'known communists' on the list in Sen. Joseph McCarthy's hand," wrote Robinson, a gibe sure to impress peers at the Post and New York Times who for years insisted Alger Hiss wasn't a Communist. Robinson appears oblivious to the fact that western liberals themselves have endorsed the spread of Sharia law.

In 2008, Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, supported the adoption of elements of Sharia law in Britain. "It seems unavoidable and, as a matter of fact, certain conditions of Sharia are already recognized in our society," he said. Williams called for "plural jurisdiction" and "constructive accommodation."

The American left's face of moderate Islam, the Ground Zero mosque imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, wrote for Eugene Robinson's own employer in 2008 that Rowan Williams "was right": "The addition of Sharia law to 'the law of the land,' in this case British law, complements, rather than undermines, existing legal frameworks. The Archbishop was right. It is time for Britain to integrate aspects of Islamic law."

Robinson finds it absurd that Gingrich would say, "How we don't have some kind of movement in this country on the left that understands that sharia is a direct mortal threat to virtually every value that the left has is really one of the most interesting historical questions." But Gingrich is hardly the first person to make this point. Liberals such as the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci and Salman Rushdie complained about the obtuseness of progressive Islamophiles long before Gingrich talked about it. When Tony Blair wowed progressives in 2005 by naming Sir Iqbal Sacranie as the face of moderate Islam in the U.K, Rushdie had to remind his peers that Sacranie approved of the fatwa on his head (saying "death is perhaps too easy" for Rushdie) and had boycotted a Holocaust remembrance.

Communism's useful idiots sold Lenin and his successors the rope to hang them. Islam's apologists will not only sell the jihadists the rope to hang westerners but will acquit them through Sharia law after they do.