Ground Zero Imam Rauf Blames Radicalization of Muslims On Free Speech

In the United States, we have the right to Free Speech. For instance, I am allowed by law to say, Jesus sucks George Bush's cock. That is allowed.

There have been plays depicting Jesus as a homosexual. There are articles in major periodicals depicting the God of the Bible as a misogynistic, hateful being. TV shows depict men "accidentally" urinating on images of Jesus.

All these are allowed because of Freedom of Speech. And, it is a good thing they are because if there was a question as to whether to allow such expression, then we would find ourselves at the mercy of Judge's and random laws flung here and there according to whims and fads of the various times we live through.

Thank God for the First Amendment. Speech, writing, art, movies, TV, these are the ways we express ourselves as individual human beings. These are the ways in which we organize our thinking. These are the ways in which we improve our lives, in a slow crawl, with many detours and steps backwards, through the centuries.

But, if we leave the First Amendment up to the Muslim world, it will be destroyed. Muslims simply do not believe in Free Speech. Simple as that.

Look at the "moderate" Imam Rauf as a prime example:



This television appearance (thanks to Awake) is not the first time Rauf has turned the prospect of Muslim rage into a veiled threat against those who speak critically of Islam or behavior by Muslims, and implied that Muslims cannot control themselves in response.


Note how, in his remarks below, "radicalized" Muslims are only reactors to provocations. It is automatic, and it is always the West's fault. Essentially, his argument depends on the idea of a one-way, almost gravitational pull by which all supposed "extremism" swirls -- "spirals," he says -- into what he ultimately portrays as an insensible hive of easily enraged drones who have no free will, and no self-restraint to keep from escalating the situation from words to physical violence.
It's not Islam... it's The Spiral.
In his attempts to defend Islam, he finds it necessary to insult the intelligence of his co-religionists. Where's the outrage about that? A transcription of his comments on radicalization follows below.

(1:16) "It's a cycle. The radicals fuel each other and feed on each other. So when something happens like this, it arouses hostility among the other, the non-Muslim community. You have a Christ[ian]- evangelical leader, for example who says Islam is an evil religion. That becomes the banner headline in the Muslim world, both domestically, and more important, overseas. It arouses hostility there. The Danish cartoon -- the Danish paper commissions cartoons. It creates hostility in the Muslim world. People in the West begin to say, oh, look, there's no freedom of speech, and you create this cycle, this spiral. It is this spiral that we have to stop.

A call to curtail free speech:

"If you really want to understand how, what creates radicalization, is the radical extremist discourse that comes from all sides. And this is what we have to stop."