Georgetown honors Abdullah

Georgetown University, a formally (or should we say formerly?) Catholic institution, today bestowed an honorary degree on Jordan’s King Abdullah, a Georgetown graduate (the event was shown on C-SPAN). Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C. gave the opening prayer. He prayed to “Allah, the compassionate, the merciful,” repeatedly using the phrase “the compassionate, the merciful” and similar Islamic phrases, which were also heard from other speakers. Now I happen to like King Abdullah, who is a gentleman. In fact I regret that the Hashemite dynasty was not reinstalled in Iraq when we overthrew Saddam Hussein. But the sight of these attenuated, bland, perfectly PC Catholic clerics and university officials (who, in fact, have the same abstracted and soulless yet weirdly pious look as EU bureaucrats) ceremoniously praising Allah, the sight of a Moslem cleric, dressed in Western academic robes, giving a long closing prayer to Allah, and the sound of the audience quietly and devoutly saying “Amen,” gave me the feeling that America has already become Amerabia.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 21, 2005 10:10 PM | Send