An incident at the Columbia demonstration

Mike B. wrote:

You wrote: “The worst was two young men, dressed in Muslim outfits but not Middle Eastern looking, holding placards, one that wished for a mushroom cloud over Israel…”

Well I did find myself clutching that individual’s throat but a couple of officers assisted in prying me loose. I did remember to thank one of them for doing such a fine job of protecting our Muslims.

LA replied:

Is this a Dylanesque fantasy, or were there and I didn’t see you?

Mike replied:

I’m not joking about this. L____ is my witness.

At that point I telephoned Mike and asked him to tell me what had happened. He was at the demonstration earlier than I was, when the two Muslims with the mushroom-cloud poster and the wipe-Israel-off-the-map poster were on the east side of Broadway and 116th Street by the subway exit. A lot of people were angrily reacting to them, so to avoid an incident the police directed the two Muslims to cross Broadway. As one of them passed near Mike, Mike in a rage reached out with one hand and grabbed him hard by the throat. The Muslim was shocked. A police officer standing nearby disengaged Mike’s hand from the Muslim’s throat, but did not arrest him or anything. The guy Mike had attacked didn’t make a complaint to the police, he didn’t say anything at all. Then the two Muslims just proceeded to the west side of Broadway.

I told Mike it was interesting, our two parallel reactions to the same thing. When I saw those two, I thought, “I’ve never seen a poster in this country openly calling for the nuclear destruction of Israel. We have Bollinger to thank for this, because he invited Johnnie who has said the same things, and has thus licensed other people to say the same things.”

I had that intellectual reaction, grim and judgmental but not particularly emotional. Mike, looking at the same thing, had a visceral enraged reaction and grabbed one of the creeps by the throat.

- end of initial entry -

Leonard K. writes:

Did you know that the “Mushroom Cloud” Muslim is of Jewish (moreover, a Cohen!) extraction?

Bizarre!

LA replies:

Here is the story of the conversion of a Brooklyn Hasidic Jew named Cohen into a Jew-hating Muslim named Yousef al Khattab. It’s not particularly enlightening. Basically he wasn’t satisfied with Judaism, began to learn more about Islam, then read the Koran, and instantly, Shazzam!, that was it. The first three suras of that marvelous book answered all his troubling questions about the Jews and made complete sense to him, and he became a Muslim, soon followed by his wife and children.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 25, 2007 06:37 PM | Send