Feisal “The Bridge Builder” Rauf threatens terrorism if he doesn’t get his way

Daniel S. writes:

Feisal Abdul Rauf, the not-so-moderate imam of the planned Ground Zero mosque, is threatening that if the mosque is not built America should expect increased jihad attacks. This is akin to the assorted political and media establishment figures blaming Terry Jones for future jihad attacks against Americans for burning copies of the Koran. So once again we are being told that we had better cave into Muslim demands or else expect more jihad and that any further attacks will be our own fault.

LA replies:

Yes. Also to the point would be a comparison between Rauf’s statement and those of various “moderate” Muslims in Britain, including those who were officially recognized and given special positions as honored moderates, who then said that if the British did various objectionable things, the result would be that jihadist attacks against Britain would increase. There was, for example, the Muslim Miss England a few years ago who said that the British expectation that moderate Muslims actually oppose the radical Muslims, in order to prove the moderates’ moderateness, was “stereotyping” moderate Muslims. She said that Britain’s condign punishment for such “stereotyping” was that the moderate Muslims were turning and would turn into terrorists. (Read the entry on Muslim Miss England, which gets at the heart of the madness of believing that moderate Muslims are the solution to radical Islam). There was no response from the British establishment to this gross revelation of what the moderate Muslims were really up to, namely, holding Britain hostage.

In the same way, the “moderate” Rauf is openly engaged in the act of holding America hostage. Yet virtually no establishment figures grasp this. Why don’t they grasp it? Because if they did, they would have to recognize that Islam—notwithstanding the “moderates” like Rauf, and notwithstanding the existence of a powerless and irrelevant contingent of Muslims who personally have nothing to do with Islamic supremacism—is, as a community and in practical terms, our fixed and determined enemy; and if they recognized that, they would have to treat Islam as an enemy, which would mean, at the very least, ceasing to welcome Muslims in our country; and if they did that, the sacred and holy basis of modern America, which is tolerance and inclusion of all peoples without any discrimination of any kind, would have to be abandoned. Rather than do the very thing that they see as most illiberal and most evil, namely to condemn and exclude a culturally different people, the establishment figures and liberals generally (which includes many “conservatives”) will prefer to let the Muslims Islamize America.

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N. writes:

A friend of mine put it this way. If a panhandler comes up and asks for five bucks, we know what he is, a beggar. On the other hand, if another panhandler comes up, asks for five bucks and then says “If I do not get what I am asking you for, I shall be enraged!” and he waves a knife in the air, we also know what we are dealing with: an attempt at armed robbery.

The trouble is, liberals can’t tell the difference between a beggar and an armed robber, not on the large, civilizational scale anyway.

LA replies:

You’re right, but let’s make the example more precise. If a panhandler came up and asked you for five bucks, while pointing to a much larger, knife-wielding man a few feet away and saying, “If I do not get what I am asking you for, that other guy shall be enraged!”, you would know what you were dealing with: an attempt at armed robbery.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 10, 2010 09:21 AM | Send