[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]
So the Ground Zero Imam Feisel decided to weigh in on Peter King’s hearings on radical Islam. Mind you, they haven’t actually happened yet, but for some reason the mere fact he going to have some kind of hearings justifies shutting it down. Why? Because his utterly peaceful co-religionists might go all terrorist over this.
I have long identified this as freeloading on terrorism, where a supposed “moderate” Muslim tells those of us in the West, don’t draw cartoons of Mohammed (pedophilia be upon him), don’t criticize his faith and so on. Because, you know, if you do, one of us Muslims are going to go and commit terrorism.
In short, don’t actually exercise and enjoy your freedom. Live your lives limited by intimidation. And then we will get along famously.
So he reaps the benefit of terrorism, without having the gonads to blow himself up. Hey, Imam, instead of trying to talk us out of exercising our freedom, if you really think your co-religionists can’t be expected to control themselves, why don’t you work on that instead? That seems like the bigger problem to me.
It comes down to this. Either Islam is compatible with freedom or it is not. And by “compatible with freedom” I mean that a Muslim has to be able to see this…
…and not hurt anyone else. I mean the point of that cartoon is to say that Islam is uniquely violent. And you don’t exactly rebut it by threatening to murder anyone who calls your faith violent, okay? And if you can’t expect Muslims to deal with criticism, blasphemy, etc. without going on a killing spree, then Islam is not compatible with American freedom. And I don’t think you want to see where that road takes us.
But I know for a fact this isn’t true. I know of and work with Muslims every day who would never resort to violence over that kind of thing. They rightly consider statements like Imam Feisel’s as a betrayal of those millions of good Muslims who believe in freedom and Allah.
But it is hypocritical, Imam Feisel, to try to reap the benefits of terrorism without admitting responsibility for terrorism. It is hypocritical to pretend to denounce terrorism while simultaneously enabling it. And It is hypocritical to say that your people will murder over mere words, but to simultaneously pretend that Islam is not a problem in America.
And when you act this way, Feisel, you enable terrorism.
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Also, previously I fisked the GZM Imam, here (language warning at the link).
That part is hardly shocking. As Weigel notes, the real news may be in the acknowledgement that NPR doesn’t really need federal funding to survive — indeed, he says, NPR would be better off without it:
The issue with public radio is not just the overweening liberal bias it shares with many other news outlets. The issue is more fundamental: we can’t afford it. I don’t care how small a percentage of the budget it is. The attitude that we can keep everything that is unnecessary because it is a relatively small expenditure is part of the problem. We can’t afford it. Period.
Now Republicans can kill the funding entirely … and when leftists scream that defunding will kill NPR, Republicans can respond with this.
UPDATE: When I first wrote this exec was “now former” that was wrong. That’s what I get for relying on Weigel. But if he wasn’t “former” before, he is now. Maybe Weigel was just prescient!
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