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COMMENTARY
August 4, 2010
Cordoba blues
Newt Gingrich -- one of my favourite American politicians, along with Sarah Palin and some others who make progressive Canadians choke on their breakfast cereal -- has waded, at the U.S. national level, into what might be dismissed as a municipal concern.The issue is the building of an immense mosque and "community centre," overlooking the Ground Zero site from the 9/11 attacks on Manhattan. It is called the Cordoba Initiative, in memory of the grand mosque in Andalusia, erected in the ninth and 10th centuries on the foundations of the demolished grand Visigothic church in that city. In Islamist, and indeed general Islamic legend, that mosque symbolized the conquest of Christian Spain by Muslim armed forces (later reversed in the "Reconquista" by armed Christian forces). The choice of name, as well as the choice of scale, is worthy of attention. The chief promoter of the scheme, Faisel Abdul Rauf, is himself an imam who, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, suggested that the U.S. was itself largely responsible for being hit. He will not say where the money is coming from (despite some journalistic hounding). Till otherwise proven, the assumption must be that most comes from the usual source: Saudi Arabia, a country whose religious affairs department has generously endowed Sunni Muslim infrastructure all over the world, from an immense oil revenue. It is also, if my reader needs reminding, a country in which the practice of any religion but Islam is absolutely banned, and grievously punished. All Saudi proposals for "interfaith dialogue" should be considered in that sharp light. What I have just written is a rough summary of Gingrich's arguments. I can find nothing false in them. He adds a more subtle argument, that, while terribly controversial, cannot be permanently ignored. It is that America's mortal Islamist enemies are not lunatics. Rather, they are acting logically, from doctrine reasonably ascribed to the Koran -- that all who resist the imposition of Shariah would be better off not existing, and that active measures are required to compel submission to the Will of Allah. As Gingrich says, secular progressive types cannot understand religious zeal; and what they cannot understand, they cannot see. Hence ludicrous events, such as that in Canada, when Mark Steyn was hauled before a human rights tribunal for accurately quoting the declarations of prominent Islamists, as if he were the bigot. The same impulse silences open discussion of the Islamist threat, everywhere in the West, and Gingrich is using the almost lewd example of the proposed Cordoba Mosque to break this "liberal taboo." We cannot win the "war on terror" (an expression itself now banned within the Obama administration) if we refuse to name the enemy. It may take some time; but we couldn't have prevailed in the Cold War without naming "Communism" as the enemy advancing not only by armed means, but also by stealth, subversion, and the cultivation of useful idiots among Western progressive elites. By contrast, New York's politically correct mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has welcomed the mosque as an expression of multiculturalism. He has taken the promoters' arguments at face value, that it will be dedicated to "peace," and welcomed such public-relations gambits as an afterthought proposal to include a memorial to the victims of 9/11 within it. (This week, the city removed the last significant bureaucratic hurdle to the mosque's construction.) But, as the Communists before them with their "peace" fronts, the Islamists use "peace" to mean a much different thing from what we mean by the word. It is a drollness on their part, and it is understood that "peace" will come when all those who could resist their power have been annihilated. Bloomberg, in this case, is playing the useful idiot. A columnist in the States (Hinkle in the Richmond Times-Despatch) compares their debate over illegal immigration to watching a contest between two teams of contortionists. Nobody wants to make too clear what he may be advocating. In office, both Democrats and Republicans have done the same things: nothing to fix the problem, but plenty to suggest they really care. It is the same in almost every controversial issue, both there and here. Thanks to what is inadequately called "political correctness," nobody quite dares to spit the marbles that have tumbled from out of his cranium, into his mouth. Except, when somebody does speak plainly, all sides agree to be shocked. The issues are not unrelated, incidentally. There is growing evidence that Hezbollah, and perhaps other Islamist terror networks, are buying into Mexican drug gangs to transport their agents across the international frontier into such states as Arizona. Alas, such is the nature of politics and journalism today, that the issue will not be front-paged until said agents blow something up. Then the issue will be: "Why didn't anyone do something to stop them?" David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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