NY Post Posted in Real clear Politics June 14, 2016 What we really need to reject is Islamophobia-phobia Kyle Smith A dangerous mindset has taken hold in America, but it isn’t Islamophobia. It’s Islamophobia-phobia. In a large and growing segment of American society, fear of being tagged “ racist” about Muslims (though Islam is not a race) provides a much more direct threat to your livelihood than radical Islam. Former police officer Daniel Gilroy told Florida Today that he repeatedly raised red flags about Omar Mateen when both men worked at the same security firm, but his employer did nothing because Mateen was a Muslim. The pattern is familiar. Before the Islamist attack that left 14 dead in San Bernardino last December, neighbor Aaron Elswick told ABC 7 News in Los Angeles that shooter Syed Farook was “kind of suspicious” and Elswick “ wanted to report it” but “didn’t want to profile” him. Before Army Maj. Nidal Hasan murdered 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, “He made his views known, and he was very vocal, he had extremely radical jihadist views,” Lt. Col. Val Finnell told FoxNews.com. Finnell took health-services classes with Hasan, who said, “I’m a Muslim first, and I hold the Shariah, the Islamic Law, before the United States Constitution,” according to Finnell. That statement alone disqualified Hasan from military service. No one did anything, Finnell added, because “they were too concerned about being politically correct.” Perhaps nothing could have been done to stop Mateen’s rampage, but I have a sickening suspicion that we’re going to learn that many more warnings went unseen by those who blindfolded themselves with political correctness. No one wants Muslims to feel harassed as a class, but it’s silly to pretend that being a Muslim makes you just another patch in the glorious American quilt, like being black or Jewish or gay. In a poll of British Muslims, a majority said homosexuality should be illegal. Nearly a quarter said Shariah law should be imposed in Britain. Four percent — that’s tens of thousands of people — admitted they sympathized with suicide bombers. The Islamophobic-phobic-in-Chief pooh-poohs both the terrorist threat and its ideological root. President Obama likes to say that bathtubs kill more Americans than terrorists. I’d like to see him try that argument with the families of the victims of the Orlando massacre. Last year Obama actually chided us that we shouldn’t look askance at Islam because Christians committed violent acts, too, during the Crusades, 600 or so years ago. I’d like to see him tell the Orlando families that, too. Obama is the avatar of the false moral equivalence that, having infected elite universities in the 1960s, has gradually metastasized to infect virtually the entire elite class of American society, along with a large chunk of the cringing, guilt-ridden bourgeoisie. The supreme rule is the severely undergraduate notion that everyone and everything is roughly equal. We like our ideas, but, hey, if you have a different point of view, that’s groovy, too. Taking it to its most absurd conclusion, as Obama does, the ideal holds that Western liberal democracy and murderous medieval fanaticism should each be given a fair hearing. At his National Prayer Breakfast speech last year, Obama euphemistically referred to global jihad as “this”: “This is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith … We should start with some basic humility. I believe that the starting point of faith is some doubt — not being so full of yourself and so confident that you are right.” They believe this, we believe that. Who’s to say who’s wrong? Obama’s response to the global culture clash is a shrug. When it comes to an ideology opposed to everything the US stands for — tolerance for gays being one of the top items on the list — Obama must be the first president in history to see himself as a trans-national figure who has to be scrupulously neutral about America’s role. Hillary Clinton might be the second. In an unusually candid moment at Georgetown in 2014, she let slip that she saw Islamist fanatics as a sort of loyal opposition with reasonable requests: “Smart power,” she said then, means “showing respect even for one’s enemies. Trying to understand, insofar as psychologically possible, empathize with their perspective and point of view. Helping to define the problems, determine the solutions.” How would that work? “Omar, you want to massacre dozens of gays. Would you be willing to compromise on that?”
-- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
