John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus, has written a curious apologia for the irrational murders and riots taking place in Afghanistan in response to the inadvertent burning of Qurans at Bagram Airfield.  In "America's Image Problem in Afghanistan" in the Huffington Post, Feffer says that "the United States definitely sends mixed messages to the Muslim world."

The messages don't seem mixed.  Obama's abandonment of our allies, his alienation of Israel, and his deference and submission to the Muslim world: bowing to the Saudi king; groveling to the Muslim world at Al-Azhar University in June 2009; ordering NASA to extol the contributions of the Muslim world; giving vocal support to the reviled Ground Zero mosque at his Iftar gala; the administration's endless apologies for the Quran-burnings; his $800 million in aid to the Muslim Brotherhood for their Islamic Spring; his silence on the Egyptian hostage crisis; his billet doux to Iran's Khamenei; his gift of our drone to Iran; his scrubbing of any mention of jihad, even when jihadists discuss it themselves, from law enforcement counter-terrorism materials; his partnering with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on the suppression of free speech (i.e., the enforcement of Islamic blasphemy laws in the West) -- all this doesn't send any mixed message at all.

Feffer is, of course, referring to the burning of Qurans.  He says: "You'd think the U.S. army would be a little more careful. Last April, when members of the Dove World Outreach Center burned a Quran after putting it on trial, riots broke out in Afghanistan and left scores of people dead, including seven UN staff."

Terry Jones of Dove World Outreach Center didn't kill those people; Muslims did.  Our soldiers didn't desecrate those Qurans at Bagram Airfield; Muslims did when they wrote messages of killing and jihad inside them and used them for jihad plotting.  What's more, why should we be bound by sharia rules regarding treatment of the Quran?  That is not our holy book.  It will never be our holy book.

Yet Feffer nevertheless says that "the United States obviously has a serious image problem."  The United States' image problem is freedom.  It is a problem for those who wish to impose the most radical and extreme ideology on the face of the earth on the rest of us.  Feffer notes that "the Pentagon takes great pains to avoid charges of Islamophobia," but where is the cultural training for the Muslim world?  Where is the sensitivity training for the Muslim world?  When do they learn to play well with others?  Jihad is cutting its bloody swath across free and not-so-free countries, and hundreds of thousands of non-Muslims and non-practicing Muslims are paying the horrible price.  Ferrer can't ascribe all that to "Islamophobia."

Feffer complains: "It doesn't help that so many U.S. politicians talk about Islam as though it were the greatest enemy of humanity. ... Indeed, rarely does a day go by in the Republican primaries that one of the candidates doesn't defame Islam. Santorum and Gingrich have both laid it on thick with their wild accusations about the threat of sharia law and their misrepresentations of the Park51 Islamic cultural center."

We don't apologize for our greatness.  We don't apologize for who we are.  We are the greatest nation on earth.  John Feffer, on the other hand, wants us to surrender; Feffer likes what he sees on the other side of the abyss.  Feffer ought to back up his admiration and reluctance to criticize the human rights abuses inherent in Islamic law and go live under the sharia.  Maybe then he wouldn't be such a self-important clown.

But in the meantime, he whines that "fire-starters like Pamela Geller or Robert Spencer continue to badmouth not Islam or 'bad Muslims' or 'Islamic radicalism,' but mainstream Islam itself. Park51, which expanded the Geller-Spencer soapbox to monstrous proportions, was hardly the threat they made it out to be. If they'd only bothered to read the writings of the cultural center's founder, they might have discovered a philosophical co-religionist."

The problem for Feffer is that we actually did read Rauf's writings.  In his book, he advocated for the sharia -- the most radical, oppressive and extreme ideology on the planet.  But then he told lemmings like Feffer something else entirely.  Yet in reality, Rauf was a prominent member of the Perdana Organization that funded the jihad warship flotilla designed to provoke the tiny Jewish state into war.  On board, the "peace activists" were chanting a genocidal jihad chant referring back to Muhammad's massacre of the last Jews of Arabia.  And Rauf refused to condemn Hamas for months until pressed.

Yet despite all this, the earnestly self-deluded Feffer writes that Rauf "condemns Hamas as a terrorist organization," and yet, "for all his conservative tendencies, the imam remains an imam. In the eyes of Geller and Spencer, the only good Muslim is a secular Muslim."

No, the only good Muslim is one who doesn't want to commit jihad and subjugate unbelievers, doesn't want to impose the sharia on non-Muslims, doesn't want to subjugate women, and doesn't hate Jews.  Rauf, with his endorsement of the sharia and the jihad against Israel, hardly fits the bill.

Feffer concludes: "Somehow we must combine a principled engagement with the Muslim world with a principled withdrawal from areas of combat. If the troops don't come home and the drones don't stop killing civilians, fine speeches and sensitivity trainings will just seem like hypocrisy, our words and our images will remain far apart, and the chasm between the West and Islam will endure, nowhere more so than in the imaginations of those twin extremists, the Taliban and the Islamophobes."

Here he finally gets to the twisted and malevolent point that he has been dying to make throughout the whole article: that Geller and Spencer, et al. are the same thing as the Taliban, who torture, maim, cut off clitorises, carry out acid attacks, gas girls' schools, and marry little prepubescent girls.  It's a propaganda effort that would make Goebbels proud.

These are the enemedia embeds who get work at Puff Ho.  I have not written there, nor have my peers, but these American-haters and liars are welcomed.  (I even submitted this very piece to them, responding to Feffer's charges against me, but the HuffPo did not even bother to reply.)

Pamela Geller is the publisher of AtlasShrugs.com and the author of Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance (WND Books) and The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War On America (Simon & Schuster).