PrintJanuary 5, 2007
Dogfight over MSP
If you arrive at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, 16th busiest in the world (just behind JFK and ahead of Hong Kong International), with a seeing eye dog and want to take a taxi, you may be out of luck. God help you if it is January and the temperature is twenty degrees below zero, for you may be refused service. Somali Muslim taxi drivers, who comprise roughly three quarters of the supply of drivers there, think that Muslim law regards dog saliva as unclean, and they want to make their religious beliefs the basis on which they supply service to the traveling public.
They also do not like alcohol, so if they think you are carrying tax free booze or some bottles of Napa Valley nectar, they don't want you defiling the vehicles they pilot. So far, there is no word of their behavior if they suspect you are homosexual, but it is well known that the Quran prescribes death for gays.
It is passing strange that the airport in my home town has become a nonviolent battleground in the jihadist campaign to impose dhimmitude on Americans. Normally, dhimmitude has followed the conquest of a people by Islamic warriors, who then impose Shari'a law on their infidel subjects, allowed to live in peace only if they accept formally inferior status (riding only on donkeys, not horses, for instance) and pay a special tax, the jizya. That is the historic Islamic version of tolerance. You probably don't want to think about what intolerance involves, although Andrew Bostom has published a scholarly examination of it, The Legacy of Jihad, which makes bloodcurdling reading.
This time around, jihad is creeping in on cat's feet, to borrow a phrase from Sandburg. Ironically veiled in the guise of tolerance, immigrants are imposing their beliefs on the land which has generously offered them refuge, ample welfare benefits, and tolerance, after they fled from their own hellhole country, even today enmeshed in violent struggle between jihadis and those who resist them.
The Congressman representing the district bordering MSP is none other than America's first Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison. Doesn't the Congressman have a duty to explain to the local Muslim taxi drivers that they are not in a position to impose Shari'a on the traveling public? At least for now, anyway.
MSP, as it is known in the code of world airports, was originally named Wold-Chamberlain Field, honoring Ernest Groves Wold and Cyrus Foss Chamberlain, the first two area pilots who gave their lives in combat during World War I. These two warriors were unafraid of a dogfight. It remains to be seen whether or not the bureaucrats who administer the facility which once honored them, and the politicians who supervise them, will have the guts to stand up and proclaim that voluntary dhimmitude betrays the ideals for which Wold and Chamberlain sacrificed their lives.
