The enemy at the gate

By Don Watson

The enemy is at the gate and Michael Bloomberg wants to sing Kumbaya.

At least that is what it feels like.

It reminds me of a weirdly comical Far Side cartoon where the Indians have laid siege to the fort and the Calvary are looking down in horror as the dim witted cook opens the doors to take out the garbage. We can criticize Bloomberg but this is not a joke.

Everything about this Mosque positively reeks of Islamic hegemony. It is a historic tradition for Muslims to build their mosques on top of the religious sites they have conquered; The Temple Mount, The Cordoba mosque, the Umayyad Mosque in Syria etc. It is a list too long to mention and it is not just ancient history. In 1981 Muslims converted the Catholic Sint-Ignatiuskerk into the Faith Mosque and a synagogue in the Hague into the Aksa Mosque. In Afganistan the Taliban blew up the world famous Buddhist statues not long before 9/11. In Turkey and Crypus Synagogues and Churches were taken over and converted to Mosques in 1974.

The ground zero Mosque is part of this pattern. It is being called the Cordoba House because some historians have described that period and place as a time when there was a true heterodoxy of faith. The Christians and the Jews still paid the special tax for their right to practice their religion as a provision of Sharia. The dhimma of medieval Cordoba was the traditional practice of a hegemonic Islam where non Muslims had no rights before the law, Islamic law, which was the law of the land. They had their own laws which were a back seat to anything Islam. That Imam Rauf would think this is a shining example of coexistence is alarming.

Imam Rauf has said that Sharia law is almost like the Declaration of Independence. In other words American culture is almost as good as Islamic culture. Really? He gauges American culture by its conformity to Sharia like measuring a shoe for the fitting. Again alarming. This man has already been exposed for what he is by Fox, 60 minutes and others.

The Greek Orthodox Church that was destroyed at ground zero, despite enormous support for its restoration, (financially documented by the way) remains mired in the usual red tape that makes projects like that poke along at a snail's pace. This mosque on the other hand has very little popular support and yet seems to be enjoying an accelerated fast tract for such a controversial project. Once again Christianity is taking a back seat to Islam. Again we see the pattern.

Bloomberg is no Guliani. He appears to be caught like a deer in the headlights intimidated by Islam on the one hand (threats of being labeled Islamophobic? why else the fast tract?) and trying to hide it by righteously defending freedom of religion and property rights on the other.