“On Jan. 4, I will go swear an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. I’ll place my hand on the Quran…” — from a remark by Keith Ellison quoted in this article
Whether or not the Qur’an is actually used in the ceremony hardly matters. What matters is that Keith Ellison believes — with the firm faith of the convert, a faith that is often much more firm and often much more fanatical than many a Muslim born into Islam — that the Qur’an is the uncreated and immutable Word of God. And that Qur’an is full of things about the duty of Jihad, about the duty of behaving toward all non-Muslims with at least (“do not take Christians and Jews as friends” etc.) and at most sheer murderousness (“kill the Unbelievers” etc.).
How does someone who claims that he believes in a faith that is more than a faith, that is an entire way of life, a Total Regulation of Life, a Complete Explanation of the Universe, a way of life that tells its adherents that they must always and everywhere be submissive, and must acquire if they do not already possess the habit of mental submission to Allah, and never to use their own reason to question his will or for that matter his whim, claim to uphold the U.S. Constitution, which is based on a quite different series of premises?
How does a Muslim, who if he is a real Muslim must locate political legitimacy can never reside in the expressed will of mere mortals, but only in the will expressed by Allah in the Qur’an (and as glossed by the Hadith and the Sira) manage to support the political and legal institutions of this or any Infidel country? How can he give such support especially to a country that so noisily makes a fetish of democracy and that expressed will of the people, and enshrines individual rights, not one of which — freedom of speech including that of mocking any and all belief-systems, legal equality of men and women, and of all religions (“Islam is to dominate, and not to be dominated”) — is protected by Islamic law?
Is Keith Ellison a real Muslim? That is, does he believe that “Islam is to dominate and is not to be dominated”? Does he take Muhammad as the Perfect Man, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil? And so does he therefore endorses the attack on the Khaybar Oasis, the murders of Abu Afak and Asma bint Marwan, the consummation of that “marriage” to little Aisha when she was aged nine, and the beheading of the bound prisoners of the Banu Qurayza, and so much more? Either he does, or he doesn’t. Either he is loyal to the American Constitution, or he is loyal to Islam, which in every important particular flatly contradicts both the spirit and the letter of the American Constitution, as it does both the spirit and the letter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Is there not a single reporter in all of the United States — or especially in the state of Minnesota — who will look into this? Is there no reporter who will study it? Is there no reporter who will find out what Islam teaches, find out why the Muslim states, instead of becoming signatories to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, concocted a Muslim version that leaves out all of the most important individual rights recognized in the full, real, Infidel version?
Put Ellison on the spot. Ask him about all that. Ask what he thinks is the source of political legitimacy for governments — any government. Ask what he thinks of the specific rights in the Bill of Rights. Ask what he thinks, while you are at it, about the Arab Muslim treatment of black African Muslims in Darfur, or of other non-Arabs, such as the Kurds in Iraq, or the Berbers in Algeria. Ask him, and keep asking him, until an answer is received.
Even if Ellison is not sworn in with a Qur’an, his insistence on carrying it about is all the excuse one needs — if one is needed at all — to use this as the point of departure for discussion of what is in the Qur’an, and what Ellison makes of those passages in it about Infidels.
Let a hundred articles be written about what is in the Qur’an, using the Ellison story as the justification and reason. Anything to get those contents out. And don’t stop there. Go into the Hadith, and what they tell us about Muhammad’s attitudes toward Infidels.
The excuse exists. Take full advantage.