Senator Foghorn Leghorn until recently was embodied in the Senate by Senator Fritz Hollings and by Senator Robert Byrd, but Hollings flew the coop, and now only Byrd is left. He has been mentioned at Jihad Watch before.
Here is a post I wrote in 2004, with some editing for style and readability:
Last year, while visiting a friend at Fort Jackson, the largest training base for the American army, located on the outskirts of Columbia, South Carolina, I took a walk around town. In the cemetery outside the Trinity Episcopal church, I noted down those celebrated names, so many of them Huguenot in origin (I recall reams of Ravenels).
I saw the antebellum mansions, the handful that had escaped the mass destruction inflicted, quite unnecessarily, by Sherman in February, 1865. The magnolias in the garden of the State capitol. The museum, with its early Italian canvases — a legacy of S. S. Kresge, who liked to spread his art wherever Kresge’s stores were to be found. And at his death, one was to be found in Columbia, South Carolina.
And there was the campus of the University of South Carolina which — now speaking as Senator Foghorn Leghorn — “I declare has, Suh, the prettiest campus imaginable, with its green, and its South Caroliniana library, and those belles from so many Beauforts who, this being the modern south, without those Vivien-Leigh manors, and manners, are no longer content to study French, dancing and deportment, but these modern young women now come, Suh, I say proudly, Suh, these young women come to the University of South Carolina in Columbia to study chemistry, and anthropology, and en-vi-ron-men-tal sciences. And that’s a fact, Suh, that’s a fact.”
Yet, not a quarter-mile from the campus, on one of the thoroughfares, I spotted, on the second-story wall of a nondescript structure housing a Laundromat or fast-food place, a sign about Islam and a local mosque.
It was one of those “Et in Arcadia Ego” moments. Here, even here, where sweet magnolias blossom, round everybody’s door, Islam had made its way.
And now we have the tale of what a single determined carrier-out of Da”wa can do in a single school, to his innocent Infidel victims, among the schoolchildren entrusted to his care. Should he be fired, forthwith, for violating the Constitution and carrying out religious instruction in the most aggressive possible way? Of course he should. And what will the ACLU do? Because if it comes to his defense, it should understand that exactly the same kind of behavior will be permitted to Christian teachers with a mission — and the ACLU doesn’t want that kind of thing, now does it? And precisely what are the doctrines of Islam which this man is inveigling his students into, little by little, starting of course with the seemingly-inoffensive Five Pillars of individual worship (shehada, zakat, salat, Ramadan, and hajj)?
The list of what this one determined Da”waist has done should, however, give pause. If he can do all of that, and if every Muslim is required to conduct Da”wa, not least in order to justify his living in an Infidel society that has not yet been turned into a Muslim one, then we must worry, greatly, about all the other efforts — in schools and at workplaces, in police stations and fire stations, in coffee klatsches and in soup kitchens, in post offices and in a thousand other meeting-places — at Da”wa by a relentless and determined group of people.
And it is interesting to consider the other prong of the Islamic attack on our ways. For who is it who for so long benefited from Saudi and other Arab largesse, and helped to misinform us about the nature of Saudi Arabia, and hence about the nature of Islam? For the hatred for Infidels that is taught in Saudi schools did not start after 9/11/2001, but has always been central to Saudi life, to Saudi sermons, and textbooks, and attitudes. And who was more influential in confusing matters, in hiding Saudi reality, in defending the Saudis, than a series of ambassadors to Saudi Arabia, some of whom promptly went to work for the Saudis after “retiring,” some of whom went to work even while on the job, angling for jobs for their friends as P. R. specialists for the Saudis?
It is at that same Columbia campus, near to that beautiful horseshoe, that the Ernest R. “Fritz” Hollings (no family connection to the “Fritz Hollings” mentioned in Under Cover by John Roy Carlson) Center for somethingorother is situated. Among the Great and Good of the South Carolina establishment, one must mention Crawford C. Cook, whose picture is somewhere on the campus, and perhaps listed at the Hollings Center. Hollings, of course, went out with a rant about “Jewish neo-cons” and has been consistently anti-Israel. Crawford Cook was a friend not only to Hollings, but to former Governor of South Carolina John C. West, who defended the Saudis even while he was ambassador, and even while he was ambassador arranged for a P.R. job with the Saudis for his friend Crawford Cook. It is a tight little world, the world of Columbia politics, and West, Cook, Hollings, and others made Washington just a little safer for the Saudis.
So instead of the Horseshoe, think of a triangle. There is the Sunni Triangle, where American soldiers are being asked to fight and die because the government in Washington is still engaged in the Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations folly instead of realizing the war is a war of self-defense against Islam, and the best way to conduct that war is to do nothing to prevent the Muslim peoples from realizing that it is Islam itself that is responsible for the political, economic, social, and intellectual failures of Muslim societies — and then, perhaps, Ataturk-like, the more level-headed among them will work, quietly, to constrain (for there is no reforming) Islam.
And then there is the triangle in Columbia: this local Muslim, working his relentless Da”wa on innocent schoolchildren, the well-paid and well-connected who used their political power and influence (West, Cook, Hollings) to muddy the waters when it came to the nature of Islam and the nature of Saudi Arabia, and the third part of that triangle — the young Americans training to go to war. But the war they train to fight at Fort Jackson will do nothing about the Cooks and the Wests on the one hand, those who curried favor, directly or indirectly, with Saudis and other potential Arab paymasters, and the local pusher of Islam in the schools. Both are dangerous, both must be stopped — at the low end, and at the upper end.
And those young Americans, especially the Reservists and National Guardsmen, who signed up to defend their homeland in a case of absolute necessity, should not be sent to Iraq on what is now a fool’s errand. If American soldiers are to be used as a cold-blooded instrument of policy, even of misguided policy, the regular army is that instrument. The rest should be kept at home to educate themselves, and then others, and to watch vigilantly over both those who conduct Da”wa, and those who sell their offices and their influence. One hardly knows which side of the Jihad-push — the paid propagandists and apologists or the promoters of Da”wa — are more dangerous. But they are certainly more dangerous, here and in Europe, than the local Muslims in the Sunni triangle, whom the Shi”a and Kurds, if better armed, will be perfectly capable of holding in check themselves, without any further loss of American life.
Meanwhile, this tourist guide to Columbia ends on a dendrological note. The trees in the Congaree Swamp, the last large-scale stand of primitive uncut trees in the United States, I say Suh, are certainly worth the visit for the Shagbark (Carya ovata) and the Sugarberry (Celtis laevigata) and the Water Locust (Gleditsia aquatica) and a thousand others standing as still as the Standing Stones of Callanish. All are awaiting your visit. And so are the tiny churches, each more adorable than the next, that dot the side of the road as you make your way to the Congaree Swamp from Columbia, and here is the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church right here, with its promised sermon — “I Am My Bro’s Keeper” — which is a theme that appeals.
Posted by Hugh, on December 8, 2004, at 3:42 PM.
I think it holds up.