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Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

Fitzgerald: How politicians can avoid missteps

Sep 29, 2007 11:55 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

RICHMOND, Va. – A member of the state’s Commission of Immigration resigned Thursday, a few hours after Gov. Timothy M. Kaine was told about online videos showing the appointee condemning Israel and advocating “the jihad way.”

Kaine learned of the videos from a caller to his live monthly radio program and accepted the resignation of Dr. Esam S. Omeish about three hours later. — from this news article

One small step for mankind.

But the moral of the tale is this: in order to avoid a misstep that will come to haunt you, if you are a political figure, and that will undoubtedly be used at this point — and with full justification — by your political opponents as an example of your naiveté or failure to exercise due diligence, do not meet with, do not have smiling photographs taken with, do not endorse in any way, and certainly do not appoint to any office, someone who believes in Jihad as a central duty, Jihad through whatever means. That includes almost every Believer. And do not accept, ever, either someone’s claim to be a “moderate” or someone else’s description of someone — especially if that someone is in the hopelessly naive Interfaith Dialogue racket — as a “great guy, no problem, he’s really on our side.”

Use your head. Enough running from all those in positions of political or academic or other power running around like candidates for Jay Leno’s Jaywalkers.
Take, for example, the supposedly “tough” performance of Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, who still has yet to inform himself about Islam. Despite the tongue-lashing he inflicted on Ahmadinejad (and here fortiter in re, suaviter in modo, might have been just the ticket) he became helpless, nearly tongue-tied, when it came to answering back Ahmadinejad when he made his absurd remarks about, for example, Israel. Was it a surprise to Bollinger that that would have been raised? Was he unable to rise to the occasion and to show up the idiocy of the claim, a claim so common that Bollinger should have fully anticipated it, that “the poor ‘Palestinians’ should not have to pay for the Holocaust”? For god’s sake. Someone well-informed, particularly in dealing with the theme of the rights of non-Arabs — Jews and Persians and Armenians and Copts to start with — in the Middle East, should have been standing right next to Bollinger at that moment. Bollinger was also given, on a platter, a chance to discuss Persian history and the successful Persian effort to prevent the arabization and cultural and linguistic imperialism of the Arabs, that has been such a feature of islamization worldwide. His doing so would have amazed not just Ahmadinejad, but would have deeply shaken up Iranians back in Iran, and caused them to think. But Bollinger seems only interested in protecting himself, and no doubt preserving the loyalty of alumni. Has he lost the ability to study and think, in the heady rise to the top? Perhaps he can reacquire that skill. It may inspire some of the undergraduates.

And now Virginia Governor Kaine has had to rethink, and so too has the man he was about to appoint, a man whom Robert Spencer has debated and has tapes of those debates, and can easily show that Esam Omeish lies. He denies that death is the punishment prescribed for apostasy in Islam, with textual authority. He has also admitted that he looks forward to the extension of Shari’a across the United States. Had he been appointed and that information come out and been widely distributed — and it would have been — it would have inflicted severe political damage, rightly, on Governor Kaine. There is no need for this, anymore than there was a need for Mayor Menino, without knowing a thing about Islam, a few years ago to enthusiastically support the building of that deplorable mosque, with all the behind-the-scenes below-market sale of city land and the Saudi connection and the BRA employee who, as far as is known, may still be on the BRA payroll. I know many people who have because of that permanently lost any enthusiasm they might have had for Mayor Menino.

For god’s sake, did no one think to do a little googling? Or to check, say, with “The Investigative Project” or with “Jihad Watch” to see if there was anything about Mr. X that might, just might, be the kind of thing the governor or mayor or Congressman deciding whom to hire for his staff, would have liked to have known in advance? Or if not those sources, then others — just something so that one is fully alerted to the real views, not the feigned ones that may be expressed, or the evasions of taqiyya-and-tu-quoque that by now we are all getting so used to, and that must be seen right through, and if not by the Great and Good of this earth themselves, then by members of their staffs, whose duty it is to guide and protect them from such blunders that, in the end, might prove fatal for those who commit them, in one way, and fatal in quite another, much grimmer way, for those who in brief (or, alas, not so brief) authority presume to instruct and protect.

Do your homework, for god’s sake. Do it.

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