HuffPo Equates Freedom Fighters with Taliban
by Pamela Geller
John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus, has written a curious apologia for the irrational murders and riots taking place in Afghanistan in response to the inadvertent burning of Qur’ans at Bagram Airfield. In “America’s Image Problem in Afghanistan” in the Huffington Post, Feffer says that “the United States definitely sends mixed messages to the Muslim world. Early in his presidency, Barack Obama went to Cairo to “˜seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.” The president proclaimed that America and Islam “˜share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.–
Feffer’s point is that Obama did not deliver on this “new beginning” characterized by “mutual interest and mutual respect,” but in fact he did. His “new beginning” was demonstrated in his abandonment of our allies; his alienation of Israel; and his deference and submission to the Muslim world: bowing to the Saudi king; groveling to the Muslim world at Al-Azhar University in June 2009; ordering NASA to extol the contributions of the Muslim world; giving vocal support to the reviled Ground Zero mosque at his Iftar gala; the administration’s endless apologies for the Qur’an burnings; his $800 million in aid to the Muslim Brotherhood for their Islamic Spring; his silence on Egyptian hostage crisis; his billet doux to Ahmadinejad; his gift of our drone to Iran; his scrubbing of any mention of jihad, even when jihadists discuss it themselves, from law enforcement counter-terrorism materials; his partnering with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on the suppression of free speech (i.e., the enforcement of Islamic blasphemy laws in the West) — all this abundantly demonstrates that Obama was serious about making a “new beginning” with the Islamic world, and has done so.
Feffer, however, complains that “when Muslims around the world turn on the television, open the newspaper, or check out their favorite websites, they are more likely to see injustice, intolerance, and indignity coming from America the (Not Always So) Beautiful. It’s not just the iconic Abu Ghraib pictures from the Bush era. Muslims — and, of course, everyone else — can get outraged over the picture of Syed Wali Shah, a seven-year-old victim of a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan. Or the video of laughing Marines urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.”
Abu Ghraib? One incident that came to the light of day because of a Pentagon investigation and the accidental killing of a child? Muslims are still angry about that, but why aren’t they aghast when they open their newspapers and read about honor killings; female genital mutilation; the slaughter of non-Muslims in Nigeria, Egypt, and Pakistan; Islamic anti-semitism; the burning of churches; and the jihadi attacks across the world every day?
About the burning of the Qur’an, Feffer says: “You”d think the U.S. army would be a little more careful. Last April, when members of the Dove World Outreach Center burned a Qur’an after putting it on trial, riots broke out in Afghanistan and left scores of people dead, including seven UN staff.”
Terry Jones of Dove World Outreach Center didn’t kill those people; Muslims did. Our soldiers didn’t desecrate those Qur’ans at Bagram Airfield: Muslims did when they wrote message of killing and jihad inside them and used them for jihad plotting. What’s more, why should we be bound by Sharia rules regarding treatment of the Qur’an? That is not our holy book. It will never be our holy book.
Yet Feffer nevertheless says that “the United States obviously has a serious image problem.” The United States” image problem is freedom. It is a problem for those who wish to impose the most radical and extreme ideology on the face of the earth on the rest of us. Pakistan disposes of its Qur’ans in the sewer, and no one protests. Meanwhile, the American authorities attempted to salvage those Qur’ans out of respect for this irrational barbarity. Respect Afghan culture when they are shooting our soldiers in the back of the head? And they are the wronged party? We have been there for ten years, and have spent billions of dollars building schools and hospitals, trying to bring the Afghans into the 21st century (hell, we’d take the 16th century), and this mindless tool faults us?
Feffer notes that “the Pentagon takes great pains to avoid charges of Islamophobia,” but where is the cultural training for the Muslim world? Where is the sensitivity training for the Muslim world? When do they learn to play well with others?
Terry Jones and the Pentagon are in the same category according to this quisling Feffer, except, he says, Jones is more honest. Feffer asks: “So, how is it that the Pentagon and the Islamophobe, with their opposite views on Islam and intervention, end up generating a similar response in the Muslim world? The answer lies in the image that the Pentagon has of the Muslim world. This is America’s other image problem.”
No, the answer lies in jihad. No matter how this lemming twists himself into human pretzel-like knots, he cannot avoid reality. Jihad is cutting its bloody swath across free and not-so-free countries, and hundreds of thousands of non-Muslims and non-practicing Muslims are paying the horrible price. He can’t ascribe all that to “Islamophobia.”
Feffer claims that “U.S. military operations involve an implicit distinction between “˜good Muslims” and “˜bad Muslims,– and the “the “˜bad Muslims” are, of course, the Taliban, who demonstrated during their brief and bloody reign that they interpret the Qur’an much as Terry Jones interprets the New Testament and Bibi Netanyahu interprets the Old Testament.” He even claims that “it’s a question of interpretation, the Taliban have ignored all the teachings of the Qur’an that contradict their own medieval beliefs about women, religious tolerance, and warfare.”
This is just more abject cluelessness by this self-important nincompoop. Judaism and Christianity have developed interpretative traditions that mitigate the literal force of passages that those who like to deal in moral equivalence commonly quote; Islam has no such traditions. The word of the Qur’an is considered immutable, and cannot be “interpreted” in a non-literal manner. To do so would be under the Sharia considered an act of hypocrisy punishable by death. There is no room for reform because of this absolutism within Islam. This is nothing like Judaism or Christianity.
And the idea that this hater would equate Netanyahu with Jones and the Taliban reveals his ugly motives. Equating good and evil. Neither Netanyahu nor Jones are murdering schoolgirls for getting an education, throwing acid in the faces of “uncovered” women, or declaring that they have a divine mandate to subjugate unbelievers. This moral equivalence is monstrous.
Feffer claims that –˜the good Muslims,” meanwhile, are Hamid Karzai and all the Afghans who are willing to fight alongside coalition forces. Coalition forces, however, deep down don’t trust their Afghan partners.” Yet it’s not that coalition forces distrust their Afghan partners gratuitously — it’s that their Afghan partners all too often, and with increasing frequency, execute coalition forces. Feffer notes this, and then says: “It’s not that Afghans are inherently untrustworthy. Rather, the United States has put them in an untenable position. They must choose between supporting unpalatable insiders and unpalatable outsiders.”
In reality, the U.S. has put them in the untenable position of choosing freedom over oppression, choice over force, equality for women over female slavery. Such abject depravity is a hallmark of leftist thinking.
Feffer complains: “It doesn’t help that so many U.S. politicians talk about Islam as though it were the greatest enemy of humanity”¦.Indeed, rarely does a day go by in the Republican primaries that one of the candidates doesn’t defame Islam. Santorum and Gingrich have both laid it on thick with their wild accusations about the threat of sharia law and their misrepresentations of the Park51 Islamic cultural center.”
We don’t apologize for our greatness. We don’t apologize for who we are. We are the greatest nation on earth. John Feffer, on the other hand, wants us to surrender: Feffer likes what he sees on the other side of the abyss. Feffer ought to back up his admiration and reluctance to criticize the human rights abuses inherent in Islamic law and go live under the Sharia. Maybe then he wouldn’t be such a self-important clown.
But in the meantime, he whines that “fire-starters like Pamela Geller or Robert Spencer continue to badmouth not Islam or “˜bad Muslims” or “˜Islamic radicalism,” but mainstream Islam itself. Park51, which expanded the Geller-Spencer soapbox to monstrous proportions, was hardly the threat they made it out to be. If they”d only bothered to read the writings of the cultural center’s founder, they might have discovered a philosophical co-religionist.”
The problem for Feffer is that we actually did read Rauf’s writings. In his book, he advocated for the Sharia, most radical, oppressive and extreme ideology on the planet. But then he told lemmings like Feffer something else entirely. Yet in reality, Rauf was a prominent member of the Perdana Organization that funded the jihad warship flotilla designed to provoke the tiny Jewish state into war. On board, the “peace activists” were chanting a genocidal jihad chant referring back to Muhammad’s massacre of the last Jews of Arabia. And Rauf refused to condemn Hamas for months until pressed.
Yet despite all this, the earnestly self-deluded Feffer writes that Rauf “condemns Hamas as a terrorist organization,” and yet, “for all his conservative tendencies, the imam remains an imam. In the eyes of Geller and Spencer, the only good Muslim is a secular Muslim.”
No, the only good Muslim is one who doesn’t want to commit jihad and subjugate unbelievers, doesn’t want to impose the Sharia on non-Muslims, doesn’t want to subjugate women, and doesn’t hate Jews. Rauf, with his endorsement of the Sharia and the jihad against Israel, hardly fits the bill.
Feffer concludes: “Somehow we must combine a principled engagement with the Muslim world with a principled withdrawal from areas of combat. If the troops don’t come home and the drones don’t stop killing civilians, fine speeches and sensitivity trainings will just seem like hypocrisy, our words and our images will remain far apart, and the chasm between the West and Islam will endure, nowhere more so than in the imaginations of those twin extremists, the Taliban and the Islamophobes.”
Here he finally gets to the twisted and malevolent point that he has been dying to make throughout the whole article: that Geller and Spencer et al are the same thing as the Taliban, who torture, maim, cut off clitorises, carry out acid attacks, gas girls” schools, and marry little prepubescent girls.
It’s a propaganda effort that would make Goebbels proud. Heil Feffer.
These are the enemedia embeds who get work at Puff Ho. I have not written there, nor have my peers, but these American-haters and liars are welcomed. (I even submitted this very piece to them, responding to Feffer’s charges against me, but the HuffPo did not even bother to reply.)
Pamela Geller is the publisher of AtlasShrugs.com and the author of Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance (WND Books) and The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War On America (Simon & Schuster)