On a late summer evening, Omar Rivera stumbled over to a local mosque, clutching a beer bottle in his hand and looking for a place to answer nature’s call. He chose the Al-Imam Mosque and proceeded to urinate around its exterior, where there were apparently some Muslim prayer rugs lying around. Omar had committed what was a fairly commonplace act of vandalism in the city, public urination. When suddenly he became the poster child for the rise of a “New Islamophobia”.
Along with a drunken liberal arts student who slashed a Muslim cabbie, the media transformed poor Omar into the face of a new and terrible wave of hate directed against Muslims. Initial news stories claimed that he had called the mosque denizens, “Terrorists”, before peeing on their rug. The NYPD later explained that it had never happened, and that he never said anything for or against Muslims.
After a five-day drunk, Omar probably didn’t even know his own name by that point. Neither did Michael Enright, the cabbie slasher, who had a long history of drinking problems. After the attack, he sat down in the middle of traffic, rather than trying to make an escape. Rather than being motivated by any animus toward Muslims, Riviera and Enright were driven by their blood alcohol level and drinking problems. There was no wave of Islamophobia, just two drunk guys who needed to become Friends of Bill.
But the facts didn’t matter, by then liberals had begun to construct their own narrative. Omar had clearly been influenced by Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. Their hateful rhetoric had induced Omar to go and piss on some Muslim rugs in order to show his patriotism and bigotry. This was undoubtedly Islamophobia. And while Mayor Bloomberg did not invite the pissed on prayer rugs to City Hall, as he had the slashed cabbie– liberals bravely sprung into action to show their support for the micturated upon furnishings.
The New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good adopted a statement at the ISNA Emergency Interfaith Summit, warning about a tide violence and condemning “the desecration of Islamic houses of worship”. The ISNA is the Islamic Society of North America, an organization that was created by Muslim Brotherhood members. The Muslim Brotherhood, which drew inspiration from Nazi Germany, was also behind such philanthropic organizations as Hamas and Al Querida. But that didn’t stop various liberal clergy from co-signing a statement with an organization linked to Islamic terrorists, calling for “tolerance”.
One of the signers, Rabbi David Saperstein proclaimed, “We know what it is like when people have attacked us physically, have attacked us verbally, and others have remained silent. It cannot happen here in America in 2010.” Of course it can happen here, just not to Muslims. It can happen to the Jews of Malmo or Paris. It can happen to Hindus in Bangladesh and Christians in Egypt. And it can even happen even in New York. While Saperstein was pontification about tolerance, the trial of four Muslim terrorists who had plotted to bomb synagogues in New York was going on. New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good had nothing to say on the subject. They remained silent. Because petty things such as synagogue bombings or Copts being lit on fire are nothing compared to the smell of an infidel’s recycled Heineken on a sacred Muslim prayer rug.
When infidels are murdered by Muslims, no one calls for an emergency summit. But when a Muslim prayer rug is pissed upon, everyone had better jump into the Dhimmimobile and denounce that rising wave of hate.
Meanwhile in support of the rugs themselves, J-Street collaborator, Rachel Barenblat of Velveteen Rabbi seized on the chance to promote herself by “passing the hat” and raised over a thousand dollars to replace the urine soaked rugs. At the same time as Rachel was passing the hat for the rugs, five people were murdered in Israel by Muslim terrorists. They left behind six orphans. Rachel Barenblat did not volunteer to “pass the hat” for them, because how can a few Jewish orphans compared to the sacred rugs of the Al-Imam Mosque? She didn’t even appear to acknowledge their murders. Unlike the rugs, they were non-people.
And so we are witness to the spectacle of an enlightened post-modern era, in which Jewish liberal clergy have decided that soiled rugs have more personhood than Jewish orphans.
Hate can wear many faces, but tolerance is one of the masks it likes best. Witness he radical left wing members of Rabbis for Human Rights terrorize Jewish farmers in the name of “human rights” or Rabbi David Saperstein warning that we will not tolerate intolerance at a summit called by a front group for one of the most intolerant organizations on the face of the earth. Meanwhile Rachel Barenbalt announced she was going to study the Koran for the High Holidays (inspired by “Rabbi Phyllis Berman” who sits on J Street’s Rabbinical Council). That last part isn’t a surprise. The only real question is why she would ever bother studying anything else.
Let us turn back for a moment to the scene of the crime. The pissed upon rugs at the Al-Iman Mosque. The tidal wave of urinary Islamophobia threatening to drown all of America’s hapless put upon Muslims in hate and violence.
The Egyptian Al-Iman Mosque or the Al-Marwa Center in Queens whose rugs were so horrifyingly bepissed, appears to be a satellite of the Brooklyn Islamic Center, operating mosques and a school as the Al-Iman Center. Here’s a sample of some of the tolerant teachings to be found on the Al-Iman website about who’s responsible for causing AIDS. If you guessed the Jews, congratulations. You win a nickel.
Already, we find that working together in secret… driving the global media and international organizations under the names and titles made to appear compassionate, while inflicting devastation and destruction for generations in order to get global laws allow adultery and protect homosexuality…
They must be planning something diabolical… And Iblis (Satan) is behind the scenes again … What we see today did not happen on its own… It is the results of the hellish schemes that do not want young people to be good… to have only oppression and infidelity… It works like this … It is still the Zionist movement, where it says in its Protocols (Protocols of the Elders of Zion): we must work to break down morality everywhere thus facilitating our control.
For bonus tolerance, their parent, the Brooklyn Islamic Center, was being fundraised for by highlighting the center as a way to drive Jews out of the neighborhood.
Anti-Semitism, Homophobia and Nazi derived conspiracy theories. They’ve got it all. I wonder if the liberal Jews like Barenblat who “passed the hat” for the Al-Iman mosque and its pissed upon rugs would have raised the money if they knew about this. My suspicion is that indeed they would have. And even more money. The same people who parse every sentence by a Republican to find a hint of intolerance in it, will just shrug and look away at this unwelcome information. “These are not the hateful religious fundamentalists we are looking for.”
Because if you peel back the layer on most mosques in America, you will find the very same thing. Islamism, bigotry and hate.
On the eve of WW2, some of Europe’s most prominent liberals were demanding tolerance for Germany’s growing aggression. Many people know Oswald Mosley as a despicable fascist, far fewer know him as the most progressive member of the British Labour Party, whose solution to Britain’s economic problems in the “Mosley Memorandum” consisted of virtually the same collection of “road building projects” and social welfare entitlements now being proposed by the Obama Administration. When Goebbels’ The Eternal Jew went to the Venice Film Festival, it wasn’t booed loudly by an enlightened audience. Michelangelo Antonioni wrote, “If this is propaganda, then we welcome propaganda. This is an engaging, penetrating, extraordinarily effective film.” Antonioni was no Nazi. He was a Marxist.
Today propaganda is widely welcomed as well. So when a drunk pisses on a Muslim prayer rug, it certainly is welcome propaganda for those who are driven to cover up Muslim violence against Jews, Hindus, Christians and many others. Just as when Israeli soldiers fire in self-defense against attackers trying to murder them, that too is welcome propaganda for those whose sympathies lie with their attackers. In one breath we are told that the victims of September 11 have no right to their sensitivities about the Ground Zero Mosque, and in another we are told that burning the Koran offends Muslim sensitivities and is a crime. Had four Jews or Christians tried to blow up mosques, we would have never heard the end of it. But when four Muslims plot to blow up synagogues, it’s unwelcome news. The report is hushed like a noisy patron in a theater. “Be quiet, don’t you know this isn’t the movie we want to see.”
The Nazis would have understood the sentiment that a Muslim prayer rug is worth more than the lives of five Jews. It is a point of view that they hold themselves. The Hebron Massacre happened when Muslims were offended by the Jewish claim to the site of the Jewish temple. And naturally they reacted as groups that fancy themselves superior to the “descendants of pigs and monkeys” usually do. With a massacre that featured horrifying acts of brutality, rape, castration and mutilation. Some of the victims were left to die in a bank or in homes, while Muslim children followed after, sticking them with knives to see if any needed finishing off. Ask a liberal about the Hebron Massacre of 1929 and you get a blank stare. Ask them about Deir Yassin and you get vile enthusiasm.
Reading the liberal press, you come away with a strange view of the world that is as alien as anything that German newspapers could have turned out in the 30’s. As Americans remembered 3,000 people killed by Muslim terrorists, the newspapers screech on about Islamophobia because of a drunken stabbing and a drunken act of public urination. One could just as easily have unfurled a copy of Der Sturmer to learn that millions of Jews had to die because Horst Wessel had been killed by his girlfriend’s pimp. Like the mythical Polish soldiers about to stream over the border, we are barraged with propaganda about the rising threat of Islamophobia. Any moment now those Polish soldiers will be crossing the border to torch mosques and slash innocent Muslim cabbies. Even if we have to pluck up a drunk pissing on a rug as our Gleiwitz Incident.
After 9/11, Anwar Al-Awlaki, the Imam who had counseled the 9/11 hijackers and is now a wanted member of Al Queda with a kill order on his head, led services for the Congressional Muslim Staffers Association. Today while Al-Awlaki is on the run, liberal organizations led by the ACLU fight to remove the kill order, in cooperation with Al-Awlaki’s father whose tribe is allied with Al Queda in Yemen. It puts one in mind of American Anti-War activists who were members of Communist front groups agitating against war with Nazi Germany, during the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and war with Soviet Russia, after WW2. They claimed their activism was in support of peace for all mankind, not in support of Hitler and Stalin. But of course the only ones who benefited from their activism were Hitler and Stalin. Today liberal groups and activists insist that they’re not working to support terrorists, even when they’re fighting to free them from American prisons.
It wasn’t about peace or tolerance then, it’s not about peace and tolerance now. One-sided peace and one-sided tolerance are lies. Part of the pretty mask that hate wears to justify its atrocities. The appeal of the mosque, like the appeal of the Nazi parade, has little to do with tolerance, and a great deal to do with the appeal of the id, the violent undercurrent of senseless brutality churning underneath. And at its side, those who profess peace and tolerance, hiding their own hate behind phony sanctimonious smiles.
This is not about peace or tolerance, or pissed on rugs. It’s about feeding hate under the guise of tolerance. It is about persecution in the guise of activism. Rabbi David Saperstein signs on to a statement from an organization with ties to Muslim terrorists who have murdered countless Jews, and then primps self-righteously and proclaims; “We know what it is like when people have attacked us physically, have attacked us verbally, and others have remained silent. It cannot happen here in America in 2010.” But it is happening here in America. In 2010. And all over the world. With the aid and abetting of people like Saperstein, who help and promote the very people who are attacking us physically and verbally. Who are bombing our synagogues, murdering our families and spreading hate against us. And then Barenlat, and those like her go on and pass the hat for people who promote the idea that an International Jewish Conspiracy is spreading AIDS.
Kill as many Jews as you want, but never piss on a Muslim’s sacred rug. Truly, Islamophilia has become the new Anti-Semitism.
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(If you like would to donate to the orphans, rather than the rugs, visit the One Family Fund website.)
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From NY to Jerusalem, Daniel Greenfield Covers the Stories Behind the News