President Obama’s affirmation of the Ground Zero mosque as a First Amendment religious liberty issue misses the point while selling the American people short.
Allowing the people behind the Park 51/Ground Zero mosque to build under the former shadow of the World Trade Center is akin to allowing the Westboro Baptist Church to build a campus next to Arlington National Cemetery: both might be exercises in religious freedom, but neither make proper use of liberty.
The American people understand this, in spite of what President Obama and his fellow elites think. Almost 70 percent of Americans oppose the Ground Zero mosque, but 61 percent of Americans also believe that a mosque can built there. This seeming contradiction isn’t. In fact, it shows the American people know the difference between the right to do something versus its propriety.
Sadly, Obama isn’t the only politician who has no faith in the American people. Mayor Bloomberg, in the wake of the botched Times Square car bombing, preemptively denounced violence directed at New Yorkers of Pakistani descent. None happened. Even George W. Bush felt compelled to give his “Islam is Peace” speech at the Saudi-funded Islamic Center of Washington, D.C. only six days after 9/11—even though America hadn’t been convulsed with a wave of anti-Muslim violence.
While the elites view the public as benighted, they are completely ignorant about the people and motivations behind the proposed Ground Zero mosque. The Cordoba mosque at Park 51 is the brainchild of Feisal Abdul Rauf. Rauf, born in Kuwait of Egyptian parents, was a student at Columbia University during the riotous years of 1968 and 69. Rauf lives in Malaysia, away from his wife, Daisy Kahn, spending much of his time in the Middle East trying to raise the $100 million needed to build the 13-story Islamic center some 500 feet from Ground Zero. Iman Rauf once said of 9/11, “I wouldn’t say that the United States deserved what happened, but the United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.”
Rauf and his followers are clearly looking to make a statement about the strength and self-confidence of Islam in the face of Western timidity and lack of self-confidence. Take the very name of the proposed Islamic center: Cordoba. For over 500 years, from 711 to 1236, the Spanish city was an important outpost of Islam. A common strand of Islam believes that once a land has been conquered for Islam, Muslims must always work to keep it or to recapture it, if lost. Rauf’s Cordoba website even sports the phrase “Ground Zero” in its metatags, further evidence that Rauf is looking to confront, not merely preach to the faithful.
Rauf may have come of age in the narcissistic, leftwing-fueled ethos of late 1960s Ivy League American campus, but his actions also reflect a larger problem within much of Islam itself. In an insightful Arizona Republic column by M. Zuhdi Jasser, the president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy decries the “narcissistic spirituality” of many American Muslim groups, observing that, “Many major Muslim groups deny any responsibility for the reforms needed to stop radicals. Instead, they obsess on victimization, make belligerent demands, and wrap themselves in the First Amendment.” He criticizes these groups as “…indifferent to the feelings and needs of the majority of America, Muslim or non-Muslim…” while calling out the President for “parroting” these sentiments of victimization, rather than leading. Jasser closes his column by showing the obvious: that being a good American and an observant Muslim is not an inherent contradiction.
Rather than offer blanket support for a mosque less than two football fields away from where almost 3,000 Americans were killed by terrorists shouting “Allahu-Akbar,” President Obama should have maintained his silence. Instead of lecturing the American people on a local land use decision, the President should be directing the FBI, CIA and the Department of the Treasury to ensure that none of the $100 million being raised by Feisal Abdul Rauf is coming from sources linked to terror. America has been burned before by foreign funding of Islamist ventures in the U.S.: the First Amendment is one thing, abandoning common sense in the middle of two wars against Islamist terrorism is quite another.
Chuck DeVore is a California State Assemblyman. He is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army (retired) Reserve and served as a Reagan White House appointed Special Assistant for Foreign Affairs in the Pentagon. DeVore studied abroad at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. He co-authored the novel China Attacks. He can be followed on Twitter @chuckdevore and his Facebook account is facebook.com/DeVoreForCalifornia.
Top Global News South Africa’s former head of police and the former head of INTERPOL convicted of corruption and sentenced to 15 years—he was well connected to the ruling African National Congress. See story.
Top U.S. News A New York City local land use panel clears the way for a large mosque at Ground Zero. Some of the funding for the Islamic center likely comes from overseas groups with links to radical Islamic terror ideologies. See story.
Top California News San Francisco, an illegal immigrant sanctuary city, is found to be violating another law, this time on the issue of racial and gender preferences for city contracts in a Prop. 209 case brought by the Pacific Legal Foundation. See story.
I’ll be guest hosting a Comic-Con International-themed program on KFI Sunday evening, July 18th from 7 to 10 PM.
Here’s the line-up:
7:00 to 7:45: Adam Baldwin, Actor
7:45 to 8:30: Tommy Tallarico, producer, Video Games Live
8:30 to 9:00: James Hudnall, comic writer, creator of The Psycho and ESPers
9:00 to 10:00: Bosch Fawstin, comic writer, creator of The Infidel.
Through 7:45 I’ll have Chuck star Adam Baldwin. Adam plays Major John Casey, a National Security Agency agent assigned to protect Chuck. Adam also starred in the film Serenity and the critically-acclaimed series Firefly. When he’s not in front of the camera, Adam can be found helping our wounded veterans with the Ride 2 Recovery. He also writes for Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood.
Next up, through 8:30, I’ll be interviewing the fabulous Tommy Tallarico, co-creator and producer of Video Games Live and the co-host of Reviews on the Run. Tommy is a musician and video games music composer and will discuss the growing convergence between film and video games and their impact on culture. Sunday night’s show also marks the world premier of Tommy’s latest album.
Comic book creator and writer James Hudnall will be on from 8:30 to top of the 9 o’clock hour. James’ work has appeared internationally and has attracted the attention of Hollywood. He’s leading a writers’ workshop at Comic-Con. Big Hollywood features his strip Obama Nation, while Big Journalism carries, Useful Idiots, which pokes fun at major media. He describes Para-Realism, his political philosophy, as taking Randian Objectivism to the next level. See: Pararealist.com.
The final hour of the show features Bosch Fawstin, the creator of the controversial The Infidel series. The Infidel features Pigman, a counter-jihad superhero. (One of Pigman’s slogans is, “Give us liberty, Give them death.”) Bosch’s Albanian Muslim background gives him a unique inside perspective which he wrote up in a piece for Capitalism Magazine called, “Calling Islam ‘Islam.’”
As the world continues to do little more than wring its hands over the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, what passes for a government in Tehran is preparing to stone to death a mother of two for the crime of adultery (breaking news update, the Iranian regime may not stone the accused to death, but rather, execute her using a different method due to growing international outrage). Sakineh Mohammadi-Ashtiani, 43, was convicted in 2006 and has already been punished with a flogging of 99 lashes (such a punishment can, in and of itself, be life-threatening).
I wrote about this barbaric Iranian practice last year when I reviewed Cyrus Nowrasteh’s hauntingly chilling and award-winning film “The Stoning of Soraya M.” on Big Hollywood. If you haven’t seen it you should.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is notorious for other reasons too. In 2007, an Iranian member of parliament, Moshen Yahyavi, admitted that Iran applies the death penalty for homosexual acts (joining such other stalwart member states of the UN such as Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen and Nigeria).
Iranian president Ahmadinejad infamously said in 2007 that there were no gays in his country after he was asked by students in New York about the hangings of two teenagers “convicted” of homosexuality.
All this matters because a nation’s dealings with its own people serve to as a window on how that nation views the rest of humanity. Thus, when President Ahmadinejad says the Holocaust never happened and darkly says that Israel is “doomed” we must view his remarks in the context of his being the leader of a nation that stones women (never men) for adultery while hanging homosexuals.
Nations, as with people, cannot be perfect. Nations, also as with people, can be bent towards good or evil. The Islamic Republic of Iran is an evil regime. Iran’s leaders are determined to acquire a nuclear weapons arsenal and, unlike other nuclear-armed regimes led by men of ill-intent, the leadership of Iran claims to believe in martyrdom as a way to usher in the Hidden Imam, the Messiah-like figure of Shia Islam, and with this 12th Imam, a Millennial Age. Such motivations cannot be deterred in the conventional Cold War sense as America’s nuclear arsenal deterred the old Soviet Union (officially atheist Communist leaders aren’t big on personal martyrdom).
As the Islamic Republic of Iran’s uranium centrifuges spin towards nuclear midnight, think about the nature of regime that seeks to acquire the tools of atomic destruction.
Chuck DeVore is a California State Assemblyman, a U.S. Army Reserve lieutenant colonel, and was a Reagan-era Special Assistant for Foreign Affairs in the Pentagon.
The Muslim Student Union should be suspended for disrupting a speech at UC Irvine by the Israeli ambassador. Its members need to learn that their freedom of speech does not trump that of other people.
UC Irvine officials recently recommended a one-year suspension for the Muslim Student Union, the group that appears to have been behind the disruption of a speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren on the campus in February. It’s an apt punishment for what was clearly an inappropriate protest, although it will satisfy neither conservative politicians such as Assemblyman Chuck DeVore (R-Irvine), who wrote a letter to the university’s chancellor urging that the group be permanently banned, nor defenders of the Muslim group, who think the students were only exercising their free-speech rights…
UCI sign announcing a program sponsored
by the MSU on campus
College campuses throughout America play host to various student groups; some enhance the campus environment while others don’t. The Muslim Student Union (MSU) at the University of California Irvine (UCI) has been in the latter category for the six years I’ve represented about 500,000 in the California State Assembly, including the UCI campus.
For that reason, and the reasons detailed below, last February, I asked UCI leaders to ban the MSU for a year because of their disruptive campus behavior. This caused UCI’s MSU spokesperson to complain of my “long history of antagonism” towards the group while accusing me of censorship and vigilantism.
I’m pleased to report that the MSU at UCI has been suspended from campus for a year, pending a routine appeal.
My history with the MSU begins with my election to the Assembly when I begin hearing the UCI’s MSU chapter was considered one of the most radicalized in the nation. It didn’t take long for me to personally confirm this.
In February 2006, the MSU took the lead in protesting a display of the Danish political cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet Mohammad. UCI officials almost shut the display down over fears of violence. I personally called UCI leadership to request that the cartoons be allowed on campus.
In February 2007, I attended a lecture by Middle Eastern scholar Daniel Pipes and personally saw the MSU disrupt the lecture in direct violation of campus policies.
In May 2007, I discovered that UCI was the sole campus in the UC system to allow student groups to prevent the recording of their events. After hearing of several incidents where students and journalists attempted to record MSU events featuring hate speakers calling for the destruction of Israel and “death to the Jews” but were prevented from doing so by campus policy, I attended an MSU event on campus and recorded it. The MSU asked to cease recording and I refused. As a direct result of my actions, the University changed its policy four months later to conform with First Amendment protections for a free press.
In September 2009, I wrote to UC Chancellor Mark Yudof, to protest the UCI MSU’s sponsorship of an illegal fundraiser for a front group for the terrorist HAMAS organization.
In February 2010, the MSU disrupted Israeli Ambassador Oren’s speech at UCI. Uncovered internal emails show that MSU members carefully planned the disruption in which 11 of their members, including the chapter president or “Amir,” were arrested. I wrote to UCI Chancellor Michael Drake, to protest the MSU’s actions. In this letter, I declared, “MSU at UCI is an entity inimical to the University’s imperative to provide an education in an atmosphere of academic liberty, free of coercion and conducive to meaningful debate and free inquiry. I therefore request that you defend this University, its students, and its mission by banning the Muslim Student Union from its campus and withdrawing all formal recognition of its existence.”
In June 2010, I wrote to Chancellor Drake again, to protest the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Amir Abdel Malik Ali, an MSU-sponsored campus speaker.
While UCI’s leadership has finally done the right thing, it took far too long. This delay emboldened the MSU, encouraging them to push the envelope a little further with every event, using cries bigotry and racism as a hammer and shield to beat the university into submission. Make no mistake; were the MSU merely a fraternity, it would have been banned years ago.
The Muslim Student Union at UCI has shown itself incapable of existing in a free and open society except as its enemy. It seeks to quash academic freedom and support terrorist groups. Now, thankfully, the students who attend this great university in my district will be free from its propaganda and intimidation for at least one year. I call upon the Chancellor to make the ban permanent.
