Why Liberals Love Feisal Abdul Rauf

In the New York Post today, John Podhoretz explains why liberals are so enamored of Feisal Abdul Rauf, the slick Muslim advocate for a Mosque at Ground Zero.

The gist of it is that Islamic militants have continually borrowed the left's rhetoric and pseudo-facts in explaining why evil is good and good is evil; or by saying that, if someone attacks us, it's our fault and we should apologize.

As Podhoretz explains:

What Rauf really sounds like, in the speeches and writings unearthed since the controversy began, is a Western leftist specializing in offering analytical defenses and sociohistorical explications of the Arab-Islamic position.

Podhoretz gives the following example of Rauf's duplicitous left-speak:

Thus, when he told an audience in Australia that "We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al Qaeda has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims," he was invoking a shibboleth of the anti-Iraq-War left. In his pacific voice, he referred to how "US-led sanctions against Iraq led to the death of over half a million Iraqi children."

Thus, he conveniently forgot (as those who use this line of argument always do), that the sanctions resulted from a unanimous UN Security Council vote and were placed on Iraq in the 1990s as a way of avoiding military action after Saddam Hussein violated the terms under which he was allowed to remain in power after the 1991 Gulf War.

Under any moral understanding -- any clerical understanding -- of responsibility, the absolute responsibility for any and all deaths therefore rests on Hussein. It was he who violated rules to which he'd agreed, and he who could've done the things that would've ended the sanctions regime.

In the same speech, Rauf explained away Mideast terrorism: "After 50 years of, in many cases, oppression, of US support of authoritarian regimes that have violated human rights in the most heinous of ways, how else do people get attention?"

This, too, is familiar gruel for the American left, which has a terrible weakness for finding the root causes of the internal repressive acts of sovereign regimes in American actions.

Read it all here.  Hat tip:  View From the Right
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