America—Land of the freak, home of the depraved

The U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, so Muslims should expect to receive the same protection afforded Jews or Christians. In fact, George Washington made a point of recognizing the need to protect Muslims from Christian persecution.

So how come the government deliberately violates its own laws and moral precepts to incite hatred against Muslims, Muslim organizations and Muslim states? There’s no point looking for a rational explanation because there isn’t one. Such perverse behaviour cannot be defended legally, politically or morally within the context of any democratic state.

This behaviour can be explained, though, if we acknowledge that the U.S. democracy is neither rational nor democratic, and that the persecution of Muslims serves the needs of a foreign government—Israel.

The Lobby's control over the U.S. is hardly news—it’s an open secret, just like Israel’s nuclear arsenal—but the manufactured hysteria over an innocuous Muslim community centre in New York shows that U.S. democratic culture, and I use that term loosely, is essentially despotic and criminal.

As you doubtless know, The Cordoba Society plans to build a community centre two blocks from the World Trade Centre demolition. After the proposal was overwhelmingly approved, the Arab Defamation League and a host of frothing anti-Muslim crusadists began screaming that “a mosque” must not be built so close to the hallowed ground of America’s holocaust. Even if these demented Jews and Christians have their kickers in a twist over the project, their complaints have no basis in fact or reason, and represent the modern face of officially approved U.S. bigotry.

Leaving aside the fact that we now know that Muslims had nothing to do with the Mossad-engineered attack on the WTC, the Cordoba Society owns the land on which the 13-storey centre is to be built. Protection of private property rights is the cornerstone of the U.S. Constitution, so no group has the right to interfere with the society exercising its constitutional right to develop its property as it sees fit. This latter point, though, is drowned out in the din of mainstream 9/11 hysteria.

(The best description of the project, now called simply Park51, is Haroon Siddiqui’s column in the Toronto Star.)

Fortunately, many Jewish “heretics,” like New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg and local congressmen Jerry Nadler, have publicly praised the project and condemned the anti-Muslim crusadists. “It’s only a slap in the face if you think that the people in the congregation are responsible for al-Qa‘ida,” said Nadler, “Jews, of all people, should know that we have to support religious liberty, because if you can block a mosque you can block a synagogue.”

Here we see the voice of reason—al-Qa‘ida comment notwithstanding—raised against the broadbrush smear of all Muslims as terrorists, but for all his accuracy Nadler misses the point. He assumes the protesters to be misguided, that they erroneously conflate extreme political Muslims with the average American Muslims. There is no error, here. The protesters are not interested in analogies between mosques and synagogues or upholding concepts like religious liberty. Their sole purpose is to incite hatred and fear of Muslims so that Israel can coerce Americans into believing that Muslims deserve to be mistreated.

Michael Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, also a rationalist on this issue, condemns the protest in even stronger language than Nadler: “There is nothing worse we could be doing to act as an accelerant and lubricant to transforming young Islamic men and women around the world into insurrectionists and jihadists [sic] than to say to a Muslim, ‘you are not entitled to freedom.’ This is the work of fundamentalist Christians and ultra-extreme, right-wing Jews.”

Whereas Nadler focuses on the basic stupidity of the crusadists' rhetoric, Weinstein makes the serious point that denying Muslims religious freedom endangers national security, whether in the U.S. or anywhere else. He also rightly identified the culprits, and in so doing highlighted the growing alienation of zionists from their co-religionists. It should be pointed out that one of the centre’s founding supporters is the United Jewish Federation of New York.

However, Weinstein also misses the point. He rationally assumes that it is a horrible mistake “to [transform] young Islamic men and women around the world into insurrectionists and jihadists,” yet that is precisely what is supposed to happen. Israel needs Muslims to be resentful and disaffected so that the demonized stereotype of the violent Muslim can be invoked to stampede the U.S. into committing horrific violence in the service of Israel.

The greatest threat to Israel is a world where Muslims are respected as equal members of a community, and enjoy good relations with people of other faiths. This scenario just happens to be the norm in a constitutional democracy, but since Israel is a fascist ethnocracy, democratic protections must be subverted wherever possible.

In the end, I expect that the centre will be built because the crusadists can mount no credible argument against it. The object of their hatred is not Park51 but the U.S. Constitution, which does not discriminate against Muslims as Israel demands. This document is more of a threat to Israel than any bomber, and herein lies the desperate irrationality of the real terrorists in America.