Echoing a theme already sounded, and sounded, and sounded again by Victor Davis Hanson, Jennifer Rubin, Charles Krauthammer, James Taranto, Jonah Goldberg, and every other uncultured non-elite intellectual who likes the polls and needs something to talk about other than how anti-Muslim bigotry or even mere animus does not in any way, shape, or form play any role whatsoever – none, and anyway why can’t you be tolerant of it? – in the opposition to the Lower Manhattan Totalitarian Terror Command Center (and Insensitive, Too), JE Dyer stresses that this thing is not only about Lower Manhattan and Totalitarian Terror and completely natural damright respectable non-bigoted rational feelings of revulsion at the mere thought of non-Judeo/Christian houses or rather rooms of worship within imaginary or virtual sight of The Site that Is Not To Be Touched (except by 100-story office buildings and so on).
JED reviews the bootleg recordings of Feisal Live on Tour!, made available at her friend “Pam” Geller’s site, and very averagely perceives something: “One of the most egregious offenses perceived by average Americans is that our cultural elite is – once again – ridiculing and abusing the people for not hewing to a narrative of culpability and self-abnegation that has no constructive purpose.” “- once again -“! Bad elite – caught in the act, ridiculing and abusing all over our brand new populist carpet.
Here’s JED sopping up the mess – with a smile on her face for almost the whole human race:
There’s hardly a shibboleth left uninvoked by the time Rauf is done. It’s actually funny to tote them up: there are the obligatory references to America having blood on its hands; to our bomber aircraft generating the pretext for terrorism; to “U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq” killing half a million children; to the N-word and our penchant for “creating ethnic conflicts”; to the British colonial authorities bringing division and strife to the Middle East.
Blood on America’s hands, total war, colonialism, ethnic conflict… If anything, it’s even actually funnier actually toting them up a second time! And those sanctions were double-actually triple-funny, when you look back on them, and think about how the neocons (including my very own self) deadpanned to everyone that we were on a moral crusade to rescue the miserable Iraqis… It’s the shaggiest dog ever! (And watch the carpet, we just cleaned it.)
Thing is – Pam and J have left out some of the Imam’s best laugh lines, but luckily our ol’ pal P.J. at State made the full routine available to our good buddy Josh at Foreign Policy. I mean, there’s one off-the-wall riff on allowing “each person and each group to choose to love God in the vernacular and in the liturgy that it chooses and it prefers” that is just gut-bustingly leftwing elitist, shibboleth-wise – it’s a ridiculously abusive hoot!
As for normal talk that serves a constructive purpose, I guess you’ll have to try Contentions, or maybe Atlas Shrugs – whichever… same difference.
But he wasn’t speaking in favor of the US interventions in Iraq (which were unnecessary according to Keller, since they only cause 500,000 lives) or Afghanistan, which was the point of PNAC, because Gerecht, and many others had argued that the current map of Middle and South West Asia needed to be reconfigured. In fact as far as I could tell, he was endorsing ‘resistance’ to those policies, there is no good that comes from Moore’s demagogic jibes, he hates the Saudis because they had connections with Bush not Wahhabism. The coffee clatch at Perdana, included the likes of Dr. Caldicott, who thought like Obamathat the nuclear freeze was not sufficient