From the Goldberg File: Making a Mosquery of the Truth

BY: Jonah Goldberg

I cannot be alone in thinking that the mosque debate is getting really old. But since I still seem to be in the minority, here are three quick points that I think need to be given more air.

1. The liberals are the ideologues on this. Michael Bloomberg and Barack Obama have claimed countless times that they are non-ideological pragmatists. But their position, right or wrong, is wildly ideological. Meanwhile, conservatives who say, "Fine, build your mosque, just not right there," are the pragmatists. But conservative pragmatism is never recognized as such if it breaks with the liberal party line. When conservatism breaks with liberalism, it must be denounced as ideology or, of course, bigotry.

2. Stop calling it a mosque. Defenders of Cordoba House sometimes say, "It's not a mosque, it's a cultural-affairs center with a prayer room," or some such, as if this were a defense. To me, that makes it worse, not better. If this were some small, one-story mosque for the handful of Muslims living nearby to pray in, the arguments over freedom of religion would have more merit. But this would be a 13-story institution with an obvious political component to it. That strikes me as gaudy and an invitation to mischief. This is another point I think non-bigoted Americans understand better than the condescending supporters of the mosque.

3. The staggering hypocrisy of liberals is really an amazing thing. Everywhere you look, you hear these scandalized liberals talking as if it were beyond the pale to criticize religion. You'd never know that these overnight stalwarts of religious freedom had been demonizing Christian conservatives, Mormons, and increasingly orthodox Jews for years. It's as if these people never wanted to ban a crèche, outlaw a Christian group, or claim that Jewish supporters of Israel suffer from dual loyalties. I'm not making a two-wrongs-make-a-right point here. I do think that some of the rhetoric on the right goes too far -- Newt's Nazi analogy, for instance. But it is amazing how establishment liberalism can spend years demonizing organized religion in this country only to turn on a dime when it comes to defending the Islamic equivalent of NikeTown two blocks from Ground Zero.

Canton OKs rezoning for new apartments, Madison County Schools and South Madison Fire District plans to appeal.

Complex to be inside school zone; district plans appeal

CANTON — Canton aldermen on Tuesday approved a rezoning that clears the way for an apartment complex on land that sits inside the Madison County school zone, over protests from both school and nearby fire protection officials.

By a 6-1 vote, the Board of Aldermen granted the change in zoning for 23 acres proposed for apartments within a 63-acre commercial development planned by First Choice Development. Attorney Ron Farris said the "high-end, luxury multi-family community" is part of the $40 million development that will be built in the Sowell Road area just east of I-55.

Attorney John Hooks said the school district is concerned about the number of students that could flood nearby schools. "We still have not received details of the number of students utilizing the Madison County schools. It's critical for schools to prepare," he said.

"We have no specifics (about the apartments). We still don't have anything but platitudes and rambling projections," Hooks said.

"You don't stop growth because the school district doesn't want more children to educate," Farris said, adding that at most the likelihood is 60 to 61 additional students would enter Madison County schools from the apartments.

John Scanlon, the attorney for the South Madison Fire Protection District at Gluckstadt, said the volunteer department has concerns over fire safety. An apartment complex could affect the fire insurance rating in the area that the Gluckstadt department is working to lower, he said.

"If the fire insurance rating is affected, it will adversely affect the residents of the fire district and the city of Canton," said Gluckstadt resident Kerry Minninger, a member of the volunteer department. "We've put in a lot of work to improve fire protections. We would ask the aldermen to consider that."

Farris disputed the chance of a change in the area's fire rating, which would increase homeowners' insurance rates. "There is no negative impact on public safety. There is no proof that the fire rating will be lowered."

Canton Alderman Billy Myers said he supports the commercial development but voted against the rezoning because of the problems that can arise from apartments.

"It's a proven fact that no matter the intent from the start, apartments become problems in any city," said Myers, who works with the Madison County Sheriff's Department. He said deputies answer frequent calls to another apartment complex in Canton that isn't far from the Sowell Road area.

Madison County School Superintendent Mike Kent said the district plans to appeal the Board of Aldermen's decision to Madison County Circuit Court. Scanlon said the fire district will join that appeal to halt the rezoning.

CL

Opinion: The Separation of Islamophilia from State

By George Neumayr
By modern secularist standards, Barack Obama's boosterism for Islam violates the "separation between Church and state." Had George W. Bush held a rosary and modest fish dinner at the White House to mark the beginning of Lent, the ACLU left would have freaked out. But these same secularists didn't mind Barack's "Iftar dinner" last Friday night.

That is, until he wimped out on his endorsement of the Ground Zero mosque. Now his dinner looks to them more like the production of Ishtar, as finger-to-the-wind Dems cravenly scramble for cover. The search is on for a "compromise." Perhaps the self-styled Solomonic Obama can convince the mosque planners to transfer their property rights to NASA. Administrator Charles Bolden could then turn the land into a satellite office for contractors who pursue the space agency's "perhaps foremost" mission (as explained to him by Obama): "to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science…and math and engineering."

The moment one thinks this presidency has hit the bottom of grim parody it finds a new one. It is hard to keep track of them at this point, but any list of the White House's greatest Islamophilic hits would have to include: wanting a civilian jury trial for the 9/11 planners, refusing to identify radical Islam as a terrorist motive, endorsing the concept of jihad, fretting over the loss of "diversity" after the Fort Hood shooting, and vacationing through the fallout of an aborted Christmas day bombing over Detroit.

The White House's ideologically willful self-delusion about radical Islam is staggering. Here, for example, is its self-reporting at whitehouse.gov about the Ramadan dinner: "Last night, President Obama continued the White House tradition of hosting an Iftar -- the meal that breaks the day of fasting --celebrating Ramadan in the State Dining Room." Continued a tradition? Exactly which White House tradition is that?

The answer: Obama was referring not to a White House "tradition" but to one distant event that he carefully left vague: Thomas Jefferson's war negotiations with Tunisian envoy Sidi Soliman Mellimelli.

Jefferson, desperate to end the Barbary war with Islamic pirates, invited Mellimelli to Washington for negotiations. According to Gaye Wilson, the visit put Jefferson and his staff on the spot: James Madison, then the Secretary of State, had to field Mellimelli's request for "concubines." Jefferson told shocked colleagues to calm down; after all, peace with the Barbary pirates required passing "unnoticed the irregular conduct of their ministers." Mellimelli, in his own way, was grateful. After hearing some gossip about the wan mood of the childless Madisons, he "flung his 'magical' cloak around Dolley Madison and murmured an incantation that promised she would bear a male child. His conjuring, however, did not work."

The war negotiations happened to coincide with Ramadan. Consequently, a scheduled dinner at the White House had to be moved back from "half after three" to "precisely at sunset" in order for Mellimelli to show up.

While it is true that the basically agnostic Jefferson was an arrogant secularist in embryo (the type on display now who dislikes all religions save Islam), he was under no illusions about jihadists. The Obama White House makes references to the "Koran" Jefferson owned, as if he had purchased it for religious edification. The truth is that he purchased it for self-protection: he wanted to understand the attitudes and war tactics of the Barbary pirates.

The cocky frat-boy "Republican" on MSNBC, Joe Scarborough, a hopelessly smug lightweight who tries to weigh in on the "big issues" of the day when not playing early-morning grabass with his equally shallow but self-important guests, has said repeatedly that the Founding Fathers wrote the First Amendment to protect projects like the Ground Zero mosque. No, they didn't. "Morning Joe" is mistaking Thurgood Marshall's "living" Constitution for theirs.

While the Founding Fathers certainly didn't want anyone coerced in matters of faith, they wrote it to protect the states from a future federal government that might swoop down and crush the public religious life of majorities in those states. (And, by the way, let's cut the PC crap about Jefferson as the father of the First Amendment; he wasn't even at the Constitutional Convention. He was in France as an ambassador, gazing with approval at budding French Revolutionaries.) For many decades after the Constitution was enacted several states still had religious litmus tests for public office and sent tax dollars directly to the churches of their choice.

In other words, it is the very First Amendment that Scarborough mangles which permits New Yorkers to block the construction of a mosque. The First Amendment was designed to protect the majority from the tyranny of a religious minority favored by the federal government. What radical Islam's useful idiots in the White House and the press call "religious freedom," the founders would have called insanely dumb religious relativism and self-hating stupidity.

TAS