QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 8:23 P.M. ET:  The mosque debate rages.  Now a group of leftist "clergymen" has weighed in on the side of the mosque.  They're led by ultra-leftist Jim Wallis, who is close (natch) to President Obama.  They claim they're concerned about religious liberty.

Strange, when Terri Schiavo was put to death in Florida, and the chic left ridiculed her family's Christian beliefs, I didn't hear any of these pro-mosque clergymen warning about attacks on religion.  Did you? 

When the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., in whose church Barack Obama sat for 20 years, engaged in his anti-Semitic hate-mongering, I didn't hear Rev. Wallis or his crowd expressing outrage.  Did you?

But now, on behalf of a mosque at Ground Zero, presided over by an imam who mixes "moderation" with some standard America-bashing and Israel-abolishing speech, the "clergymen" are anguished. 

Wes Pruden of the Washington times says it well:

The American elites no longer understand strongly held convictions, good or evil, religious or political. The church and synagogue is only a place for rites and ritual, a place to marry your daughters and bury your dead. But devout Muslims really believe. They never apologize for who they are or what they believe. They have only contempt for the platitudes they have learned to use so effectively in hoodwinking the West — and for presidents who peddle the moonshine.

We make a distinction between truly moderate Muslims, and there are legions of them, and the frauds.  The fact is that Islam is both a religion and a political/military movement.  We have a right to examine its beliefs and motives. 

And Pruden is right that American elites no longer understand strongly held convictions.  How can they, when any idea, absurd or not, is presented to them in our "best" universities simply as "an alternative narrative"?

The elites are making fools of themselves.  They will be replaced.

August 25, 2010