Dennis Prager Reviews Motives of the Left’s Hatred for Ground Zero Mosque Opponents

“I recently wrote about leftists’ hatred for conservatives as people, not merely for conservative ideas. Demonization of opponents is a fundamental characteristic of the left. It is not merely tactical; they believe people on the right are bad. (Here’s a test: Ask someone on the left if active support of California Proposition 8 — retaining the man-woman definition of marriage — was an act of hate.)

A related defining characteristic of the left is the ascribing of nefarious motives to conservatives. For the left, a dismissal of conservatives’ motives is as important as is dismissal of the conservatives as people. It is close to impossible for almost anyone on the left — and I mean the elite left, not merely left-wing blogs — to say “There are good people on both of sides of this issue.” From Karl Marx to Frank Rich of The New York Times, this has always been the case.

In the left’s worldview, conservative opponents of affirmative action cannot be driven by concern for blacks — opposition is animated by racists; conservative opponents of illegal immigration are animated by racism and xenophobia; opposition to abortion is a function of sexism; President Bush went to war for oil and American imperialism; and conservative supporters of retaining man-woman marriage hate gays.

This is not true of elite conservatives. Leading conservative columnists, leading Republicans, etc., rarely depict liberals as motivated by evil. Conservatives can say “There are good people on both sides of the issue” because we actually believe it.

Almost any contentious issue would provide proof of the left’s need to attack motives, but the proposed Islamic center and mosque near ground zero provides a particularly excellent example.

I have not come across a mainstream leftist description of opponents of the mosque/Islamic center being built near ground zero that has not ascribed hate-filled, intolerant, bigoted, “Islamophobic” or xenophobic motives to those who oppose the mosque. Contrast this with how mainstream opponents of the mosque describe the proponents of the mosque and you will see an immense divide between right and left in the way they talk about each other.

Here are but a few examples of how mainstream proponents of the mosque describe opponents and their motives:

Michael Kinsley, editor at large, The Atlantic: “Is there any reason to oppose the mosque that isn’t bigoted, or demagogic, or unconstitutional? None that I’ve heard or read.”

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times Blog, Aug. 19, 2010: “The far right wing has seized on the issue as an occasion for fanning hatred against Muslims.”

Tony Norman, columnist, Pittsburgh Post Gazette: “… a handful of politicians who cynically conflate the religion of American Muslims with the nihilism of the 9/11 terrorists.”

Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic blog: “The pursuit of power through demagoguery.”

Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York (in a column titled “America Has Disgraced Itself”): “In today’s GOP, even bigotry doesn’t spare you from bigotry.”

“GOP leaders call them (those building the mosque) terrorists because they don’t share Benjamin Netanyahu’s view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

“And oh yes, my fellow Jews, who are so thrilled to be locked arm in arm with the heirs of Pat Robertson and Father Coughlin against the Islamic threat.”

And in a Politico column titled “Decency Lost”: “Republicans are clawing over each other to demonize Muslims.”

HuffingtonPost, Allison Kilkenny: “This mock piety is really a cover for Islamophobia.”

“Indeed, America is extremely hostile — not only to Islam — but to anyone who gives off the air of being exotic, or different.”

“Xenophobia is really a convenient cover for a deeper bigotry.”

HuffingtonPost, James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute: “Shame. Your bigoted appeals to fear and intolerance disgrace us all and put our country at risk in the world.”

HuffingtonPost, Michael Hughes: “Even more hideous is the way in which these bigots try to hide their overt prejudice in the emotional guise of love and caring, purportedly because they believe we must be ‘sensitive’ to the families of the victims of 9/11.”

New York Times editorial: “Republican ideologues, predictably … spew more of their intolerant rhetoric.

“The country ignores such cynicism and ugliness at its own peril.”

“Too many Republican leaders are determined to whip up as much false controversy and anguish as they can.”

New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof: “Why do so many Republicans find strip clubs appropriate for the ground zero neighborhood but object to a house of worship?”

“(They) are cynically turning the Islamic center into a nationwide issue in hopes of votes. … They’re just like the Saudi officials who ban churches, and even confiscate Bibles, out of sensitivity to local feelings.”

“Today’s crusaders against the Islamic community center are promoting a similar paranoid intolerance.”

Keith Olbermann, MSNBC: “(The) country has begun to run on a horrible fuel of hatred — magnified, amplified, multiplied, by politicians and zealots, within government and without.”

New York Times columnist Frank Rich: “This month’s incessant and indiscriminate orgy of Muslim-bashing.”

“So virulent is the Islamophobic hysteria of the neocon and Fox News right — abetted by the useful idiocy of the Anti-Defamation League …”

“The ginned-up rage over the ‘ground zero mosque’ (was motivated) by the potential short-term rewards of winning votes by pandering to fear during an election season.”

It started with “a New York Post jihad.”

“The Islamophobia command center, Murdoch’s News Corporation…”

Why does the left attribute only nefarious motives to those who believe that the Islamic center does not belong near ground zero?

Because leftism holds these beliefs:

1. Those who hold leftist positions are, by definition, better people than their opponents.

2. Those who hold leftist positions have, by definition, pure motives; therefore, the motives of their opponents must be impure.

I conclude with this: I believe that a wiser man than the present imam would have decided to avoid precisely what he has inspired — intense division in America — and would have immediately retracted his decision to erect an Islamic center and mosque right by the slaughterhouse of 9/11 which happened to have been caused by his co-religionists.

But I also believe that there are good arguments and good people on both sides of this issue.

I can say that, however, for one reason.

I am not on the left.”

Dennis Prager Columns are available at Townhall.com

Gore’s Global Warming – Climate Change Myth Legislation Fading This Year

Poor Al Gore. As if an im- pending divorce and allegations of sexual misconduct from an Oregon masseuse weren’t bad enough (he has since been cleared of wrongdoing), the apparent collapse of “cap-and-trade” legislation in the U.S. Senate has driven the former vice president to despair.

As reported by Steve Milloy on his blog Green Hell, Mr. Gore recently admitted to supporters in a conference call, “[T]his [cap-and-trade] battle has not been successful and is pretty much over for this year.” Mr. Gore blamed everyone and their monkey for the failure of Congress to pass comprehensive climate legislation, including his former colleagues: “The U.S. Senate has failed us,” he lamented, “the federal government has failed us.”

The fortunes of Mr. Gore‘s global-warming crusade certainly are in decline: A recent Rasmussen poll found that just 34 percent of respondents “feel human activity is the main contributor” to global warming and that the percentage of those who consider global warming a “serious issue” has “trended down slightly since last November.”

Mr. Gore himself is to blame for at least some of the public backlash against global-warming orthodoxy: Using bad science to justify bad policy will inevitably rub people the wrong way. And Mr. Gore has not helped his cause by consistently expressing outrageous falsehoods (“the debate is over”) and shamelessly trying to shield his assertions from legitimate criticism by claiming “settled science.” All the while, he has enriched himself and pushed a left-wing economic agenda.

Take, for example, the infamous “hockey stick” graph, a version of which was featured prominently in Mr. Gore‘s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” The graph appeared to show global temperatures relatively flat for a millennium and then suddenly spiking upward in the late 20th century – proof, according to Mr. Gore and his acolytes, of man-made global warming caused by industrial carbon emissions.

Temperature records for the past century are based on instrumental data: thermometers, satellites, etc. For prior centuries, however, scientists rely on proxy data; in the case of the original hockey-stick graph, researchers relied on tree rings. But as Roy Spencer, former senior scientist for climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, writes in “The Great Global Warming Blunder,” “the most recent tree-ring data do not even show the warming that occurred in the second half of the 20th-century, but appear to indicate a cooling instead.” Because tree rings do not show the recent warming that we know occurred, it follows that tree rings are not an adequate proxy by which we can accurately gauge past temperatures.

The unreliability of tree-ring data has long been known. Nevertheless, the hockey-stick graph was embraced enthusiastically by Mr. Gore and the global-warming crowd, for it conveniently dispensed with two significant climate events: the Medieval Warm Period (10th to 13th centuries) and the Little Ice Age (14th to 19th centuries). The former saw temperatures in the North Atlantic warm enough that vikings could settle and flourish in a lush Greenland, the latter temperatures so low that people routinely ice-skated on a frozen River Thames. Both of these climate events, for which there are masses of historical evidence, began before the Industrial Revolution and therefore are unattributable to man-made carbon emissions.

That’s why the global-warming crowd was so desperate to hide them: If people realize that temperature fluctuations occur naturally and cyclically, they are less likely to embrace the draconian, job-killing energy taxes favored by Mr. Gore and his ilk as punishment for their own carbon sins.

The hockey stick conveniently hid this natural temperature variation – for a while. Fortunately, thanks largely to the tireless work of independent researchers Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, the flaws in the statistical methodology used to create the various hockey-stick graphs have received widespread attention, and the once-iconic symbol of global warming has since been largely marginalized in the climate-change debate.

But not before it helped Al Gore to earn an Academy Award, a Nobel Peace Prize and an undeserved reputation as a scientific guru. As The Washington Post once noted of Mr. Gore‘s academic credentials: “For all of Gore‘s later fascination with science and technology, he often struggled academically in those subjects. The political champion of the natural world received [a] sophomore D in Natural Sciences 6 … and then got a C-plus in Natural Sciences 118 his senior year.”

Imagine: We nearly let this former politician, who barely passed sophomore science at Harvard, persuade us to acquiesce to the monstrous statism of cap-and-trade, which would have resulted in higher energy and food prices and imposed yet another economic hardship on the poorest members of our society. All in the name of bad science.

Shame on him. And thank God he failed.

The above report was written by Matt Patterson of the Washington Times.

Comment:   Poor Al having to face public review of his college scores.  This exposure may not be beyond the pale, but it is close.  I once failed Geomorphology118 as a college junior……and got a D in ROTC.  (I thought I’d make that public if there is a chance I might decide some day to run for public office.)

 

Dollars for Mosque-building from Uncle Sam

Fellow conservative, Lisa Rich sent me the following article questioning why Obama is spending so much American taxpayer dollars to renovate and construct mosques in various corners of the world.  The author was not noted.

 

“As US President Barack Hussein Obama continues on his seemingly endless quest to appease Muslims, with instructions to NASA to ‘find a way’ to reach them, Iftar dinners at the White House and the US State Dept.’s sponsorship of Ground Zero Mosque Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s forthcoming ’speaking tour’ of Muslim countries (without knowledge of what exactly he’ll be talking about); it emerges that that his administration is also planning to spend millions of taxpayer dollars on the restoration of dozens of Muslim sites around the world:

WASHINGTON – The goodwill tour of the Middle East by the Imam behind the proposed mosque near ground zero is just part of the U.S. government’s efforts to reach out to the Muslim world.

This year, the Obama administration will spend nearly $6 million to restore 63 historic and cultural sites, including mosques and minarets, in 55 nations, according to State Department documents.

Under a program established by Congress in 2001, the department will fund at least five projects in as many countries at a cost of more than $271,000.

The contributions include $76,135 for the 16th century Grand Mosque in Tongxin, China, and $67,500 for the 18th century Golden Mosque in Lahore, Pakistan. An additional $62,169 will be spent on restoring a 19th century minaret in Mauritania’s ancient city of Tichitt; $50,437 for the Sundarwala Burj, a 16th century Islamic Monument in New Delhi, and $15,450 to restore the 18th century Gobarau Minaret in Katsina, Nigeria.

The amount spent on mosque restoration projects is a fraction of the total in the 2010 Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation, which also will fund projects to restore Christian and Buddhist sites as well as museums, forts and palaces.

Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent almost $26 million on the program to fund about 640 cultural preservation projects in more than 100 countries.

“The fund has demonstrated America’s respect for the world’s cultural heritage,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said last month in announcing the 2010 projects. “Cultural heritage serves as a reminder of historical experiences and achievements of humanity. Ancient structures and objects offer important lessons for us today.”

Throughout his administration, Obama has been fervent in his support of Islam and Muslims and distinctly cold towards other faiths. Some believe that he is in fact Muslim himself (we believe this to be at least technically true, as he was born to a Muslim father and schooled as a Muslim in Indonesia – which would make him at the very least an apostate of Islam, if, as he claims, he is now a Christian).

But why, at a time when America is coming out of one of the worst recessions in history, is he squandering US taxpayers’ money on such naked appeasement as this? Surely it is the responsibility of Muslims to maintain their own holy sites? How many Synagogues and churches will be receiving the same largesse?”