Vladimir Lenin said that westerners too dumb to recognize his
plans to “hang them” would “sell me the rope — on credit.” And
they did, engaging in decades of excuse-making for Communist
totalitarianism. But without the Soviets around, the American left
needed new anti-western totalitarians to mollify, and the leaders
of militant Islam satisfied that itch.
In the 1970s, the American left embraced the Ayatollah
Khomeini. Jimmy Carter’s United Nations representative, Andrew
Young, said that in time Khomeini would be seen as “some kind of
saint.” The BBC and New York Times defended Khomeini as a
potential progressive during his days as a Parisian layabout in
exile. Carter’s ambassador to Iran assured the skeptical that
“Khomeini is a Gandhi-like figure.”
Today’s American left displays its useful idiocy by
insisting after each new act of Islamic terrorism that “Islam is a
religion of peace.” MSNBC is the unofficial headquarters for these
useful idiots and now numbers the mugging and giggling morning host
and “Republican” lightweight Joe Scarborough as a member in good
standing. In between goofing around with Carter adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski’s stuck-up daughter Mika, Scarborough often shills for
the Gandhi-like figures of Islam today. He longs for that glorious
day when fellow Republicans abandon their bigotry and see a mosque
near the ruins of the World Trade Center as American as apple
pie.
Eugene Robinson, whom MSNBC hosts incessantly introduce as
a “Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist” before his insight-free
appearances, wrote a
column this week titled “Sharia the new Red menace?” Robinson
chuckled at Newt Gingrich’s recent comment that Sharia law is
seeping into western countries through “stealth
jihadis.”
“The ‘stealth jihadis,’ I suppose, must be like the ‘known
communists’ on the list in Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s hand,” wrote
Robinson, a gibe sure to impress peers at the Post and
New York Times who for years insisted Alger Hiss wasn’t a
Communist. Robinson appears oblivious to the fact that western
liberals themselves have endorsed the spread of Sharia
law.
In 2008, Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury,
supported the adoption of elements of Sharia law in Britain. “It
seems unavoidable and, as a matter of fact, certain conditions of
Sharia are already recognized in our society,” he said. Williams
called for “plural jurisdiction” and “constructive
accommodation.”
The American left’s face of moderate Islam, the Ground
Zero mosque imam Feisal Abdul Rauf,
wrote for Eugene Robinson’s own employer in 2008 that Rowan
Williams “was right”: “The addition of Sharia law to ‘the law of
the land,’ in this case British law, complements, rather than
undermines, existing legal frameworks. The Archbishop was right. It
is time for Britain to integrate aspects of Islamic
law.”
Robinson finds it absurd that Gingrich would say, “How we
don’t have some kind of movement in this country on the left that
understands that sharia is a direct mortal threat to virtually
every value that the left has is really one of the most interesting
historical questions.” But Gingrich is hardly the first person to
make this point. Liberals such as the late Italian journalist
Oriana Fallaci and Salman Rushdie complained about the obtuseness
of progressive Islamophiles long before Gingrich talked about it.
When Tony Blair wowed progressives in 2005 by naming Sir Iqbal
Sacranie as the face of moderate Islam in the U.K, Rushdie had to
remind his peers that Sacranie approved of the fatwa on his head
(saying “death is perhaps too easy” for Rushdie) and had boycotted
a Holocaust remembrance.
Communism’s useful idiots sold Lenin and his successors
the rope to hang them. Islam’s apologists will not only sell the
jihadists the rope to hang westerners but will acquit them through
Sharia law after they do.
