Character Matters

My friend Mike wonders why the NFL is aghast at the behavior of some of its stars but not that of others which in some respects seems just as unseemly. He has in mind specifically the recent behavior of Patriots' QB Tom Brady who, according to a Boston Globe article, got his girlfriend pregnant, broke up with her, and was dating someone else by the time the baby was born.

I suppose this is no big deal to execs who pay women to gyrate mindlessly on the sidelines while wearing next to nothing, but it should be. These people profess to being appalled, as Mike points out, by the abuse to which Michael Vick subjected animals and by the rough treatment to which Ben Roethlisberger subjected young women, but it's also abusive to children to grow up without their biological father present on a daily basis in the home. The fact that such arrangements have become common in American society over the last forty years does nothing to meliorate the harm done to kids by fathers who don't want to take responsibility for their development.

What Brady did violates no law so his is not an offense in the same category as those of Vick or Roethlisberger, of course, but it's very sad that he chose to end his relationship with his actress girlfriend once the two of them had conceived a child. Maybe the NFL poohbahs think that the personal lives of their players, as long as they don't commit any felonies, are none of the league's business, but if they're concerned about the NFL's image then they might encourage a higher level of character and responsibility among their stars.

At the very least, they could stop insulting us by putting women on the sidelines whose only apparent purpose is to promote the sexualization of the sport.

RLC

To Build or Not to Build

Two Muslims, Raheel Raza and Tarek Fatah, have written a piece for the Ottawa Citizen in which they question both the need for a mosque near the WTC and the sincerity of those who seek to build it. Raza and Fatah sit on the board of the Muslim Canadian Congress and both have authored books. Raza is the author of Their Jihad ... Not my Jihad, and Fatah wrote The Jew is Not My Enemy, to be released in the fall.

Among the points the pair make in their column are these:

New York currently boasts at least 30 mosques so it's not as if there is pressing need to find space for worshippers. The fact is we Muslims know the idea behind the Ground Zero mosque is meant to be a deliberate provocation to thumb our noses at the infidel. The proposal has been made in bad faith and in Islamic parlance such an act is referred to as "Fitna," meaning "mischief-making" which is clearly forbidden in the Koran.

The Koran commands Muslims to, "Be considerate when you debate with the People of the Book" -- i.e., Jews and Christians. Building an exclusive place of worship for Muslims at the place where Muslims killed thousands of New Yorkers is not being considerate or sensitive, it is undoubtedly an act of "fitna."

Do they not understand that building a mosque at Ground Zero is equivalent to permitting a Serbian Orthodox church near the killing fields of Srebrenica where 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered?

As for those teary-eyed, bleeding-heart liberals such as New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and much of the media, who are blind to the Islamist agenda in North America, we understand their goodwill.

Unfortunately for us, their stand is based on ignorance and guilt, and they will never in their lives have to face the tyranny of Islamism that targets, kills and maims Muslims worldwide, and is using liberalism itself to destroy liberal secular democratic societies from within.

There's much more on this controversial issue in the column. Give it a look.

I myself have wondered why it is that people like Mayor Bloomberg and a number of liberal commentators seem to think that opposition to the mosque is a symptom of Islamophobia which, as Americans, is beneath us. What they seem to be missing is not whether Muslims have the legal right to build their worship centers, the question is why they would want to do so on this particular spot, a site close enough to the WTC that debris from the airplane crashed through the roof of the building that currently stands on it.

When the Israelis insisted upon their right to build housing in Arab East Jerusalem last year liberals, including President Obama, were outraged because, even though the Israelis had the right to do it, they were being terribly insensitive and provocative, it was said, to go ahead and do it.

Do some liberals actually believe that people need be sensitive to the feelings of others only when the others are Arab Muslims? If the others are the families of firefighters, policemen and capitalist office workers, then is sensitivity no longer such a big deal?

RLC