Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Ditziness on Parade

If you have little patience with muddled thinking you probably shouldn't watch this video of former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn weighing in on the New York mosque issue. If you do watch it, though, you might be struck by the incongruity of a woman who has acknowledged that she numbers among the people she admires Mao Zedong, the Chinese communist leader responsible for the murders of 50 to 70 million Chinese, blasting opponents of the mosque for "intolerance":

Throughout this segment Ms Dunn refuses to be deterred from her single-minded mission to smear Republicans, even though nearly 70% of Americans, including many Democrats, oppose building the mosque on the proposed site. In her eagerness to make this controversy about Republican bigotry, Ms Dunn makes herself sound foolish. Opposition to the mosque is not simply a matter of being intolerant toward a particular religion -although there's nothing wrong with personal, as opposed to legal, intolerance toward a religion that treats women like chattel, gays like felons, and non-believers like swine. Rather, it's a matter of insensitivity and insult. For people who adhere to the same religion that figured so prominently in the act of mass murder that took place on 9/11 to gratuitously place a facility that honors the religion that motivated the murderers adjacent to the site of one of the greatest crimes in America's history is extraordinarily offensive.

It would be, as we've said before, like Germans building a German heritage center in the shadow of one of their extermination camps at the conclusion of WWII or Japanese Americans building a shrine to Japanese militarism next to Pearl Harbor nine years after the attack on our naval base. It might not have been illegal, but it would've been either a deliberate thumb in the eye or an act of appalling insensitivity. In either case it should not be done.

This, however, is all too complicated for the robotic Ms Dunn whose mind can't seem to wander beyond the bounds of her ideological talking points.

Nothing she says, though, is as ditzy as Mika Brzezinski's baffling comment about peep shows in the neighborhood of Ground Zero. Ms Brzezinski evidently thinks the controversy is really about whether a mosque is more or less insulting to the families of the 9/11 victims than a strip club, and that if we accept the presence of the latter we should accept the former as well. This, however, is to grossly miscast, or misunderstand, the issue. This controversy is not about the relative moral value of Islam and sex shows, it's about whether it's appropriate for those who worship Allah to honor him at the spot where their coreligionists, in Allah's name, committed one of the worst crimes in the history of that violent religion. Unless Ms Brzezinski believes that peep show operators conspired with the Islamist terrorists to bring down the World Trade Towers their proximity to Ground Zero has nothing to do with whether an Islamic mosque should be placed there, too.

This video would have been an occasion for mirth were not the subject so serious and were it not the case that these people occupy positions of influence.

Thanks to the Daily Caller for the video.

RLC