Your Tax Dollars And The 1st Amendment At Work

We've heard the left, led by the pseudo-lawyer in the White House, spend thousands of words telling us we're bigots, we've got it all wrong about Islam, the imam behind the Ground Zero mosque is a moderate, and the separation of church and state is being fully protected. If you're not already fed up to the neck with being patronized by know-nothings, this should do it.

The State Department has decided to hire Glenn Beck to be a goodwill ambassador to the Christian nations, send him on a worldwide tour on the taxpayers' dollar, and distribute free copies of his most recent book to those who need to understand the deep and abiding relationship between Christianity and the United States. The City of New York is also working with the federal government to establish a 13 story Christian center in lower Manhattan by promising $80 million dollars in financial assistance to the center. It will be called the Ferdinand and Isabella Christian Outreach Center, in honor of the noble Muslims who so valiantly but unsuccessfully opposed the Catholic monarchs.

Oh, wait, that's not quite right. It was actually Feisal Abdul Rauf. The State Department sent him on a goodwill tour of the Muslim nations on the taxpayers' dollar, and distributed 3,000 discounted and free copies of Rauf's book What's Right With Islam: A New Vision for Muslims and the West (the book has been slightly re-titled since its original publication to eliminate the mention of the United States in Muslim lands). The book was needed in Islamic nations because there needs to be a show of mutual respect between the Christian West and the Muslim Middle East (wink, wink).

New York City's controller has indicated that $80 million sounds about right for city assistance to the builders of the mosque at Ground Zero. And the perfect place for the mosque is Ground Zero so that the originally-named Cordoba Center can honor the Christians who worked so well with the Muslims in the Spanish transition from Muslim to Christian control in 1492. It stands even more strongly for the separation of religion from the secular government (except for those pesky loans and "bought" politicians and the distribution of a religious tract by an author who refuses to condemn Hamas).

Somehow, in their generosity toward the First Amendment, the same people who support the mosque, pay for the junkets of a terrorist-supporting imam, and love the First Amendment to death, also would never hand out free copies of Mutiny on the Bounty because the hero's name is Fletcher Christian, and cannot find a way to assist St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church to be rebuilt after being destroyed by the collapse and fire at the World Trade Center. Leftists and Obamist Muslim-supporters seem to be able to turn their sensitivities and adherence to the First Amendment on an off like a light switch.

The imam's good will tour allegedly cost the taxpayers a mere $16,000 (I call baloney, the jet fuel alone would have cost that much), and an even merer $10,000 to distribute the copies of the mass-murder fellow traveling imam's book. Let us not forget that imam Rauf says America created al Qaeda, was complicit in the 9-11 attack, refuses to denounce Hamas as a terrorist organization even after the recent murder of four Israeli civilians (including a pregnant mother), and insists that the Muslim center is mostly secular because they will teach law there--sharia law, that is.

If the Glenn Beck scenario had been true, the editorial staff of the New York Times and the Washington Post would turn into a raving mob and attack the White House and Congress with the Supreme Court thrown in for good measure. But they're too busy right now condemning Beck's recent mass meeting on the Washington Mall as overly Christian, overly white, and overly racist. And besides, Beck is automatically and ipso facto a bigoted Islamophobe because he opposes the Ground Zero mosque.

But when it comes to Rauf, the leftists all agree that the Ground Zero mosque is an excellent form of Muslim outreach to the ignorant Christians, Jews, and family survivors of the 9-11 mass murder. They further agree, for some reason I have yet to fathom, that separation of church and state includes synagogue and state but not mosque and state. When it comes to the Ten Commandments (common to all three religions), any printing of them at public expense would be a horrendous violation of the First Amendment, but since Rauf's book actually mentions the West in passing, the remaining 99% of the book devoted to Muslim religious thought is discarded as incidental, and the left declares the book "not religious." Thus, there is no First Amendment violation when the taxpayers are paying for its distribution.

Are you clear on this yet? If so, please explain it to me, because I am totally lost. And as for the financial part, the City of New York is willing to lend millions not only to a religious figure for building a triumphalist Islamic center near the sight of a Muslim mass murder, but to the same man who it now appears is a slumlord and a tax-evading property owner-manager. Although it's likely that the Saudis and the Iranians will pour money into the project, as of this writing, the financing appears to be both shaky and shady. But that isn't going to stop the NYC controller from ponying up more money for this disgusting monument to religious intolerance and destruction of all non-Muslims.