"Choose your friends carefully. Your enemies will choose you." — Yassir Arafat.
The headline on the email read "Get Someone Else To Start Your Car." If it hadn't been from a co-worker, I would have deleted it as some bizarre, auto-repair spam.
Instead, I read the attached message, a press release from the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Washington, DC. Right away, a few words jumped out at me:
"Anti-Muslim." "Spewing hate." "Bigotry." Oh, and one more: "Michael Graham."
CAIR has just launched a national media campaign, the clumsily named "Hate Hurts America," to combat what they consider "hate radio by conservative talk show hosts." Their press release urges national action and unceasing diligence by Muslims against the "bigotry" of radio, but in the entire three-page document, CAIR only mentions one talk-show host by name.
Lucky me.
Actually, I do consider myself lucky, because I believe that our true character is revealed by the quality of our enemies, and I couldn't be prouder to count the terrorist-coddling CAIR as a foe. I am also lucky because CAIR is so bad at what they do.
What CAIR does is try to portray all criticism of all Muslims everywhere as bigotry. They singled me out because I said on the air (and have said in print as well) that Islam is a uniquely dangerous religion, that the religion itself needs a reformation much like those experienced by Catholicism and Mormonism, and that the one distinguishing attribute of "moderate" Muslims is their reluctance to publicly criticize the actions of the Islamo-fascist extremists who continue to spread terror.
Now, you might agree with me or you might disagree with me, but this is hardly bigotry. "Stating the obvious" is a more apt description. But any criticism from an infidel like yours truly is unbearable to the folks at CAIR, and so they've launched their attack:
"Graham recently made an implicit call for violence against Muslims," CAIR said in their press release. "He said: 'I don't wanna say we should kill 'em all [Muslims], but unless
there's reform [within Islam], there aren't a lot of other solutions that work in the ground struggle for survival.'"
Now, you don't have to be a literary critic to see that the folks at CAIR have added a significant word to that quote on their own ("[Muslims]") and that they've added it to a rather significant sentence, "kill 'em all." The reason they had to add the word "Muslim" to begin with is, of course, because I didn't say it.
What I said was that I wanted some solution to the struggle between civilization and the Islamists (the violent, Muslim extremists) other than their obliteration. Unfortunately, at that point in my conversation, I couldn't think of one.
What's worse is that I still can't.
Islam has a problem, a problem with the Islamo-fascists who I'm told by folks like CAIR don't represent "real" Muslims. I point out this problem, and my frustration with the fact that so-called "moderate Muslims" appear to be doing so little to solve it, and I'm a hate-spewing bigot. Meanwhile, mosques in "moderate" countries like Egypt and Pakistan continue to support suicide bombers or, like Iran and Saudi Arabia, give money to terror groups like Hamas and the Al Aqsa Martyr Brigades.
Apparently being a "moderate" Muslim means you only want to kill the Jews.
Then again, what to expect from an organization like CAIR whose executive director, Nihad Awad, has openly expressed support for Hamas and Hizbullah? Or from a group that takes money from the whacko Wahabbis of Saudi Arabia, with their extreme view of Islam and the limited rights of women, homosexuals and non-Muslims?
In fact, the same week CAIR was trying to get me thrown off the air, one of their former employees, Randall Todd "Ismail" Royer, was being thrown in jail. "Ismail" got 20 years in prison for his illegal, terror-related activities in the Virginia Jihad Network, a network he's admitted forming here in the US after September 11th.
What's so frustrating to me is that, if CAIR were truly a moderate organization dedicated to reform, we would be fast friends, not enemies. I think I'm like the vast majority of Americans who know relatively little about Islam, aren't particularly interested in learning much more, but would like to see normal, decent Muslims lead the charge to take back their faith from the Osamas and al-Sadrs and Yassins and Wahabbists of the world. Instead you've got the spokesman for CAIR explaining on my radio show why they support the good Hamas, not the bad one.
If the "Muslim" Martin Luther King appeared today, American Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Scientologists, atheists, Rotarians and even some Democrats would rise to cheer him and offer arms and treasure for his cause. We want the world to be safe. We don't want to live in constant fear that our neighbor's faith is going to make him dangerous to all who don't share it. In other words, we want the Muslim religion to be a little less, well, religious.
Does anyone know the Islamic term for "Unitarian?"
Darn. There goes that "hate speech" again.
