Cordoba or Tours?
By: Emmanuel Navon, member of EMET’s Board of Advisors, and an instructor at Tel Aviv University. Cross-posted from http://navonsblog.blogspot.com/
In today’s France, Jewish items are being burnt on the streets again. Not Jewish books by the Church, but Jewish food by the Mosque. Food items are publicly thrown out of stores and burnt on the street if they are imported from Israel or simply if the package indicates that they are kosher. At least, the French Government publicly condemned this phenomenon and Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux promised to prosecute the authors of what he called a criminal act of racial discrimination.
In Britain, by contrast, the court system has capitulated to the hatred and violence. A few weeks ago, a London court acquitted the members of a gang who broke into a weapons factory and mostly tore it down. Their defense line was that they suspected that this factory had sold weapons to Israel during the Cast Lead Operation. The Judge ruled that their version was acceptable and set them free without even fining them for the damage they had caused to the factory. Similarly, four militants were acquitted by a British court last week for breaking into a retail store of the Israeli company Ahava. In other words, you are allowed to destroy property (and maybe, tomorrow, to kill) based on political opinions or even based on the unproved suspicion that your victim is acting against your political opinions. This is the rule of intimidation and terror, not the rule of law.
In Norway, it is not the court system but the government itself which has become accomplice to Jihad. Norway’s Minister of Education Kristin Halvorsen was recently photographed in front of a demonstration sign saying that the US and Israel are the real Axis of Evil. Her boss, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, expressed public support for two doctors who helped Hamas during the Cast Lead Operation. Those two doctors are the authors of an anti-Semitic book that has been praised by Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr StØre. Norway’s State Secretary for Environment and International Development Ingrid Fiskaa has declared that the UN should bombard Israel.
Europe’s descent into dhimmitude is a tragedy for those who care about Western civilization and about freedom. Alas, even the shining city upon a hill on the other side of the Atlantic no longer seems to be a safe heaven. President Obama’s endorsement of the Ground Zero Mosque indicates that America is capitulating to cynicism in the name of freedom.
On the face of it, President Obama is right: As he said, because America is committed to religious freedom, Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in the United States, and that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan.
President Obama, however, is missing two points.
The first point is that Islam rejects religious freedom and the founding principles of the US Constitution. If Islam was not a religion protected by the US Constitution, it would be banned because of its ideology of hatred and discrimination. No other religion has produced 9/11. True, Christianity is responsible for the Crusades and for the Inquisition. But Christianity has integrated some elements of modernity, and it no longer condones murder in the name of faith. Islam does.
The second point is that the proponents of the Ground Zero Mosque are being purposely offensive and cynical, and that they intend to set a historical precedent full of symbolical significance. By building an Islamic site and symbol a few yards away from the place where 3,000 people were murdered in the name of Islam, they are intentionally insulting the memory of these people and are pushing bad taste to its limits. But, mostly, they want to declare victory. That is no speculation or conspiracy theory: The mosque will be called Cordoba. Do you get it? Cordoba was the first European city conquered by a Muslim army (in 711). Then a mosque was built there, and the rest of Spain was conquered. This is an accepted Islamic practice, and the proponents of the Ground Zero Mosque are note even hiding their intentions.
Islam is using the values of the West to fight the West. Saying that is not politically correct, but it is true. 70% of Americans are against the Ground Zero Mosque precisely because they understand that this mosque is not about religious freedom. It is about the use of freedom to fight freedom and to progressively impose an ideology of hatred, discrimination, and violence. Either President Obama doesn’t see that –which is bad. Or he does but lacks the courage to say it –which is worse.
The American people should build a huge Church near Ground Zero and call it the Tours Church. Why Tours? Because Tours is the French city where Charles Martel defeated an invading Muslim army in 732, thus halting the Islamic expansion to Europe (actually, the battle was fought in an area between the cities of Poitiers and Tours, located in north-central France, near the village of Moussais-la-Bataille. But the battle is known as “Battle of Tours” in English and as the “Battle of Poitiers” in French. Incidentally, “Tours” happens to mean “towers” in French). By doing this, Americans will not only show that they too know History. They will also prove to themselves and to the world that they learned from it.