On the Latest Faux Outrage

24Aug10

Shocking news today as the blogger who called Barack Obama Malcolm X’s illegitimate son uncovers video of Imam Rauf stating, a, uh, fact:

“the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al Qaeda has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims.”

Let’s be extremely generous to Al-Qaeda’s non-Muslim kill count and put it at 10,000. Is there anyone who doubts that US intervention led to more than 10,000 Muslim deaths? Even the most conservative estimate (not politically speaking) puts the death count at 97,000 (The highest estimate puts the count at 1.2 million).

Refudiations (sorry, had to) of Imam Rauf’s claim are quite peculiar. Gellar sees fit to bring in the uncited claim that Muslims have killed 270 million in a 1000 year Jihad:

No mention of the 270 million victims of over a millennium of jihadi wars, land appropriations, cultural annihilation and enslavement. No mention of the recent slaughter by Muslims of Christians, Hindus, Jews, non-believers in Indonesia, Thailand, Ethiopia, Somalia, Philippines, Lebanon, Israel, Russia, China……………. no candor, no criticism of Islam.

I’ll let it slide if Gellar both cites the claim and also provides a number on how many people have been killed by Christians over the last 1000 years.

It’s not worth spending too much time on Gellar, though I’d like to point out one last section because actually Rauf makes a really great point in the supposedly outrageous speech, and Gellar, bearing only the sword of Michael Moore hatred, claims that because Rauf has seen Fahrenheit 9/11, he must be a 9/11 Truther. This excerpt has not been edited:

And the Imam is conspiracy theorist – 911 was an inside job:

How many of you have seen the documentary: Fahrenheit 911? The vast majority – at least half here. Do you remember the scene of the Iraqi woman whose house was bombed and she was just screaming, “What have they done.” Now, I don’t know, you don’t know Arabic but in Arabic it was extremely powerful. Her house was gone. Her husband, I think, was killed. What wrong did he do? I found myself weeping when I watched that scene and I imagined myself if I were a 15-year old nephew of this deceased man, what would I have felt?
Collateral damage is a nice thing to put on a paper but when the collateral damage is your own uncle or cousin, what passions do these arouse? How do you negotiate? How do you tell people whose homes have been destroyed, whose lives have been destroyed, that this does not justify your actions of terrorism. It’s hard. Yes, it is true that it does not justify the acts of bombing innocent civilians, that does not solve the problem, but after 50 years of, in many cases, oppression, of US support of authoritarian regimes that have violated human rights in the most heinous of ways, how else do people get attention?

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Tags: 9/11 comments, ground zero mosque, imam rauf, islam, muslim blood, park 51