Some of the worthiest allies in the fight against terrorism are the cheerleaders of terrorism. Make sense?
Makes sense to California Governor Gavin Newsom, apparently. This March he sent nearly $200,000 — on top of earlier grants — to the Islamic Center of San Diego. It’s part of a program to help religious institutions fight terrorism.
The Center is led by an imam who rationalized Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks on Israeli civilians; no atrocity gave him pause. The Washington Free Beacon also reports on links between this mosque and the 9/11 hijackers.
Newsom has awarded similar “antiterrorism” grants to other mosques demanding the demise of Jews and Israel.
Daily reports of Islam-rationalized outrages and atrocities are aggregated by Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch. They aren’t rare.
Some regard “Islamophobia” — which, defined reasonably, means something like irrational hostility to Islam or to peaceful Muslims — as a worse threat than use of Islam to rationalize intimidation, repression, kidnapping, rape, murder. We do have reason to oppose the latter … and it is not any kind of “phobic,” contrary to the assertions of those who seek to blur important distinctions, because it is not irrational.*
People are responsible for their own actions, not the actions of others who belong to the same ethnic or religious group.
But people are responsible for their own actions.
It should go without saying that applauding the most vicious treatment of other human beings is not the kind of thing an American government should be encouraging.
By words.
Or cash.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Remember that the modern use of “phobia” hails from abnormal psychology, which is especially focused on needless fears.
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One reply on “Newsom’s Terrifying “Antiterrorism””
Newsom’s support of the Islamic Center is no surprise to anyone who heard President George W. Bush’s speech to Congress after 9/11. His is an elitist response. Both Democrat and Republican leaders refuse to recognize the danger Islamic theology, which is supremacist in nature, poses to free people everywhere. Thomas Jefferson fought the Barbary States, whose pirates were attacking American ships. Their ambassador told the Americans that it was mandated in the Koran, that they should make war on unbelievers wherever they could be found. Nothing has changed in Islam since then. What has changed is the world has gotten smaller. Our First Amendment guarantees freedom of worship. International relations and global diplomacy require that we see all acts of Islamic terrorism, even those on 9/11 and on October 7th, as the work of a ‘tiny minority of extremists’.