An overlooked answer

With the debates and discussions on the Ground Zero mosque (mosque, not community center), and the controversy over the decision of a Christian church to burn Qur'ans on 9/11, there appeared a blog post from Diana West at Big Peace yesterday, where she correctly stresses an important point: The Constitution Trumps Islamic Law.

The focus of her piece is on how the reaction to the announcement of the Qur'an burning is part of an effort “to bring our constitutional republic into conformance with Islamic law”, to acquiesce to the continual demands of Islam.  However, she falters in one respect.

At the beginning of her post, Mrs. West mentions the aiding of “useful fools” when noting the efforts to bring America into conformance, and later in the post when going into details on the demands of the jihadists (in this case, specifically, a separate speech code for Islam), she notes:

This same demand also manifests itself in the society-level assumption that Islam should somehow exist in a state of exaltation that no Western society grants any belief system, or any God. This assumption is increasingly becoming consensus among non-Muslims. Why?

In the next paragraph, she presents an answer:

One answer is because people who do not believe in Allah, from Sarah Palin to Gen. David Petraeus to assorted ministers and rabbis, have succumbed to a specifically Islamic brand of blackmail (the “or else” of violence or other outbreaks of “extremism”), thus accommodating and even lobbying for the uniquely Islamic prohibitions against written, pictorial or symbolic criticism. In so doing, they have also succumbed to the Islamic narrative. That narrative, or rationale, tells us that burning a Quran causes murder and mayhem, putting our troops, our citizens, our cities, and our interests at increased risk. In this narrative, the actual bad actors are absolved of both volition and blame.

Since it is an answer to the question of why more and more non-Muslims are accepting the assumption that Islam should be given exclusive exaltation, it's an answer I find hard to believe in regards to Sarah Palin and General David Petraeus.  The decision to burn Qur'ans on 9/11 was also condemned by a number of noted figures in the Counterjihad, notably Brigitte Gabriel, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, non-Muslims who know more about Islam than most.

For Mrs. Gabriel and Mrs. Geller, I'd sooner believe their condemnations come from their wish of not giving the Jihadists more ammunition to continue their twisted holy war, and I believe it is also the case for Mrs. Palin and General Petraeus.  Mr. Spencer opposed the burnings because he opposes book burnings, period, but that any of them have accepted this idea of Islam deserving exclusive exaltation as a belief system is something I find ludicrous.

Mrs. West's answer is very much a valid answer to her question, but her definition of “useful fools” is far too broad of a definition to be accurate.