B984-LH13
Where Will Muslims Go To Plot?
Copyright © by Len Holman, 8/23/10
There is a move afoot in this country of laws and tolerance for divergent points of view to not only insist on rejecting the building of a proposed new mosque two blocks from where the World Trade Center towers stood, but to ban ALL mosques EVERYWHERE. It is said by these groups that mosques are hotbeds of terrorist planning and that Islam is a warrior, terrorist religion, which seeks to destroy our way of life.
If all mosques ARE centers of terrorist training and recruitment, and they were to be closed and no more mosques were to be built, where would these people go to do their plotting? Muslims would have to find new places to plan America’s destruction. And they can’t just be any old places, but cleverly concealed, innocuous-looking places—places no one would suspect. Planning terror is a tough business, what with all the damn buttinskies looking over your shoulder, so it has to be done very secretly.
There are no more innocuous and ubiquitous places in America than burger joints. Burger King, though, is definitely out. The word “King” is a dead give-away for the royal house of Saud, and we all know that most of the people involved in 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia. Any fool can see that Fox news would quickly pick up on this clue, what with their cracked news team on the scent of every stray rumor and cosmic coincidence. In fact, any burger joint is too public, and too messy. It wouldn’t do to get taco sauce on the plans to fire-bomb the eighteenth tee at the local golf course. So plotters would have to choose some place more discrete.
One big problem any terrorist would have is that they don’t look like regular folk. They have swarthy skin and five o’clock shadows and short black hair and dark eyes, so that—while they may have no trouble blending into a group of plotters in a mosque, and could easily infiltrate Puerto Rican Pride parades or Filipino family barbeques, especially with any Latino groups, like those celebrating Cinco de Mayo—there would be no quiet place to plan and snicker ominously with all the noise and barbecued ribs, and screaming children banging away at piñatas. This limits them to skulking around during the night, which is especially unsafe in lots of places in this bastion of freedom, where gangs roam and police are not friendly to those they take a dislike to, especially those with funny accents and weird clothes.
Another possibility is the floor of the House of Representatives. One look at C-Span on any given day will show the potential of this spot for a good place to plot. Usually there is one person speaking to an echoing, empty room, and empty rooms are good for plotting. Unfortunately, our would-be plotters would be the wrong color for this place, and would quickly stand out, ruining their hiding place. Perhaps the American heartland or the Wild West would be the place.
These areas are filled with little towns and remote barns and houses—perfect for plotting. The down side is that small town residents know everything about everyone, and when the whole town knows how many sheets of toilet paper you use (on average, of course), this precludes the secrecy needed for really good terrorist plotting. A group of terrorists could plot well in anonymous big cities, and one perfect place would be San Francisco, that fortress of liberality, that citadel of “live and let live—as long as I can find a parking space.” Remember, this is the city with the nickname of Baghdad-By-The-Bay, named by Herb Caen, the beloved, but now deceased, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, a title which headed his column for many years. It’s perfect.
The plotters would rent an apartment and begin to plot. They would have no money problems—just go out on the streets and panhandle for cash. Everyone does it, and if they got some clothes from goodwill and they would be invisible. The problem for Watchers Of Evil is that this could happen right under their noses. Cities, though, are generally very crowded, and the people in them are very difficult to monitor, unless there are as many cameras in all of them as there are in London or Palm Springs.
I believe these Freedom Guards would be better served if they left the mosques alone, since—if that is where all the planning for jihad goes on—it would be much easier to keep an eye, and ear, on them, to stop their activities before they can go into motion. At the proposed building site in New York, there is already a mosque, and people already praying in their foreign, suspicious, Islamic way. If true patriots were really serious, they would storm the building and chase out these un-American foreigners. Apparently, cooler heads have prevailed and the leadership has decided to let these people do their bowing and whatever all in the same place, so that they can be watched. It’s easier to watch cats when they are penned up, than when they are running all over hell’s half acre, scared of being stomped.
There seems to be only one permanent solution to all this, and that is to re-write the Constitution to enshrine the will of the people on all matters religious. The recent Time poll which showed that over 25% of respondents thought the president was a Muslim, and almost 30% believed no Muslim should be a supreme court judge or president of the U.S., and I’d be willing to bet that if you got on a plane and had to sit next to a swarthy, dark-skinned man with a five o’clock shadow, who spoke English with a funny accent, you’d be nervous and start looking to see if there was a fuse coming out of his shoes and start ringing desperately for the air marshal. If the people will it, it must be so, with all respect to the due process thing. If the will of the people—helped by falsified facts, sensationalized stories, edited videos, and the constant drumbeat of invective, and constant insistence on deliberately distorted information, plus the puzzling, diffident responses, or lack thereof, of the White House, to all the swarms of misinformation and disinformation—is to be obeyed, then Muslims have to go. And if they DO go, I expect the Jains—with their impractical, and dangerous (to our beloved beef industry), idea of “ahimsa,” no injury to any living thing, to be next on the list. Soon, America will be back to its core religion: fear of the Other.
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