Speaking at “hallowed ground” at the Pentagon yesterday, President Barack Obama  (peace be unto him) alluded to the controversy over a mosque — and a Florida pastor’s threat, later rescinded, to burn copies of the Muslim holy book. Obama made it clear that the U.S. is not at war with Islam and called the Al Qaeda attackers “a sorry band of men” who perverted religion.

“We will not give in to their hatred,” Obama said. “As Americans, we will not or ever be at war with Islam.”

Excuse me, Mr. President, they sure do seem to be at war with us. 

According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, released on September 9th, 49 percent of all Americans say that they have generally unfavorable opinions of Islam, compared with 37 percent who say that they have favorable ones.    This figure is almost 20 % higher than it was, immediately after 9/11/01.

I have a question for you, gentle reader.  How many well-known practitioners/leaders of Islam can you remember speaking out after the horrible events of  September 11th, 2001?

I’m waiting.

Not too many, huh.  If you can remember any at all, you can count them on one hand.  One that remains at the forefront of opposition to radical Islam to this day is Dr. M. Juhdi Jasser.  I’m sure you’ve seen him in his appearances on Fox News as a contributor.  

Do you remember when those 6 Imams behaved suspiciously on an airplane, resulting in their arrest?  After Dr. Jasser spoke out about the incident, he appeared on Mark Levin’s radio show and told him about the Muslim world’s reaction to his speaking out, which included being pulled from a 2007 PBS series which featured an episode titled Islam vs. Islamists:

The producers had seen my work and followed our travails with the moderates here, with what we’re doing against the fundamentalists locally. They came and spent the week with me and looked at all of our activities, the interfaith community, and spent time interviewing some of the imams locally [Arizona] and others… It is sort of a microcosm of what happened. People say, “Where are the moderates, why aren’t they speaking up?”

The movie looks at some of the response and how I’ve been demonized. I’ve been labeled as a false Muslim. I’ve been told that even though I’m proud to raise my kids Muslim and I pray and I fast that really I’m imposing a secular separation of religion and politics in our faith and for me to try to get the imams to stop talking politics in their sermons is to impose something false into our faith…

All I’ve tried to do is open the debate. The important thing this documentary did was to begin the debate and to say that certainly the fundamentalists are able to express what they want in our free speech but they shouldn’t suppress what I have to say. They should allow us to bring this debate into the Muslim community.

For this to get pulled really shows that our government and the mainstream media feel they’re basically tools of the Islamists. They’re going to respond to them and not push the issue and you wonder where the voice of the moderates is. The voice is in the wilderness because nobody [in the media] wants to hear it and nobody is going to give time…

According to the show’s producer, it was pulled on political grounds:

The producer of a tax-financed documentary on Islamic extremism claims his film has been dropped for political reasons from a television series that airs next week on more than 300 PBS stations nationwide. Key portions of the documentary focus on Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser of Phoenix and his American Islamic Forum for Democracy, a non-profit organization of Muslim Americans who advocate patriotism, constitutional democracy and a separation of church and state.

Martyn Burke says that the Public Broadcasting Service and project managers at station WETA in Washington, D.C., excluded his documentary, Islam vs. Islamists, from the series America at a Crossroads after he refused to fire two co-producers affiliated with a conservative think tank. “I was ordered to fire my two partners (who brought me into this project) on political grounds,” Burke said in a complaint letter to PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supplied funds for the films.

I related that moment from 2007 to try to explain what’s happening in this country today.  Yesterday, on the 9th anniversary of the worst attack ever on American soil, the American President was continuing to push a  message of reflection (on our bigotry) and service (atonement) on a day where Americans for the past 9 years have instead chosen to honor and remember those 3,000 innocent people who were murdered by Islamic Terrorists.  It was not a “man-caused disaster”.  It was an act of war.

Y’know, there’s a “moderate” Imam who wants to build a mosque at Ground Zero.  Did he condemn that horrific attack?  Nope.  He was interviewed on 60 Minutes by host Ed Bradley on September 30, 2001.  Here is a partial transcript:

BRADLEY: Are — are — are you in any way suggesting that we in the United States deserved what happened?

Imam ABDUL RAUF: I wouldn’t say that the United States deserved what happened, but the United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.

BRADLEY: OK. You say that we’re an accessory?

Imam ABDUL RAUF: Yes.

BRADLEY: How?

Imam ABDUL RAUF: Because we have been an accessory to a lot of — of innocent lives dying in the world. In fact, it — in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the USA.

This is a “moderate” Muslim?

While I don’t, as a Christian, condone the burning of the Koran or the ripping out of its pages, I do understand where the rage is coming from.  The oppression of the Politically Correct Elite, including those now in positions of power over us, has created a backlash.  In their zeal to forcibly unite a nation created on Judeo-Christian principles with a political ideology masquerading as a religion, Progressives have become responsible for the public demonstrations of dissent that they claimed were so “patriotic” during the Bush administration.  Unfortunately for the “smartest people in the room”, they did not realize how deeply Americans would resent being apologized for to those who view us as infidels.

Perhaps they’ll have a clue after November 2nd, 2010.