Downtown Denver experienced an anti-Israel rally this past Saturday - out of respect for the Jewish Sabbath, no doubt. We'll get into the more bizarre aspects of the rally - and the Post's coverage of it - in another post, but for the moment, consider this, from the Denver Post's coverage:
Religious leaders helped organize the march. Mixed messages ranging from steadfast nonviolence to support for Hezbollah "show the diversity" of a new organization called the Front Range Coalition for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, said Imam Ibrahim Kazerooni, a leader of interfaith efforts at St. John's Cathedral.
If I were capable any longer of being astonished at what gets said at these things, I'd be astonished. This is so jaw-droppingly incoherent and dishonest that one wonder just what on earth the church fathers have been smoking, that they allow this man to stay on the payroll as leader of an office dedicated to "interfaith understanding."
Diversity? Yes, the crowd ran the gamut all the way from the genocidal to the merely anti-Semitic. Evidently he's been reading the CU student handbook as a dictionary. I hadn't realized that tolerance for, indeed applause for, Ahmedinejad's willing executioners was included in the definition of "interfaith efforts."
I've thoroughly chronicled the antics of this mild-mannered mullah on this blog, and while I've been pretty hard on some pretty bad behavior, I've resisted characterizing the man's beliefs. One measures the content of one's words carefully, and I would never want to give someone an excuse to give up and go over to the dark side, or say something that I'd be embarassed by years later.
No more. There are ways of handling this sort of miscreancy. A well-organized rally would have had marshals controlling the message a little bit. The quote to the paper would have been about how his "movement" had no place for the sort of hatred that Nasrallah represents, blah blah blah. But Kazerooni couldn't even bring himself to say that.
Kazerooni knows what Hezbollah and Nasrallah are. He knows perfectly well that Nasrallh, too, has said he's looking forward to the ingathering of the Jewish exiles, all the easier to kill them. He's also a professional at PR, so he knows how to stay on message when he wants to. And in this case, the message was, "we'll take all comers, even if they're experimenting with Zyklon B in their back yards."
He's not anti-war, he's just on the other side.
Comments
There have been several people writing about how they now understand something of what it was like pre-WWII. Watching the surreal pageant of unbridled anti-semitism, I can now understand how the Holocaust happened. That its like is supported once again by a surprisingly broad spectrum of society, and people who ought to know better add their voices, gives me an idea of the kind of frustration experienced by those who saw clearly and yet were unable to do anything about it.
Posted by: oldsalt | August 15, 2006 6:53 AM
When I read of Christian clergy associating themselves with this sort of thing, all I can think of is Leonard Bernstein's gala put on for the benefit of the Black Panthers, so acidly chronicled in Tom Wolfe's "Radical Chic." The only difference is that rabid anti-semitism was still taboo circa 1970...that is regrettably not the case today.
Posted by: Jeffersonian | August 15, 2006 7:48 AM
Anti-Semitism has gone main stream in this country. Even Mel Gibson has refused to distance himself from his Holocaust denying, anti-Semitic father and paid no societal price. Even now I predict his career will not suffer.
Islam is NOT a religion of peace. Read the Koran, read Bat Ye'or, read The Myth of Islamic Tolerance by Robert Spencer, read Claire Berlinski's Menace in Europe. read Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept.
These are not opinion pieces but are filled with facts, figures and evidence. We are in serious trouble, and unless we realize and do something about it, it is certain that our children will pay a severe and bloody price at the hands of a sick and radical worldwide Islamic push for total domination.
Posted by: Mark | August 15, 2006 9:42 AM
hey, i'm all for tolerance. so long as it works two ways. wanna guess what would happen if i arranged a rally to support the "we nonviolently pray for all radical moslems to die young" association?
G-d have mercy.
Posted by: Ben Ami | August 15, 2006 10:12 PM
The headline on the article was as laughable as Kazerooni's nonsense. The rally had nothing to do with "peace."
Posted by: Pavel | August 16, 2006 12:01 PM