Big Audio Dynamite Goes “Plip”

Wow. Tapes and transcripts of Park 51′s main guy has shown him to be a very reasonable, thoughtful guy full of quite reasonable, rational things to say, and Pamela Geller goes totally bonkers with no substantive critique at all. I find myself merely laughing and rolling my eyes.

The best part for me of Geller’s rant is where the evil, evil, evil (hiss! boo!) Feisal Abdul Rauf notes the absolutely factual, completely indisputable fact that the sanctions the U.S. used against Saddam Hussein’s brutal fascist regime, during the years of the Clinton administration, resulted in hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths–and she goes nuts.

Those of us who supported the Iraq intervention from the beginning–as I did, and still do, having never changed my mind at all–used as one of our primary arguments the fact that the sanctions regime of the Clinton administration had been utterly useless and had only killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis.

President Bush noted the exact same thing, along with the dozen-plus other reasons he gave us for going to war to take out Saddam. It’s good to know that Rauf knows it too, and confronted the Clinton administration about it.

I’m extraordinarily pleased to see a Muslim leader with the courage to note this–instead of attacking us for doing the right thing and taking out Saddam. The truth is that sanctions against tyrants often do more damage than good. I’m glad to see him recognize this.

I also love the attempt to throw this or that grievance against Muslims from hundreds or thousands of years ago as proof of anything; as if I couldn’t make a list every bit as long of sins of the Catholic Church (or the Protestant Church), for other religions, or for those with no religion at all–as an ex-atheist I never tire of reminding my atheist friends that communism was an explicitly atheist philosophy.

Other than that, watching Geller get more and more hysterical over absolutely nothing of substance just cements for me that Islamophobia is a mental poison, a sickness that has paralyzed all rational thought among too many people–and that this hysteria is being used by certain pundits to make a following (and thus, money) for themselves. And made me more firm than ever in my conviction that I will no longer allow this blog to be used as a forum to spread poison and perversion.

Goodbye to all of that.

*Update*: Former communist turned anti-communist warrior Ron Radosh has some sane, thoughtful, and, best of all, INFORMED commentary. Although Radosh misses one important point: toward the end of President Bush’s term, he began using the term “Islamic fascist” or “Islamofascist.” He was pilloried as being an Islamophobe. So there are two sides of this; false allegations of Islamophobia do tend to help hide the real Islamophobes.