Hitchens on the Ground Zero mosque (again)

Published in today’s National Post is Christopher Hitchens latest Slate column about the Ground Zero mosque project. Once he’s finished distancing himself from his intellectual inferiors’ “crass” objections (see also his earlier column) to the GZ mosque the Hitch gets down to raising some good reasons for suspicion about the true motives of the Imam behind the project:

From the beginning ... I pointed out that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf was no great bargain and that his Cordoba Initiative was full of euphemisms about Islamic jihad and Islamic theocracy.

The more one reads through his statements, the more alarming it gets. For example, ... Regarding President Obama, he advised that:

He should say his administration respects many of the guiding principles of the 1979 [Iranian] revolution ... a just government, based on the idea of Vilayet-i-faquih, that establishes the rule of law.

Coyly untranslated here (perhaps for "outreach" purposes), Vilayet-i-faquih is the special term promulgated by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to describe the idea that all of Iranian society is under the permanent stewardship (sometimes rendered as guardianship) of the mullahs.

... I do not find myself reassured by the fact that Imam Rauf publicly endorses the most extreme and repressive version of Muslim theocracy.

Another feature of my local mosque that I don't entirely like is the display of flags outside, purportedly showing all those nations that are already Muslim. ... So, before he is used by our State Department on any more goodwill missions overseas, I would like to see Imam Rauf asked a few searching questions about his support for clerical dictatorship in, just for now, Iran. ...

Good stuff, but the smug Hitchens needs to be reminded that if others hadn’t registered their legitimate outrage (some of it perhaps a mite over the top but most not and a lot of it asking the same kinds of questions he does) about the GZ mosque project no one would be talking about it at all - it would be a done deal, and Islamists around the globe would be smiling at their soon-to-be newly planted victory monument.