Day: September 11, 2006

Morning after

The morning-after pill case can keep rolling.  Springfield-based U.S. Judge Jeanne Scott refused to throw it out, per an AP story, “Federal Judge Rejects Dismissal,” etc. that Chi Trib helpfully has on its web site but that appears not to have run in hard copy.  That’s a pity, since it’s a hot issue in some circles.

In the suit seven pharmacists challenge Gov Blago’s edict that they have to sell the pill, to which they object on religious grounds, claiming violation of religious freedom.  Five of the seven lost their jobs at Walgreen stores when they refused to sign a promise to sell it.

The opinion’s a 28–pager.  The state defendants said the ruling had nothing to do with religious belief but was solely to provide contraception to all.

Library speaker 9/9/06 part of big Muslim doings

OP’s Committee for Just Peace in Palestine speaker asked if Zionism is racism, compared Israel-Palestine today to apartheid-era South Africa — “It’s much worse,” he said.  He’s Farid Esack, a Muslim theologian and author of Qur’an, Liberation and Pluralism: An Islamic Perspective of Interreligious Solidarity Against Oppression; On Being a Muslim: Finding a Religious Path in the World Today; and An Introduction to the Qur’an.

He had spoken two days earlier at Dominican U. ($10 a head) in a “dialogue series.”  DU says he’s been active in “the Call of Islam,” which as a message is said by the Muslim American Society to include this:

The Muslim regards himself as commanded by God to call all humans to a life of submission to Him, to Islam as a present participial act (42:15). His life goal is that of bringing the whole of humankind to a life in which Islam, the religion of God, with its theology and Shari’a, its ethics and institutions, is the religion of all humans.

He’s currently at Harvard Divinity, having just done a three–year stint at Xavier U., Cincinnati (where this blogger taught briefly in the late 60s).  Coming up at Dominican is a lecture 9/21 on “theological challenges and opportunities of Muslim-Catholic dialogue,” a lecture 10/30 on “Transforming the Self [sic], Transforming Society” an open meeting 11/8 of Chicago-based “Catholic-Muslim Dialogue.”

To Esack’s credit, he does not turn up in search of the Anti-CAIR or Front Page web sites, each of which has sensitive antennae when it comes to Islamism.  He does turn up in an Amazon-posted rave review of Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism, by Omid Safi, to which he contributed “an essay that takes the document ‘Progressive Islam – A Definition and Declaration’ as its point of departure.” In the essay he

is very critical of the views expressed by many liberal Muslims, whom he accuses of suffering from the same myopia as their fundamentalist adversaries: presenting themselves as ‘authentic’ interpreters of Islam and canonizing certain statements in the sacred scriptures without regard for the context. He is equally dismayed by liberal Muslims’ failure to challenge that other form of fundamentalism: that US interests represent the axis around which the earth rotates. [Italics added]

Uh-oh.

Old dogs learn poorly

The Instapundit man, Glenn Reynolds, and Twin Cities’ James Lilek both note that if Clinton et al. reacted poorly to Islamic threat, so did most people; so give them slack.  What’s happened since 9/11 is what separates men and women from boys and girls is this line of reasoning.  But, says Power Line,

there is a huge problem with this magnanimous approach. The Democrats are, today, trying to dismantle our efforts to fight the terrorists. They are trying to block the NSA from intercepting terrorists’ communications; they are trying to force our armed forces to treat captured terrorists with the same deference they would accord to a member of our own services; and they are trying to block the confirmation of John Bolton as U.N Ambassador so that he can be replaced with someone who will offer meaningless platitudes instead of aggressive advocacy of American interests.

What the Democrats are trying to do is return to the hunker-down and hope for the best days of the Clinton administration. They are trying to sell the American people on the absurd proposition that the terrorist threat we face today is mostly George Bush’s fault, and that if we only abandon his tough approach to national security, everything will be fine.

That is why I think it is critically important that the American people not be deceived about how we got to the pass we arrived at on September 11, 2001; and that is why, I think, the Democrats are so hysterical about The Path to 9/11.

They give every appearance, in other words, of being up to their old tricks.