A Burqa for Lady Liberty and a Mosque for Ground Zero

Daniel Greenfield

A Muslim group has announced plans to cover the Statue of Liberty with a burqa and then replace her with a minaret. But there's no reason at all to take such plans seriously. Lady Liberty being treated the way the Muslim world treats women in general, is as unlikely as a massive mosque being built just downwind of Ground Zero. Or Queen Elizabeth donning a hijab on a visit to Abu Dhabi. It's one of those things that we're told not to worry about until it happens and then objecting to it becomes a crime against tolerance. The tolerance of intolerance.

In Germany, a Kosovar Muslim airport employee cried, "Allahu Akbar" and opened fire on a group of US airmen. Of course the motive has yet to be determined, and after a long period of speculation touching on everything from his mortgage problems to his scratchy uniform, the truth will be known and quietly buried, along with the two men he killed. Little more than a decade ago, the United States Air Force was instrumental in helping create a terrorist state for Kosovar Muslims. This is the gratitude they got in return. A hail of bullets. And this is the gratitude that Westerners can always expect for their aid Anjem Choudary, the leader of the Islamic group that would like to sandblast Lady Liberty, and Arid Uka, the airport gunmen, were not hatched in some cave in Pakistan. Choudary was born in the London Borough of Bexley. Arid Uka was born and raised in Germany, where his family had lived for some 40 years. They are not immigrants, but native born European Muslims fighting to remake Europe into an Islamic state. The idea is fanciful, just like the Statue of Liberty being blown up by the American Taliban to make way for a minaret. But there was a time when a short Austrian corporal's plans to build a Thousand Year Reich on the bones of Europe were as laughable as Choudary's antics.

In 1993, Americans laughed at a gang of stupid Muslim terrorists who had tried to blow up the World Trade Center using a Ryder rental van, and then actually tried to get their deposit back on the van. 8 years later a gang of terrorists not all that much smarter than them hijacked four planes with box cutters and knocked down both towers, killing 3,000 people. And suddenly it wasn't funny anymore.

Evil is often ridiculous in its pretensions, but horrifying in its execution. It is silly only until it begins to succeed, and then the joke turns to horror and madness. We may find Kim Jong Il funny, but no one in North Korea does. Saddam's love poems, Stalin's toupee, Hitler's comic bellicosity, Khaddafi's eccentricity are funny only because we never lived under them. The presumptuousness of a Choudary presuming to wave the flag of Islam over the White House and announce plans for dynamiting the Statue of Liberty is a joke. But the punchline is how little we are doing to halt the day when it really does fly over the White House.

"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." But our governments are not doing nothing, they are aiding it along. European leaders grumble about multiculturalism and call for more integration. Choudary and Arid Uka are the successes of their integration. The politicians talk and the refugees swarm and the mosques spread. Most European Muslims are not going out guns blazing or cursing returning soldiers. They don't need to. They can do the math better than the politicians can. And they already know they will win.

We don't have the same demographic gun to our heads yet, but we are retreating almost as quickly. In the aftermath of 9/11, the temerity of a Ground Zero mosque was unthinkable. Now it's not only thinkable, it's downright mandatory. And does anyone really believe that Barack Hussein Obama could have been elected at any other period in history, but the one in which our relations with the Muslim world have become of paramount importance?

This is how craven we have become in the face of enemies armed only with box cutters, IED's and the occasional RPG. But the days of the suicide bomb are passing, and the day of the suicide nuke is coming.

While we have been dismantling our nuclear weapons, Pakistan has been building them. Pakistan has passed the UK to become the world's fifth largest nuclear power with 100 nuclear weapons. Today the mobs bay in the streets of Pakistan for the blood of Christians charged with blasphemy. What happens when an Islamic regime tells us to ban all criticism of Islam or they will launch a full scale nuclear strike? Do you think we will still have freedom of speech left then.

If we have not been able to stand up to suicide bombers without flattering and pandering, what will we do when we are confronted with the cold hard choice. Either put a burqa on Lady Liberty or fight a nuclear war.

Most of Europe has already made its choice. Some states are still dragging out the inevitable. But there are only two options. There have only ever been two options. While the debates drag on, the size of the occupying army grows. No less a figure than Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan proclaimed that the “Mosques are our barracks, domes our helmets, minarets our bayonets, believers our soldiers.” In the secular Turkey of the day, he was jailed for it. But with support of the European Union, he now rules over an Islamist Turkey. A prospective member of the EU.

Yesterday Erdogan paid a visit to Germany, and delivered a boisterous speech to German Muslims, the likes of which Dusseldorf had not been seen since Schicklgruber was entertaining industrialists with promises of a better tomorrow. Today a German Muslim killed two American airmen in a scene that might have been lifted from Turkish propaganda films such as Valley of the Wolves. Germany attempted to ban the movie, but it has been screened nonetheless, and now German and American audiences have been treated to a live showing, with Arid Uka taking on the Polat Almedar role. Erdogan leaves Europe to attend a funeral for Turkey's first Islamist Prime Minister, alongside the leader of Hamas and other world terrorists, but his work has been done. And done well.

If Europa is halfway to donning the veil, is Lady Liberty any better off? Choudary's march will be met with the fiction that he only represents a tiny minority of extremists. Arid Uka's killing spree will be filed in that same folder with all the other lone gunmen and bombers who just happened to shout, "Allah is Great" at a crucial juncture. Meanwhile the Muslim Brotherhood will keep on slithering deeper and deeper into the corridors of power. And our leaders will go on trying to win over the Muslim world with a buffet of appeasement. And evil will go on triumphing.

There was a time when Hitler and Lenin could have been squashed like bugs, until a few years later when it would take half the armies of the world to stop their ambitions. They could have been stopped. But the world chose not to. And that is what is genuinely awful. Beyond the death camps and the gulags, the terrible knowledge of how easy it was to shut them down. How many people died, how much of the world was destroyed, because men did nothing to stop them.

The Islamists could have been stopped yesterday. They can still be stopped today. But tomorrow the cost will be much higher, if it will even be possible at all. Each passing year erodes our power and grows theirs. The balance of power has already shifted in the minds of our leaders. But it will shift in reality as well. The difference between a mad dream and a terrible reality is power. Alone Charles Manson was another lunatic drinking deep of the poisoned well of his own power fantasies. With only a few women and men, he terrorized California. And the evil we face now makes Manson seem as harmless as a stuffed bunny.

History's monsters were rarely geniuses, most often they were men with a bad idea, willing to do absolutely anything to see it through. Islam is a very bad idea that breeds monsters. It has all the usual components of of the "Bad Ideas" that nearly destroyed humanity in the 20th century. Absolute power in the name of a perfect order, conspiracy theories and the rise of the oppressed. The Koran 2.0 has gone digital and a new generation is being taught to see the world as a target rich environment-- from a German airport to an island in New York harbor where the 'mighty woman with a torch' is attracting a new breed of exile these days. Who come not to be free, but to enslave us all.

A burqa for Lady Liberty and a mosque for Ground Zero-- that is their vision for us, if we allow it to happen. Freedom undefended turns easily to slavery. Not only defended by force, but in meaning. We have forgotten that freedom is not universal tolerance, but a moral force that springs from the determination of each individual in a society to be free. It is no more a safe space for the burqa, than it is for the slave's chains, it is not an open door of tolerance for the crescent and star, the swastika or the hammer and sickle. Freedom is not blind, that is anarchy and soon undone. It is not only a negative absence of law, but a positive determination to maintain the free society against those who would threaten it. Without that determination Americans will bend under the same chains that a billion already wear in the East and Lady Liberty will done her burqa.