Frank Gaffney today in the Washington Times had strong words for his detractors, claiming that anyone who points out his malicious anti-Muslim bigotry is just like a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Progressives and Muslim-Americans aren’t the only ones who have documented Gaffney’s consistent attacks on Muslims, as even the American Conservative Union passed a resolution denouncing Gaffney and prominent conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell found in an investigation that not only does Gaffney routinely make completely baseless allegations about two of his rivals in the ACU, Suhail Kahn and Grover Norquist, but also that his “hatred” of Norquist is “fueled by the fact that Grover is married to a Muslim-American woman.”
Today Gaffney writes that the supposed encroachment of Sharia law in US courts has placed us in “the civil rights struggle of our time,” and says that anyone who opposes him are similar to the “Ku Klux Klan’s members” who “reviled an earlier generation of civil rights activists”:
In short, we find ourselves in what is, properly understood, the civil rights struggle of our time. Those who stand up for freedom against Shariah are quite literally protecting the rights of women, children, people of faith and other minorities sure to be abused by its misogynistic, intolerant and domineering doctrine. That means protecting, as well, Muslim-Americans who have come to this country to escape the long arm of Shariah law. In due course, though, Shariah’s repressive strictures would not simply be a threat to these communities. They would be a toxic blight upon all of us.
Ironically, today, it is defenders of our freedoms who are being denounced as “racists,” “bigots” and “Islamophobes.” Such terms are, in truth, being used in much the same way and for precisely the same purpose as the Ku Klux Klan’s members reviled an earlier generation of civil rights activists for loving blacks: to defame, threaten and isolate their opponents. We cannot, and certainly must not, tolerate the Islamists’ intolerance.
Muslims are, of course, free to practice their faith in America like anyone else – provided they do so in a tolerant, peaceable and law-abiding way. What they are not entitled to do, in the name of religious practice, is subvert our Constitution, deny us our rights or engage in sedition without facing concerted opposition – if not prosecution.
Today, every bit as much as in the civil rights struggles of the past, there are those who are prepared to go along with what they know is wrong in order to get along. Now, as then, the few who recognize that any such accommodation makes more certain the ultimate triumph of evil, may be vilified and even harmed. But now, as then, more and more Americans are emerging who see the danger posed by our time’s totalitarian threat – Shariah – and will do their part to secure freedom against it, both here and, as necessary for that purpose, elsewhere.
