Muslims need to quit their self-pity and get on board with the May 21 opening of the National Sept. 11 Memorial Museum — a sad day for New York — instead of splitting their spleens over a seven-minute video exhibit calling the terrorists “Islamists” and using the word “jihad.”
The shoe fits. The 19 Muslims who hijacked four planes, flew two of them into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and steered another to the White House before heroic passengers crashed that doomed jet in a Pennsylvanian field, were holy-warring hypocrites who killed nearly 3,000 people, and plotted their mayhem in bars and strip clubs, allegedly leaving behind the Koran in one jiggle joint.
Explosive Muslims kept mum on those damnations. Their silence spoke volumes, as did their noticeable absence from the interfaith vigils that trailed our worst day. They met their awkward moment defensively, while most Americans bent over backwards for them because the U.S. is not a vengeful country — unlike many Muslim lands.
Now Sheik Mostafa Elazabawy, imam of Masjid Manhattan, wants to sanitize the sins of the 9-11 terrorists and parse terminology on account of the baby-bottomed sensitivities of his community.
“The screening of this film in its present state would greatly offend our local Muslim believers,” he griped in a letter to the museum’s director.
Elazabawy’s backlash is systemic of Muslims who don’t want to be yoked with terrorists, yet think it is okay to terrorize the rest of us with their knee-jerk reactions to frank dialogues about their religion and culture, both of which undoubtedly spawned the 9-11 pond scum, and need to be addressed. No ifs, ands, or buts about that.
The irascible imam needs to re-route his concerns that “unsophisticated visitors do not understand the difference between al Qaeda and Muslims” to the Muslim phobia about self-distinction that confuses rights with rites: last month, six British schools were implicated in a Trojan Horse plot by extremists to Islamicize secular state education, with boys and girls taught separately, assemblies espousing extremist Islamist views, and other religions downgraded.
Last year, the Council on American Islamic Relations strong-armed education officials in Dearborn, M.I. into accommodating student-led prayer in public schools, and tolerating unexcused absences for students who leave early on Fridays for prayers.
Add to that the Islamic “no-go” zones across Britain endangering non-Muslims, and U.S. law enforcement training materials being cleansed to avoid offending Islamic groups, and it is a no-brainer that the institutional replacement of democracy with Muslim authority is a cultural land mine ready to explode.
Museum officials should not amend their all-too-brief video, which barely touches on the worst terror attack in our nation’s history out of clear respect for Muslim New Yorkers. Believers who don’t want to be lumped together with al Qaeda should stop blowing golden opportunities to demonstrate their solidarity with New Yorkers, and remain ever mindful that the 9-11 innocents died because of evil in the radical Muslim heart.
