The Faceplant of the Week

The hateful left refuses to relinquish Tiller-bomb

The sad tale of the pro-abortion lobby's efforts to transform the murder of Dr George Tiller into a permanent rhetorical advantage seemed to have slowed recently, but sadly, some members of the radical pro-abortion lobby insist on continuing the effort.

Their argument has been, more or less, that the anti-abortion lobby is complicit in the Tiller murder by virtue of the numerous anti-abortion extremists who describe abortion as "murder".

Even in the face of the actual positions of their opponents, the hateful left simply refuses to relinquish the death of Dr Tiller as a club with which they can beat anyone who dares disagree with them on the topic of abortion.

One merely has to consider the sheer depth of the effort that the most recent would-be scion of the Temple of Sychophantic Groupthink, Audrey II, went to in a recent post at her blog, Enormous Thriving Plants to attempt to delete Suzanne Fortin's denunciation of Tiller's murder:

"Facepalm of the week goes out to SUZANNE FORTIN of "Big Blue Wave". While her defense of Muslims suffering post 9/11 discrimination is certainly admirable, it's not really a reasonable analogy. The moderates that she (and Flowers) laughably compare themselves to don't similarly spew the same violent, wide-eyed, hysteric, extremist filth that Bin Laden and his band of zealots do, nor do they subscribe to the same set of premises. The same cannot be said for the relationship between Roeder's positions on abortion and the violent, inflammatory word-choice of a goodly lot of the anti-choice movement. In addition, most religious moderates overwhelmingly reject the Divine Command subscription of devout fanatics that holds that any action can be potentially be morally justified as long as some sky-being demands it.

Since SUZANNE and Flowers have adopted the comparison, it begs correction: A whole lot of radical religious zealots "did not kill" anyone on 9/11. That alone does not absolve many of them from the culpability of their rhetoric and the part it played in contributing to the massacre. Words matter."

Now, if only this were so.

Many Canadians -- particularly those on the far-left -- would insist that Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress is unequivocally not a terrorist, and not complicit in terrorist attacks.

Yet it was Elmasry who, during an appearance on the Michael Coren show, declared that any Israeli over the age of 18 is a legitimate target for attack.

While many of those who insist upon casting Elmasry as a moderate would note that each non-Arab Israeli citizen is required to complete a mandatory period of military service, although they forget that exceptions are understandably made under physical, psychological or religious grounds.

Of course this doesn't hold up under virtually any of the criteria most people use to designate a legitimate or illegitimate target. Under the Just War principle, those who are not a threat are generally deemed to not be a legitimate target. This would eliminate the elderly, the infirm, or pregnant women as legitimate targets. As well, any conscientious objectors killed by rocket attacks or suicide bombers would most certainly not be legitimate targets.

As such, Elmasry's remarks are certainly not those of a moderate. Yet Elmasry himself denounced 9/11 and has written articles condluding that the Quoran doesn't sanction violence (although it does sanction violence in self-defense).

It's only fair to mention that Audrey hasn't written anything about Muhammad Elmasry, so it would be unfair to insist that she thinks of him as a moderate.

But regardless of her views on Elmasry, she's wrong about the extent to which Muslim moderates believe in the notion of Divine Command.

Benazir Bhutto, for example, fought for democracy in Pakistan -- at the terrible expense of her eternally-promising life -- because she firmly believed that democracy in the Islamic world was ordained by God's divine command.

It isn't at all that Muslim moderates don't believe in divine command. Rather, they draw different conclusions about what, precisely, that divine command entails.

Naturally, this does lead one to the question of whether or not one would consider Fortin herself to legitimately be a moderate. But the facts of this particular comparison speak for themselves.

If Mohammad Elmasry is a moderate, then Suzanne Fortin is no less moderate, and Fortin's comparison of herself to various Muslim moderates much less unreasonable.

Even if Audrey doesn't consider Elmasry to be moderate, she must still come face-to-face with the fact that some of her compatriots do.

But by the same token, one simply doesn't expect the apparentness of these facts to hold in the mind of those who are bound and determined to hold the entire anti-abortion movement culpable for the murder of Dr Tiller -- and, yes, his murder very much was a terrorist act.

It isn't that they cared deeply about Dr George Tiller. Rather, it's that they simply recognize a rhetorical advantage they can gain from exploiting his murder.