Keith Ellison’s fatwa

Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison made his name as the first Muslim elected to Congress. It was therefore all but obligatory for him to weigh in on the firing of Juan Williams from NPR as a result of Williams’s expression of his feelings on Fox News about seeing air passengers dressed in “Muslim garb,” as he did last week on Ed Schultz’s MSNBC show.
It’s always illuminating to hear the deep thoughts of Keith Ellison on matters of public concern. We still await the enterprising journalist who will ask Ellison which branch of Islam it is that comports with the tenets of the Democratic agenda on the equality of women, abortion, gay rights and all the rest. Then we might learn something from him that we don’t know.
Incidentally, Ellison used to hang with the gangbanging Minneapolis cop killer Sharif Willis. Now he hangs with the likes of Schultz, an altogether better class of thug. In his conversation with Schultz, Ellison announced he felt like taking Williams’s books (referred to in in the singular as “that stuff”) off the shelf “and putting it in the garbage.”
Schultz elicited from Ellison the fevered charge that “Juan Williams contributes to profiling and harassing Americans.” He doubts Williams’s integrity — this from a guy who predicated his first congressional campaign on three easily demonstrable lies.
Given the profile of the perpetrators of 9/11, Ellison makes the point that Williams’s reaction to passengers in “Muslim garb” is misguided. Is Ellison chiding Williams for failing to observe that the rational fear would be focused on Muslims who blend in? Muslims like Keith Ellison? Let’s consider the point duly noted. While Ellison’s point has superficial plausibility, however, one should also consider the uses of “Muslim garb” in concealing the explosive vest that has proved so popular among Muslim terrorists.

It should be noted that Ellison lurked in the background of the November 2006 incident involving the flying imams at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. The whole point of the lawsuit brought by the flying imams was to disable law enforcement from acting on the justifiable concerns of ordinary citizens about ostentatious Muslims behaving in a manner that would cause rational concern.
The flying imams were removed from the aircraft and interrogated while the USAirways flight went on its way. USAirways and the law enforcement defendants in the flying imams’ lawsuit paid an undisclosed but tidy sum to the flying imams to settle their lawsuit. The flying imams prevailed; the next time around, it will be the imams who fly and the other passengers who stay behind.

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