That Rascally Imam

Victor Davis Hanson salutes Feisal Abdul Rauf for his brilliant and rascally cyncism.

He duped liberals and conservatives into this war of words and there was no bigger dupe than the President of the United States.

Finally, we come to the greatest irony of all, the politically suicidal entry of President Obama into the fray. After himself invoking Cordoba for just the sort of therapeutic mythmaking that Imam Rauf is far better at, how could the president now stay out? Rauf knew that he had a legal right to build the mosque, that the cultural elite would rally to his defense, that the right wing would go ballistic, and that his “outreach” would be deeply offensive to the vast majority of Americans of all faiths.

In other words, Rauf is just the sort of Venus’s flytrap that would lure in the unthinking multicultural, multi-everything president, eager to score political points with his omnipresent tolerance, and apparently having learned nothing from his disastrous beer summit and his declaration that clinging Arizonans would arrest Mom and Pop and the kids as they went out for ice cream. Obama could not resist weighing in, and once more he ended up looking the law-professor fool, who in sonorous tones reminds Americans, on the one hand, of the banal (it is perfectly legal to build a mosque near Ground Zero), while, on the other, he plays the Chicago legislator who voted present whenever he could (to a Muslim audience, he kinda, sorta wanted it built; to an American audience the next day, he kinda, sorta really didn’t).

Imam Rauf is a rascal, but he is at least a brilliantly cynical one.

Good stuff.