re: #30 Charles

For my part, I view the Newsweek article as akin to those who accused anyone who was not 100% supportive of the Cordoba House project of being a religious bigot. Now the charge being leveled, albeit implicitly, is that anyone who opposes the project, or even raises qualms about it, supports killing our troops. It represents, IMHO, the worst of political discourse, in which we surrender the duty to argue a position and convince one another on the merits and instead reduce the argument to explicit or implicit ad hominem attacks.

The sad reality is that the Islamists, including AQ (yes, AQ is not the only Islamist group that poses a danger to the U.S. and its allies), do not need this controversy to recruit. The mere presence of American troops in what they consider to be the dar-al-Islam, the mere fact that Muslims are killed anywhere by any Westerner (regardless of the blood and treasure that the U.S. has spent to protect Muslims) and the simple fact of U.S. support for Israel is more than sufficient for them to recruit followers. While the Cordoba House project has been a major issue on LGF and in the American media for the past several weeks, it is, by comparison, a mere fly on an elephant’s posterior.