Muslim hatred fanned into an actual fire [updated]

Four days and counting before the Church of the Total Wackos in Gainesville, Florida, celebrates the Twin Towers attack by burning Korans.

I was waiting for someone to make the obvious observation that, for all the fetishistic talk about ‘supporting the troops’, these Christian crazies are about to put the grunts directly in harm’s way with their self-indulgent little stunt. Now General Petraeus himself has warned about the dangers of this gratuitous inflammation of religious sentiment among people who take their dogma extremely seriously.

Apparently, the Dove Outreach church is a two-bit storefront operation run by a smarmy entrepreneur like a million others in our gloriously tolerant land. No doubt the Becks and the Limbaughs will wash their hands of this event scheduled for the High Holy Days of September 11. Fill in their indignant responses here: We NEVER suggested [etc., etc.]

But not so fast. The campaign they drummed up against the Islamic Center/‘Ground Zero Mosque’ is now in overdrive with a recent New York Times poll announcing that a majority of local residents now oppose its construction. That’s interesting for those who care—I don’t. Nor do I care that in 1961 some percentage of white people in Birmingham, Alabama, were against sending their children to school with ‘Negroes’.

Of course, New Yorkers would never confess that their opposition reflects anything like crude prejudice--the very idea! Oh no, it’s all about being ‘sensitive’ to the relatives and ‘legitimate questions’ about the source of the funds and a lot of other bogus crap that no one would have thought of it it weren’t for the hate campaign itself. Somebody should dig up the old attacks on Martin Luther King and read how they also had nothing to do with race but rather his communist friends and all those annoying agitators from up north.

I regret that some kids from Nebraska are going to get shot up in Helmand province because these execrable bipeds are going to stage their little Hitler youth rally in on some backwoods shopping center parking lot and then bask in their 15 minutes of ignominious fame. But I suspect that it will take some sort of grotesque spectacle of this sort to generate the desperately needed backlash against the rising tide of idiocy sweeping the land.

This would be a good time to see our president lose a tad of his famous cool and share a few choice words about the impact of this madness on the soldiers he continues to send into the mountains of Afghanistan to face the enraged residents.

[Update with the ink barely set]: I particularly love the way self-proclaimed and -described liberals and moderates pile enthusiastically onto the racist mob. Here is the barely humanoid editor of The New Republic, once a magazine, now a screed-sheet inspired by the Israeli right, on how Muslims do not deserve the protections of the First Amendment.