Appeasement in the News

The circus has put up its tent at a local technical college and will soon run the plumbing to its ritual foot washing facilities.

Many Muslim students use restroom sinks to wash their feet before prayer. Other students have complained, and one Muslim student fell and injured herself while lifting her foot out of a sink. Some local Muslim leaders have advised the college staff that washing is not a required practice for students under the circumstances, according to (MCTC President Phil) Davis. Nevertheless, he says, he wants to facilitate it for interested students. "It's like when someone comes to your home, you want to be hospitable," Davis told me. "We have new members in our community coming here; we want to be hospitable." So the college is making plans to use taxpayer funds to install facilities for ritual foot-washing.

Maybe you just think that MCTC is trying to be seen as tolerant, open and welcoming to people of all faiths, but this is really just a suck-up to Islam. Don't you dare try to let on that it's Christmastime:

A memo from (Dianna Cusick, MCTC's director of legal affairs) and President Phil Davis, dated Nov. 28, 2006, exhorted supervisors to banish any public display of holiday cheer: "As we head into the holiday season ... "all public offices and areas should refrain from displays that may represent to our students, employees or the public that the college is promoting any particular religion." Departments considering sending out holiday cards, the memo added, should avoid cards "that appear to promote any particular religious holiday." Last year, college authorities caught one rule-breaker red-handed. A coffee cart that sells drinks and snacks played holiday music "tied to Christmas," and "complaints and concerns" were raised, according to a faculty e-mail. College authorities quickly quashed the practice.

If you think installation of simple plumbing is where this is going to end, pull your head out:

The task force's eventual objectives on American campuses include the following, according to the website: permanent Muslim prayer spaces, ritual washing facilities, separate food and housing for Muslim students, separate hours at athletic facilities for Muslim women, paid imams or religious counselors, and campus observance of Muslim holidays. The task force is already hailing "pioneering" successes. At Syracuse University in New York, for example, "Eid al Fitr is now an official university holiday," says an article featured on the website. "The entire university campus shuts down to mark the end of Ramadan." At Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, Mich., "halal" food -- ritually slaughtered and permissible under Islamic law -- is marked by green stickers in the cafeteria and "staff are well-trained in handling practices."

A letter to the Strib further focuses the hypocrisy of MCTC:

If, therefore, an issue of safety is involved in the foot-washing ritual as asserted by Phillip L. Davis, (Counterpoint, April 18), the proper response is to forbid the unsafe activity. American laws prohibit genital mutilation of little girls, and also polygamy, despite religious justifications for those practices. Constitutional law, not the Bible or the Qur'an, governs America.

Religious adherents of any faith, who think they cannot conform to existing religiously neutral standards, may establish and attend private schools where all their strictures can be observed. But they are not entitled to impose or establish their faith with tax expenditures.

Meanwhile, not unrelated, in Spain:

Indeed, Zapatero seems to believe that multilateral group therapy is the best way to work out his differences with the Islamic extremists who want to take over his country. But the prime minister’s initiative has been widely criticized in Spain and elsewhere because of its failure to comprehend that Al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremists are at war not just with Spain or other individual states, but with the very ideals of Western society…and especially with post-modernist hyper-secularists like Zapatero himself.