A wily foe
Ann Coulter rips into the Airport Imams — rightly — but misses a little something along the way:
In 2003, for example, Shahin alleged that a woman in Arizona had thrown shoes at children at the mosque.
This is the most transparent hoax I’ve heard since, “If I did it, here’s how I would have done it.” This is like the joke about a speaker at an American communist rally opening with: “Workers and peasants of Brooklyn!” Shahin has so little insight into this country, he can’t even invent a believable hate crime.
It’s Arabs who have a thing about shoes being a sign of disrespect, not Americans. When Iraqis toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein, the crowd immediately pelted it with shoes. Saddam installed a mosaic of the first president Bush’s face on the ground floor of his palace so that visitors would be forced to disrespect Bush by walking on his visage in their shoes.
Shahin himself couldn’t get away from this pan-Arabic shoe fetish, adding: “The incidents of Muslims being attacked kind of shocked me in my shoes.” Note to imams trying to fabricate hate crimes against Muslims: Americans don’t share your shoe neurosis.
Ahh, but Ann, ordinary non-Muslim Americans weren’t the intended target of the imam’s lie; Muslims elsewhere were. He’s trying to paint ‘em a picture of outrageous bigotry, oppression, and victimization, and I’d bet that his little meme has been passed around the Arab asylum world to a goodish extent — making his gambit a success, one that we dumb Yanks will misunderstand just like we have all the rest of ‘em.
- Entries
