A year ago at this time, Rick Santorum was a two-term senator and possible presidential candidate. Yesterday, he was at Penn State as a guest of David Horowitz, as part of the absurd “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.”<\/p>\n
Of course, Santorum’s presence wasn’t the real problem; what the former Republican senator had to say<\/a> was the troublesome part. (thanks to reader R.S. for the tip)<\/p>\n Americans just don’t understand, Rick Santorum said. Not the grave nature of the threat posed by radical Islam — or “Islamo-Fascism” in the lexicon of the former U.S. senator. Not the history of Islam or its underlying principles. And certainly not the fundamental differences between Islam and Judeo-Christian culture.<\/p>\n No, Santorum told a packed lecture hall on Tuesday night, Americans just don’t get it. […]<\/p>\n While Christianity presents a humble, meek message emphasizing love, he said, Islam stemmed from the strong rule of the prophet Mohammed. “Every aspect of life was ruled.”<\/p>\n “Islam, unlike Christianity, is an all-encompassing ideology,” said Santorum, a Penn State alumnus. “It is not just something you do on Sunday…. We (as Americans) don’t get that.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now, there are a couple of ways to look at this. For example, Santorum’s drive to compare Christianity and Islam on matters of peace seems inherently suspect. In historical terms, if one includes the last several centuries, it’s a toss-up.<\/p>\n But more importantly, Islam is an “all-encompassing ideology”? And Christianity isn’t? This from Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum<\/i>? Indeed, the former senator seemed to imply that Christianity is “just something you do on Sunday,” whereas Islam is a faith tradition that believers carry throughout the week.<\/p>\n I wonder if Santorum realizes how ridiculous this sounds coming from him. For that matter, I wonder whether Santorum’s religious right buddies agree that Christianity is not<\/i> “all-encompassing.” In the Student’s Guide to Hosting Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week<\/a> provided on the Terrorism Awareness Project’s website, Horowitz’s team suggests that students distribute a petition that “forces students and faculty to declare their allegiances<\/a>.” The guide then suggests that the petition be brought “to those groups who might be least likely to sign it” such as the “Muslim Students’ Association.” As the Atlantic’s Matthew Yglesias notes, the petition is “deliberately designed to be unlikely for Muslim groups to sign<\/a> and then to use Muslim groups’ failure to sign the petition as evidence that they’re on the side of ‘our terrorist adversaries.'” Horowitz’s entire campaign is rife with such “with us or against us” rhetoric. In an online chat<\/a> on Sunday at Islamonline.net<\/a>, he claimed that if Muslims found his work “offensive<\/a>,” they would be supporting “terror, the stoning of women, clitorectomies.” Additionally, the very choice of speakers for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is a who’s who of controversial speakers<\/a>, some of whom have a history of anti-Muslim rhetoric, such as Ann Coulter. At the 2006 Conservative Political Action Conference, Coulter declared to “boisterous ovation” that “our motto should be post-9-11, ‘raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences<\/a>.'”<\/p>\n As the Muslim blogger Ali Eteraz notes, “this ‘awareness’ week is not about awareness at all, but using anti-Muslim animus to achieve political ends<\/a>“by attacking Horowitz’s true “enemy”: “the political left<\/a>.”On the Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week homepage, Horowitz explicitly lays out his prime motivation for the project. “The purpose of this protest is as simple as it is crucial: to confront the two Big Lies of the political left<\/a>,” says a statement on the website. Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week will allow conservatives to target “tenured leftist professors teaching anti-American curriculum<\/a>,” a University of Rhode Island College Republican told a local radio station. During her Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week speech at the University of California at Berkeley, Nonie Darwish, the founder of Arabs for Israel, repeatedly challenged “the American left<\/a>” to “support” Horowitz’s far right cause.A former Marxist-turned-conservative ideologue<\/a>, Horowitz is on a perpetual and paranoid campaign against what he deems the Left. On his website, Discover the Networks<\/a>, he claims that the left consists of everyone from movie critic Roger Ebert<\/a> to Osama bin Laden<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I’m sure Santorum is proud of his role in promoting such an upstanding event.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A year ago at this time, Rick Santorum was a two-term senator and possible presidential candidate. Yesterday, he was at Penn State as a guest of David Horowitz, as part of the absurd “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.” Of course, Santorum’s presence wasn’t the real problem; what the former Republican senator had to say was the troublesome […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13348\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nAnd as long as we’re on the subject of “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” — a phrase I have trouble even typing without shaking my head — today’s Progress Report<\/a> had some great info explaining this stunt in greater detail.<\/p>\n