Hamas the Shibboleth

Andrew C. McCarthy deploys an effective analogy to cut through some of the gobbledygook mucking up the public debate over the mosque. (Or am I imagining that, as the Cordoba Center becomes more and more unpopular with Americans in the last week or two, the media is increasing its one-sided coverage of “Islamophobia” in America?) Put simply, support for Hamas is as good a test as any for unmasking Ikhwan members set about the Grand Jihad. From NRO:

Why They Can’t Condemn Hamas

August 28, 2010 4:00 A.M.

Rauf and his friends employ different methods, but they are on the same team.

Hamas is a shibboleth. If you want to know whether an ostensible Muslim “moderate” is really moderate, ask him if Hamas is a terrorist organization.

It is really not a hard question, even if Feisal Rauf can’t — or won’t — answer it. Rauf, the would-be imam of the controversial Ground Zero mosque, is also a stud in the State Department’s stable of ready-to-travel-on-your-dime “moderates.” That same State Department has branded Hamas a terrorist organization, and we can’t even get it to say that about the Taliban, the guys we’re fighting in the overseas contingency operation formerly known as the War on Terror.

During a WABC radio interview, Aaron Klein three times pressed Rauf to admit that Hamas is a terrorist organization. Rauf bobbed and weaved in classic Islamist style. “I’m not a politician,” he replied, as if only politicians trouble themselves over whether terrorists are terrorists. “I try to avoid the issues. The issue of terrorism is a very complex question.” Avoid the issues? You don’t say!

But it is not a complex question, no more complex than “Does Derek Jeter play for the Yankees?” It is a straightforward question that Islamists complicate with clever casuistry, carefully designed to ring all the right chimes for our opinion elites and their media pitchmen.

By all means, read the entire article here.