Katherine Kersten: What the…?

In an editorial in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal (OpinionJournal), Katherine Kersten of the Minneapolis Star Tribune has written something so inane, so incredibly narrow-minded, that it boggles the mind.

She says in her first graf that “hard-line Muslim activists are injecting an element that is anything but nice” into Minnesota.

As evidence, she brings up two events: Muslim taxi drivers who refuse to drive people carrying alcohol, and Muslim cashiers who refuse to scan pork products.

Huh? That’s “anything but nice”? Last I checked, there were lots of radical Christian pharmacists refusing to dispense “Plan B,” the day-after, non-abortive contraceptive. I wonder if Kesten would put them in the same category.

But, you see, it’s not that those taxi drivers aren’t being nice. They’re trying to open a gateway to America subscribing to fundamentalist Islamic law!

Check out this bit of inanity:

In September 2006, the Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC) proposed a two color top-light pilot project to indicate which drivers would accept passengers with alcohol. The proposal, later dropped, would apparently have marked the first time that a government agency in the U.S. officially recognized Shariah law, and distinguished individuals who follow it from those who don’t. (Emphasis mine.)

Sharia law (it’s commonly spelled without the ‘h’) is what you think of when you think of thigns like the stoning of women, the cutting off of hands, and so on.

It makes a great scare tactic, even if Kersten is full of it, to jump from two small examples (refusing to drive with alcohol, asking customers or other cashiers to scan pork products) to “Sharia law” in general.

Once we let them refuse to scan our pepperoni pizzas, next we’ll have to let them stone their women!

What a load of crap.

It’s especially crap because Kersten herself points out that it’s far from clear that driving someone who’s carrying a bottle of wine (or scanning a pepperoni pizza) is even part of Sharia:

Ahmed Samatar, a recognized expert on Somali society at Macalester College in St. Paul notes that “There is a general Islamic prohibition against drinking, but carrying alcohol for people in commercial enterprise has never been forbidden.” Similarly, Islam prohibits consuming pork, but not touching or scanning it, according to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf of the American Society for Muslim Advancement in New York. It is, or should be, “a nonissue.”

But let’s not let the facts get in the way of a good scare-the-people story, eh?

Then Kersten lays it on thicker, bringing up those six imams who were detained ”after engaging in what an airport police report called “suspicious” activity,” she wrote. “Some prayed loudly in the gate area, spoke angrily about the U.S. and Saddam, switched seats and unnecessarily requested seat belt extenders with heavy buckles that could be used as weapons, according to witnesses.”

First they’ll refuse to scan our pizza, next they’ll be taking down our airplanes with seat belt extenders!

Am I the only one tired of this scare-tactic bullshit?

Those imams were a bunch of idiots. I doubt they were planning anything other than to scare people and be detained so they could raise a fuss. (If it wasn’t intentional, the level of idiocy involved staggers the mind.)

And the taxi drivers and supermarket scanners are no worse than drug-store employees demanding that another employee ring up Plan B. The hacks and cashiers don’t understand the law they think they’re upholding, and the pharmacists don’t understand basic biology.

Stupid? Yes. Threatening to the American way of life? Doubtful. Not nearly as threatening as, oh, secret tribunals, suspension of habeas corpus, warrantless wiretaps, lying attorneys general, and so on.

It’s all a matter of your agenda, isn’t it?