Immigration

A group of these clergypersons got together this week to sign a letter to their congregations and whoever else might read it to stop "misrepresenting" the president's faith. Brave as these worthies are, they can't quite bring themselves to say what it is, exactly, they object to, since to say it plain might offend the followers of Mohammed. But they're talking about the claim that the president is a secret or not-so-secret Muslim. (At this point the politically correct thing to say is, "not there's anything wrong with that.") One recent poll suggests that 1 in 5 Americans say Mecca is where the president's heart is.

"As Christian leaders whose primary responsibility is sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with our congregations, our communities and our world," the clergypersons wrote, "we are deeply troubled by the recent questioning of President Obama's faith. We understand that these are contentious times, but the personal faith of our leaders should not be up for public debate."

Some of the true believers in Arabia say the mosque is a conspiracy hatched by the Jews to set out a clear and permanent connection between Sept. 11 and Islam, a constant reminder of an attack on America led by devout Muslims. Dr. Abd al-Muti Bayumi, a prominent fellow of the Islamic Research Academy of Al Azhar, sometimes regarded as "the Vatican of Sunni Islam," says the construction of a mosque anywhere near Ground Zero is the child of a "devious mentality" to connect the dots of Sept. 11 and Islam, to stoke memories of barbarism in the name of Islam.

Another Arab notability, Dr. Amna Nazir, a professor of doctrine and philosophy at Al Azhar, calls "building a mosque on this rubble indicates bad intention — even if we wished to shut our eyes, close our minds and insist on good will." These are not the empty sentiments of good will and sensitivity so beloved of the girly men of the West. They're statements of concern that "Zionist conspiracy" aid in construction of the Ground Zero mosque will ultimately damage Islam. Dr. Bayumi, for one, preaches suicidal jihad to demonstrate that his heart is in the wrong place: "I say in all honesty that we recruit the people of Islam, and instill in them the spirit of the true jihad, which is death for the sake of Allah, for the sake of our faith."

Here he was on Friday night last, speaking about the Ground Zero mosque to a dinner at the White House celebrating Ramadan: “Let me be clear: As a citizen and as president I believe that Muslims have the same right . . . to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan . . . This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable.”

Who argues with that? But here he was the next day, when reporters accompanying him to his dip in the Gulf of Mexico asked him about his Ramadan remarks: “I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there.”

The decision doesn't settle anything. The trial in U.S. District Court was a setup for the real thing. The decision was rendered by a not-so-discreet gay caballero in San Francisco, where a man and woman holding hands in public risk outraging public morals, such as public morals and preferences may be in these precincts.

Next up is an appeal to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, also based in San Francisco, where the most liberal of all the appeals courts is expected to rubber-stamp the decision. That still won't settle anything. Then it's on to the U.S. Supreme Court, where justices are usually loath to reach for the rubber stamp.

Bringing back the good times, a fantasy not so long ago, won't be easy, but the community is taking baby steps on a long journey to prosperity. The past, like a long, sleepy summer's afternoon, hangs heavy in Helena. Seven men from Helena became Confederate generals, and from Graveyard Hill you can sometimes hear the ghosts of a fierce two-day battle for Helena and control of the river in July 1863. The traffic on the river mostly passes Helena by now, and boarded-up shop windows and vacant lots line the downtown streets. More than a third of Helena's residents live below the poverty level. Every schoolchild is enrolled in the discounted or free school lunch program, and for many it's the best meal of the day.

Helena's woes are not unique in the Delta, where the blues, after all, were born. (Helena, population 15,000, comes to life for a boisterous weekend in October with the Delta blues festival, which sometimes attracts 100,000 visitors.) The region has all but emptied of whites, who followed the blacks who struck out for St. Louis and Chicago and other places decades ago. The poorest of the poor, nearly all black, are left in towns deep in the embrace of poverty, despair and kudzu, only shells of what they once were.

Beheading is something of the national sport of Saudi Arabia, where the government has scheduled for Friday the gruesome ritual for a man, the father of five, accused of sorcery for "making predictions" in his native Lebanon. (Punditry can be risky there, too.)

Better to take your celebration to Israel, where the government will assist your visit. It's the difference between Middle East and the cultural West, between the 8th and 21st centuries, between civilized and not-so-civilized. The Israeli guarantee of religious freedom, taken for granted in the nations of the West, is part of what invites hostility and belligerence from Israel's neighbors.

You might think war is endless gaiety, like Mardi Gras, from this week's coverage of Senate Armed Services Committee hearings about whether to repeal the law enabling homosexuals to serve in the armed forces so long as nobody asks and they don't tell.

The military services have always discriminated against a lot of people in choosing who they want for the grim tasks and brutal duties of war. Congress and the courts have always granted the services wide latitude. The old, the halt, the lame, the one-legged man and even the man with flat feet are not allowed to serve, either. It would never have occurred to the generations who won America's wars to question such common sense. Now we have pregnant sailors and routinely send mothers of small children off to do the work of men, so why not oblige men who look upon other men with lust?

Public apologies have become a growth industry. Such an apology is marked with capricious cant and blatant insincerity ("… if I've offended anyone I regret it") and meant only to turn down the heat. Sometimes even Democrats, not often but sometimes, are called out for the outrageous things they say. Harry Reid, the leader of the Democrats in the U.S. Senate, is even now making the rounds to tug at his forelock (what there is left of it), paw the ground with his left foot and affect the kind of humility that politicians are famous for. He's offering practiced amends for his remarks about Barack Obama — that he was a presidential candidate who wouldn't frighten white folks because he was "a light-sk…d" African American who spoke with "no N…-o dialect, unless he wanted one." (Excuse the ellipses, but I want no trouble from the language police.)

This is actually how a lot of politicians of both parties, black, white, tan and various shades between, talk when they're in a smoke-filled room, trying to sort out who ought to run against whom. Mr. Reid, who will soon have a lot to answer for in regard to his part in saddling the nation with the monstrosity of health care "reform" legislation, no doubt meant nothing more "insulting" than a candid judgment that Mr. Obama, for the good and sufficient reasons he enumerated, would make a good candidate for president. And he was right, as anyone who read the papers on Nov. 9, 2008, could tell you.

When Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. awarded the Islamic radicals the opportunity to take their rhetorical carnival of murder and mayhem to New York City for the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 assault on America, Mr. Holder insisted that he was only acting in the American judicial tradition of due process. A military tribunal is OK for a GI in Afghanistan but not for a criminal the GI captures there. His prescription is actually more in the tradition of "Rules for Radicals," the manual of civic disorder and troublemaking written by Saul Alinsky, Mr. Obama's revered mentor in all the things not in the province of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright or Bill Ayers. The president and the attorney general have had interesting instructors.

Neither the president nor the attorney general were quite prepared for the overwhelming, bipartisan, transracial outrage over their remarkable doctrine of "due process." Mr. Obama, questioned by reporters in Asia, insisted that the noose was ready for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (or KSM in the helpful shorthand applied to unpronounceable names). The legal niceties were necessary, but the wait for the hangman — or the needler, or electrician or whomever — would make the anticipation all the merrier.

I observed in this space earlier this week that Barack Obama's curious compulsion to travel the world to make endless apologies for America could stem from his spending the most formative years of his childhood in the Third World. I mentioned two observable facts, neither in any way accusatory or rude, that his father was a Kenyan (Marxist) and the mother who raised him was obviously attracted to men of the Third World. She married two of them.

These observations, and how that might have influenced a child, struck several readers - I've heard from them all - as unforgivable xenophobia, arrogance and, of course, the mindless all-purpose indictment, "racism." My observation that the president's mother was attracted to the Third World was, incredibly, taken as insult, as if being attracted to "men of the Third World" is bad. But bigotry, like beauty, lies often in the eye of the beholder, or in this case in the eye of the accuser. Most of the e-mails were crude, obscene and, worse, cast in the language of the schoolyard. Some included the obligatory shot at George W. Bush. With friends like these the president needs no enemies.