Don Pesci: Anti-Muslim hatemongering or scholarly curiosity?

In early August, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) jointly condemned E. Miles Prentice, the owner of the Single-A Connecticut Tigers, based in Norwich, Conn., and co-owner of the Double-A Midland (Texas) RockHounds. Prentice was assailed because of his association with the Center for Security Policy (CSP), a group, according to a story in the Norwich Bulletin, that has been identified by CAIR as an anti-Muslim hate group.

Immediately after the “hate” gauntlet had been thrown down, curious minds certainly wondered if the CFSP was indeed a Muslim hate group, which is to say a group that hates all Muslims because they are Muslims. In a story of this kind, it is important to know whether the CSP is inspired chiefly by hate or by something far less toxic -- scholarly curiosity: Is sharia law compatible with our constitutional and the common law? In addition, one would want to know whether Prentice himself hates Muslims simply because they are Muslims, or whether Prentice is being assailed because of his close association with the CSP, while he himself is free of the presumed taint of hatred. Prentice is chairman of the Center for Security Policy and appears to be far more interested in baseball than irrational hatred.

Unfortunately, none of these questions have been asked, still less answered, by those reporting on the matter. The charge of anti-Muslim hatred – like charges of racism and anti-Semitism – may be unanswerable in the absence of unambiguous definitions. No doubt racism, anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim hatred should be denounced from every pulpit in the nation, religious and secular, but the denunciations must be aimed at the thing itself, not an intimation of its shadow. And, in the absence of firm definitions, those who falsely charge others with hatred of Islam as such should be fervently denounced by men and women of good will much in the way Sen. Joe McCarthy was reviled when he sought to tag as Communists some people who were innocent of the charge. McCarthy did correctly identify some people as Communists, but he was painting with a very broad brush, and in some cases his manner of investigation proved insufficient.

In 1992, William F. Buckley Jr. brought out a book titled In Search of Anti-Semitism. The tightly reasoned book ran to 200 pages and Buckley appeared to have captured in its pages a proper context “to evaluate anti-Semitism and, at the same time, what is wrongfully thought of as anti-Semitic.” There is no such effort underway to narrowly define “Islamic hatred” in such a way that Prentice may be safely put behind its definitional bars. Neither Prentice nor the Center for Security Policy, founded in 2008.

Is it not possible that CAIR -- closely associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational Sunni Islamist organization founded in 1928 in Egypt by Islamic scholar and schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna, which itself is closely related to Hamas, a militant anti-Israeli terrorist organization -- may regard as hate what non-Muslim commentators in the United States choose to view as critical analysis?

The Council on American Islamic Relations should be wary of throwing stones from within glass houses. CSP is not an Islamic hate group. And if Prentice is to be judged an Islamic hater because of his association with a group found on the growing enemies list of the Southern Poverty Law Center, should not CAIR and the SPLC be judged according to the same standard applied in the case of Prentice? Prentice’ response to the charge that he is a hatemonger, not ventilated fully in news outlets that have carried the sensational charge, may be found here.

There is no reason to suppose that the members of CAIR should be familiar with Kant’s categorical imperative -- “Act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature." Or, to put the precept in Christian terms, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That precept – that moral law – weighs heavily on the Christian conscience. But there is no reason to believe that violent jihadists, say, soiling their hands with the blood of innocent Christians, among others, think themselves under any obligation to submit to Kant’s moral law. Their submission is to Mohammed's precepts as expressed in the Koran, the hadiths and sharia law.

However, if you want to play ball in Dodd Stadium, Norwich, CT., USA, you’ll have to play by the rules. And the overarching rule is that there is a world of difference between proper scholarly activity, permitted under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, and hate mongering of a kind that falls short of slitting the throats of those who disagree with you on nice theological questions.

Don Pesci is a columnist based in Vernon, Conn.

Chris Powell: Sharia Law not an issue in Conn., so leave Muslims alone; state helps the hoaxers

Everybody knows that Islam is having a civil war between murderous totalitarians and people who just want to live and let live. Civilization's urgent agenda must be to help the good guys. But as Connecticut saw last weekend, some people are determined to insult and intimidate the good guys by suggesting that all followers of Islam are bad, which can only discourage the good guys and strengthen the bad guys.

Last weekend's demonstration of this came in Waterbury, where a group called ACT for America held a rally, purportedly to warn about sharia law, an Islamic religious code that is contrary to democracy in many respects. Waterbury seems to have been selected because it has a large Muslim community.

But no one in Connecticut is advocating replacing civil law with Sharia Law. In Connecticut Sharia is not an issue and is no more a threat to democracy than Christian or Jewish religious law, both of which also differ substantially from civil law but are not acknowledged by ACT for America as being just as incompatible with democracy as sharia is.

Nor does ACT for America acknowledge that Christianity and (much less so) Judaism had their own civil wars that devastated Europe and the Middle East for centuries before the live-and-let-live factions triumphed. Even in Connecticut, as late as the 1950s Protestants and Catholics nearly came to blows over whether civil law should provide public school bus transportation to Catholic schools.

Being 2,000 years younger than Judaism and six centuries younger than Christianity, Islam isn't done with its civil war yet. So Islam's good guys need support, not bullying and shunning. ACT for America says it wants religious freedom for all, but the group's harping on sharia law where there is no attempt to induce government to impose it smells like bigotry and hate.

State government helps the hoaxers

Former Fox News journalist Megyn Kelly, now running a news program on NBC, is catching criticism for planning an interview with radio talk show host Alex Jones, who is renowned for asserting that the Newtown school massacre in 2012 was a hoax. Maybe Kelly's questioning will undermine Jones as a hoaxer himself, or maybe it will just glorify him among the growing segment of the population that is inclined to consider everything official to be a lie.

But if government wants to help squelch hoaxes, it should reconsider what it has done to encourage them, as the General Assembly and Gov. Dannel Malloy did in response to the Newtown school massacre. That is, at the urging of the families of the murdered, legislators and the governor hurriedly enacted an exemption to Connecticut's Freedom of Information Act to obstruct disclosure of police photographs and videos depicting victims of homicide. Such images remain essential to refuting deniers of all sorts of atrocities, from the Holocaust to the Armenian genocide to the Rape of Nanking.

If applied nationally, Connecticut's law would conceal the Zapruder film of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as well as the photographs taken during his autopsy, even as the circumstances of the president's murder remain very much in question. After the Newtown massacre Connecticut's black and Hispanic state legislators insisted on making the photo and video exemption apply to all homicide victims rather than limit it to the Newtown case.

Now those legislators are lamenting that, because Bridgeport police are not equipped with dashboard and body cameras, there are no photos or video of the fatal shooting by officers of a 15-year-old boy a month ago. But even if there were such images, the law those legislators insisted on enacting would obstruct any release to the public.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.