Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs, Baron Bodissey of Gates of Vienna and Andrew Bostom have all covered Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders' triumphal Washington appearance last week far better than I could hope to. Suffice it to note that among the scurrilous Islamic/leftist reactions to Wilders' presentation was a post by Muslim activist Eboo Patel, who slagged the Dutchman as a "foreign element threatening America" in his Washington Post/Newsweek blog. Patel also noted that Muslim congressman and former Nation of Islam activist Keith Ellison (AKA Keith E. Hakim, Keith X Ellison, and Keith Ellison-Muhammad), D-Minn., compared the Capitol screening of Wilders' documentary film Fitna "to screening the horribly racist film The Birth of the Nation in the White House."
Patel went on to rhetorically bleat, "Shouldn't Capitol Hill be amplifying our tradition of pluralism rather than returning to the dark days of racism?" (as though resistance to Muslim aggression has anything whatever to do with race) and "Should we engage one-fifth of the world's population by punching them in the mouth or by reaching our hand out in friendship?" (The question raised by Fitna, of course, is just who has been punching whom.) Patel is the head of something called the Interfaith Youth Core and appears to be a great favorite of the tax-funded "public" media. It is accordingly unlikely that this is the last we'll hear of him.
