Minnesota Sharia and the Silence of the Left

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Minnesota Sharia and the Silence of the Left

By Robert Spencer

FrontPageMagazine.com | March 30, 2007

Here’s a Prairie Home Companion episode you’ll never hear:

It’s been a quiet week here at Lake Wobegon. Aunt Tillie had to cut short her big vacation in Paris – she got caught in a riot at the train station and you’ll never believe it, she got tear-gassed. She’s all right, but you can imagine the mood she was in when she arrived at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Poor thing, she went straight to a duty-free shop and bought a big bottle of Merlot.

After that, believe it or not, it got even worse. The airport cab driver told her, “You can’t bring that wine into my taxi!” He said it was against his religion. Cab after cab, and they all refused to carry Tillie and her Merlot. Poor Tillie was so distraught, she didn’t know what to do. She paced around on the sidewalk for awhile, and then decided to call Uncle Pete on his cell phone. Pete was with Uncle Fred at Target, but they were held up – Pete was buying a frozen pepperoni pizza for dinner, but the checkout girl refused to ring it up! You’ll never believe this, but she said it was against her religion too! Well, when Pete got Tillie’s call, he just left the pizza, told Fred and his seeing-eye dog to come along, and caught the first bus for the airport.

By the time they got there, Tillie was in a state, let me tell you. Pete took her aside and explained to her, very quietly, that all she had to do was put the Merlot in her suitcase. Then the cab driver would be none the wiser. Tillie did as he directed, and she and Pete got into the cab line with Fred and his seeing-eye dog. Well, let me tell you, I wouldn’t have liked to have seen the look on Pete’s face when the cab drivers told him, one after the other, that they wouldn’t carry Fred’s dog either. They explained to them that he was blind and that Checkers was a seeing-eye dog, but they didn’t care.

Now they were in a real fix. But luckily, Mrs. Hanson’s son came along – remember Ted Hanson, the traveling salesman? He was just heading out of the airport with his girlfriend – you know, old Farmer Johnson’s daughter -- and he ran into Tillie and Pete pacing around on the sidewalk. He got them all, the dog too, into his SUV and drove them home. And boy, did he have a story to tell! It seems that he was flying out of Minneapolis a few months ago, and there were some men on the plane acting, well, you know, suspicious. They asked for seatbelt extensions, and then they didn’t hook them on. Instead, they put them under their seats. They also changed their seats so that a couple of them were sitting by all the entry and exit points of the plane. And they were praying, very loudly – as if they wanted people to notice them, you know? Well, they got their wish. Several passengers – Ted included – notified the flight attendants, and pretty soon these imams were off the plane. It’s a long story, but it turns out that the men who were taken off the plane were Islamic imams, and they’re suing. They say they were victims of discrimination, that they were taken off the plane because they’re Muslims. And Ted says they’re not just suing the airline – they’re suing him, and the other people who complained. I don’t mind telling you, there ought to be a law against that.

And come to think of it, there ought to be a law against all the rest of it too. Now, I am not as funny as that graying Leftist Garrison Keillor, but then again, none of this is really a laughing matter anyway. For some reason, Minnesota, the most consistently liberal of all the heartland states, has lately become a hotbed of Sharia agitation in the United States. The first Muslim congressman, Keith Ellison, is from Minnesota. It should not be forgotten that he addressed a banquet held by the Council on American Islamic Relations, which is deeply involved with the suit against the airline and passengers, two days before the Flying Imams were bounced from their flight, and met with Omar Shahin, the leader of the Flying Imams, the day before. Now in Minnesota we see Muslim cabdrivers discriminating against passengers and Muslim store employees discriminating against customers, and none of the state’s Leftist establishment says a thing. Where they fought and bled with Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement to end racial discrimination, apparently religious discrimination is just fine with them.

Apparently the Left in Minnesota, as elsewhere, can’t see beyond their all-consuming hatred of George Bush to realize how they themselves will be victimized by their new friends if those friends get the upper hand they are now so openly seeking in Minnesota.

Where have you gone, Garrison Keillor? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you, and asks you and other Minnesota liberals to stop trying to tolerate the intolerable. You might do better to remember the words of another famous native son: “don’t hate nothing at all except hatred.”