Creeping Sharia

Let's momentarily ignore the elephant of public education for a moment and ask ourselves what is wrong with the following picture, as summarized by Little Green Footballs:

The American Civil Liberties Union has given their blessing to the public funding of Islamic footbaths at the University of Michigan, to let Muslims wash their feet before prayers.

The ACLU says it has nothing to do with religion. [bold added]

Really? And how might that be the case? We can find out through the Detroit News (as excerpted by LGF):

Muslim leaders in Metro Detroit have decided not to raise private money to pay for two footbaths at a local college campus now that the American Civil Liberties Union has said the plan doesn't pose constitutional problems.

The University of Michigan-Dearborn's plan to spend $25,000 on the footbaths was criticized on conservative blogs and radio shows this month. Critics said using public money for the project would violate the First Amendment, which says governments can't favor or subsidize religions.

Muslims are required to wash body parts, including feet, up to five times daily before prayers. University officials say the floor-level wash basins are needed because some students at the 8,600-student campus wash their feet in the sinks.

Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said his group was concerned a public outcry would cause the university to back down from the project.

"If the ACLU had decided to take legal action against the UM-Dearborn, we probably would have called for the university to raise the funds privately, just so that the UM-Dearborn wouldn't have to go through the trouble of having to defend its position against the ACLU," Walid said.

Kary Moss, director of the Detroit branch of the ACLU, said its review concluded the plan is a "reasonable accommodation" to resolve "safety and cleanliness issues" that arose when Muslims used public sinks for foot cleaning before prayers, which often spilled water on bathroom floors.

"We view it as an attempt to deal with a problem, not an attempt to make it easier for Muslims to pray," said Moss, who likened the plan to paying for added police during religious events with huge turnouts. "There's no intent to promote religion." [bold added]

This is a perfect example of how the welfare state functions and how Moslems take advantage of that fact. Since, in the minds of leftists (and increasingly some conservatives), the government exists not to protect individual rights, but to "solve problems" for an infantilized populace from cradle to grave, the students are not held accountable for the fact that they are making a potentially hazardous mess through their practice of washing their feet in the sink and not bothering to mop up afterwards.

Nobody is held accountable for these magically-appearing "problems", and thus their root cause -- the superstitious beliefs and primitive rituals of a segment of the student population -- is simply never on the table. And since the government exists to "solve" such mysterious "problems", of course special accommodations for the Moslems will be made. Despite the obvious religious nature of the footbaths, I think that the ACLU's useful idiots -- being idiots, after all -- really do believe that this is not government funding of religious activity, based on this kind of reasoning.

And of course such willful evasion on the part of someone passing out loot is not going to go unnoticed by Moslems. This is a big part of why they're so often observed making pains in the ass of themselves the world over: They know that they will not be held accountable for any "problems" that just happen to occur as a result of them following the dictum of the moment and that the various Western welfare states will attempt to "solve" such problems not by holding them accountable, but by throwing money at the "problem", which we can conceptualize as a big, outspread, Moslem palm.

For example, observe that the "Palestinians", who elected Hamas, are about to get foreign aid from Israel in an attempt to induce them to stay put. The proper response by Israel would be to blockade Gaza and, perhaps to carpet bomb it if the "Palestinians" weren't eliminating themselves as a threat to Israel fast enough on their own.

But that would entail assigning moral blame to a people who overwhelmingly elected a party that vowed to anihilate Israel. Since Israel clearly sees allowing the "Palestinians" to immigrate as the only other alternative, they are condemning themselves to a succession of bombardments or invasions, for however long that can actually last.

To the extent that we in the West refuse to morally condemn the uncivilized behavior of Moslems and ensure that they face the consequences of what they do, we are already acting as dhimmis. And since we already possess much of the apparatus of a totalitarian state, we will effectively get a creeping sharia in the bargain as the state, always at the service of the most irresponsible people it can find, solves more and more "problems" caused by Moslems. Heck, now that I think of it, the Moslems wouldn't even have to come up with this strategy, although many plainly use it.

-- CAV