Hey Westword, your PC is showing

So using someone's Arab surname -- which she herself often uses -- is as bad or worse than that same person interrrupting a US election campaign to pander to a foreign audience with the bogeyman of rich, powerful Jews exerting stealthy influence?

And wondering if someone is an ally of Islamists is as bad or worse than that person's long record of acting like an ally of Islamists?

Such is the implication of a scolding directed at me and this blog by Michael Roberts, media critic for Westword, on Tuesday in relation to my weekend posting about the anti-Semitic stance of legislative candidate Rima Barakat Sinclair.

Sinclair lost her Republican primary for HD-6 in Denver last night by a landslide to Joshua Sharf, so she'll soon be no more than a footnote in Colorado political history.  Before that happens, though, let's set the record straight about Roberts's accusation of "race- and faith-baiting" by Andrews and Sharf. 

The baiting has all been from her side, for which he is largely giving her a pass -- or to be charitable, about which he perhaps did no homework.  Call it the soft bigotry of low expectations, or in playground terms, an indulgence by Roberts of the classic dodge from Sinclair (in effect), "It all started when he hit me back."

(1) First as to the charge that my calling Sinclair by her birth surname, now a middle name since her marriage, is some sort of bigotry similar to the "Hussein" digs at Obama, if Roberts had bothered to click the Arab-language link in my 8/10 post here at the Gang blog, he would see that she is repeatedly identified as "Rima Barakat-Sinclair" in the very interview I was bringing to stateside attention.  Here's the actual graphic:

(8317) Rima Barakat-Sinclair

عزيزي/تي المشارك شكرآ لكم على المشاعر الطيبة والمداخلات الصريحة التي ارسلتوها الى موقع 'ضيف تحت المجهر". أرجو المعذرة ان فاتني الرد على اسئلة البعض منكم، ولكن يظل املي ان نبقى على تواصل. أود ان اهنئ السيد عادل محمود وجريدة العرب اليوم على مبادرتهم الحسنة وذلك لتوفير زاوية نادرة لتبادل الرأي والبحث. ان جريدتكم تمثل شمعة مضيئه للإعلام

Rima Barakat, without the Sinclair, was how she introduced herself to me when we first met at a Jewish forum years ago, and that is what she still often goes by for media purposes when wearing her Muslim activist hat.  What was operating when Roberts threw this penalty flag was simply his own hyper-PC, not any coded slur on my part.

(2) Second, as to the charge that it was "vitriolic" for me to say in an endorsement email on 8/11 that Sharf's opponent "talks like an Islamist mole" -- again, I was just trying to describe reality as accurately as words will allow.  Doesn't her crude formulation about Jews and Zionists in that Jordanian paper sound exactly like Al Jazeera TV?  Wasn't the same passive-aggressive victim pose obvious in her June 5 rant at a local GOP breakfast that the state and national Republican Party and Bob Schaffer have "declared war on...  everything called Arab-American, and everything called Muslim"?  Audio for that gem is on Sharf's website.

I won't attempt here, for Roberts's benefit, a detailed defense of Joshua Sharf -- to whom, full disclosure, I gave a campaign endorsement, a recurring slot on my radio show, and a plug to be one of the Gang bloggers.  He's quite capable of providing that himself. 

But I'll assert that Sharf is unfailingly decent, careful, and fair in all that he does.  His admittedly stark description of Rima Sinclair as a "terror apologist" was not gratuitous, rather it grew from her own statements about Hamas, some in print and others during a KNUS interview with me and Joshua in December 2006.  His all-out (and now hugely successful) election campaign against her was the farthest thing from indiscriminate Muslim-bashing.  Along the way he picked up an endorsement from Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, and made common cause with another, more clear-thinking Muslim woman, local Iranian immigrant Ana Sami.

True, my shot at Rima as an Islamist mole and Sharf's label of terror apologist are a quantum level higher on the campaign invective scale than Wil Armstrong calling Mike Coffman a career politico.  We used strong language because we perceived in her a strong threat, and one to which the mainstream media as well as its supposed "alternative" conscience, Westword and Colorado Media Matters and the rest, were utterly blind.

Nor were we alone.  Jerry Gordon of the American Congress for Truth, Brigitte Gabriel's organization dedicated to monitoring radical Islam in this country, sounded the alarm nationally about Sinclair's candidacy, which he argued is part of a widespread US movement to place covert jihadists in public office.  John Perazzo of Front Page Magazine, the David Horowitz organ, wrote that "Rima Barakat-Sinclair is the living embodiment" of the Muslim Brotherhood's declared strategy in America for "'grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.'"

Michael Roberts is no more obligated to agree with the concerns of Gordon and Perazzo than with those of Sharf and Andrews.  But he practices the worst kind of PC in attempting to rule us out of order because our terms of debate make him uncomfortable. 

Radical Muslims have a name for nonbelievers who carry water for them by reason of unconscious fear or misplaced kindness.  They call them "dhimmis." The trouble with dhimmitude and its softhearted pity or timidity is that it not only chills free expression, it could also get a lot of people hurt.

Hence this long after-action report on the 2008 political rise and fall of candidate Barakat.  And in conclusion, let's just note the dog that revealing did NOT bark when Michael Roberts did what he chided me for not doing, namely, give Rima a chance to retract or spin her Jew-baiting interview with the Jordanian paper.  "Rather than denying that she made these remarks, or criticizing the translation," he states, with what seems to be a pang of personal pain, "she instead insists that the negative spin Andrews applies isn't warranted -- and then digs herself into a hole in an attempt to explain."

Sinclair, that is, used her out-of-jail card from Roberts to repeat not once but twice the same garbage about Zionist millionaires.  Hard to believe, but you can read it right here.  If we have to contend with moles, may they all be as clumsy as this one.  So long, Rima; we won't miss you at all.

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