It Offends Me, Rudy

 

Photo from "My First Day at Madrasa" by blogger mattinindo, the guy in the necktie (he mentions it in the post), an English teacher at the Madrasah Negari Aliya Lumajang, God's State Muslim School in Lumajang, East Java, Indonesia in July 2012, writing about how a vice principal introduces him to his new class: "'This is Mr. Mek. He is your new English teacher from America. He lives on [blank] street near Al-Huda Mosque. He doesn’t like to eat rice. He’s twenty-four and not married. He’s not Muslim. And he’s not allowed to ride motorcycles. Since he’s a native speaker you will all speak English fluently very soon. Mr. Mek, come say something.' He’s beaming his pearly whites the whole time." It's a lovely post.

Rudolph Giuliani in a NewsMax interview last Sunday explaining his view that New York mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani should not attend the 9/11 25th anniversary commemoration (my transcription):

Frankly, whatever he'd like to say, he doesn't agree that September 11th was an Islamic terrorist attack on the United States of America... Having lost friends there, and being very close to many of the families, it offends me that he's coming.... This is not a place for people like the Arab princeling who gave me ten million dollars so he could say this was caused by American and Israeli policy. From Day One I have taken a very strong position against that because I knew that would be the propaganda the Islamic extremists would use. Because we fall for that, too many American fall for that Islamic propaganda, which is the reason they're taking over certain parts of America and certain parts of Europe. They have every desire to take us over. This is not--um--they just want to be another religion. They want to dominate us. That's what they're taught from the day they begin their religious education. Mandami [sic] is a clear--a clear supporter of that. All of the--all of the--all of the Muslims he supports are murderers! 

The princeling in question is the Saudi businessman and philanthropist Prince Alwaleed bin Talal; Giuliani sent back his gift to the city after a written statement in which he said:

At times like this, we must address some of the issues that led to such a criminal attack. I believe the government of the United States of America should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinian cause.

Not long afterwards he exposed himself to more serious accusations of antisemitism, I'm sorry to say, when he told a Saudi magazine that Giuliani had turned down the check because of unspecified "Jewish pressures", but this has not stopped many distinguished American and British universities from accepting his donations (including $20 million to Georgetown and £16 million to Edinburgh). He also sued Forbes Magazine for underestimating how rich he is, unlike Donald Trump in a similar case, who demanded an apology but didn't take it to court when they refused. I don't know why I'm telling you all this, but Giuliani is the one who brought him up.

It offends me that Giuliani should be invited to the occasion, not least because of the irrepressible Islamophobia with which he poisons it, in defiance of the good advice of President George W. Bush, as he said on a visit to Washington's Islamic Center six days after the attacks

The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war.

or more fully on welcoming King Abdullah of our ally Jordan at the Oval Office a couple of weeks later, on September 28

I have assured His Majesty that our war is against evil, not against Islam. There are thousands of Muslims who proudly call themselves Americans, and they know what I know -- that the Muslim faith is based upon peace and love and compassion. The exact opposite of the teachings of the al Qaeda organization, which is based upon evil and hate and destruction.

What does Giuliani mean by "all of the Muslims" Mamdani "supports"? Who is he talking about? Can he prove they are murderers? Who is he accusing of "taking over over certain parts of America and certain parts of Euope"? Which parts? What does he know about "the day they begin their religious instruction"?  Does he mean anything at all? "Here it is twenty-five years later and if anything we have more of them now," he told NewsMax, "because of what Biden did, hanging around America, and we have less information about who they are and where they are." What is he claiming to know and who did he get it from?

But also because of his psychopathic insistence on locating the New York City Emergency Management command center against police advice on the 23rd floor of World Trade Center 7, which caught fire from debris as the North Tower collapsed, and collapsed itself in the afternoon—no casualties, happily, but rendered completely useless for emergency management though the emergency was right next door.

 And still more because of his complicity in the coverup of the lethally bad air quality around the site of the attacks that has led to so much death and sickness among the survivors, especially first responders, firefighters and police officers, as Mamdani told us yesterday (gift link), at the end of a 25-year wait:

“People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air,” he said at a news conference at City Hall, surrounded by politicians, relatives of those who died on Sept. 11 and advocates for the health of those now suffering from illnesses that surfaced years after the attacks.

“As the years pass and the human toll grows, we reckon with the cost of Sept. 11 whenever another New Yorker is stolen from us too soon,” Mr. Mamdani said at the event, where he announced the release of more than 170,000 pages of documents related to toxic air quality around the site of the felled towers.

And because he's a completely disgraced person, a permanently disbarred ex-lawyer and slanderer, a key figure in the cases for which Donald Trump was impeached, in the attempt to extort negative information about Biden and his son Hunter from Ukrainian officials, and in the attempt to overrule Biden's 2020 election and install Trump as emergency dictator, the latter earning him four federal indictments, 13 in Georgia, and one in Arizona, on all of which he escaped trial as Trump's 2024 election enabled them to dismiss the charged, plus a civil judgment of $148 million for his defamation of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss (for which he really did have to pay something, though the amount is not publicly known).

And even boycotted by Fox News, as he complained the the NewsMax interviewer, saying they haven't invited him to their own 9/11 coverage for the last eight years: "How could you do 9/11 and not have me on it? Unless you're not interested in telling the truth?"