Still no answer from Cao

In her latest attempt to avoid answering a very simple question, Cao provides both some unintended entertainment and further confirmation that one of the most common traits — perhaps even a prerequisite — of being an ultra-rightwing blogger is the inability to draw rational conclusions from the data at hand.

Her post "Miami 7, Islam and media lies" has a number of obvious flaws. The first appears in the very first sentence:

Apparently some people simply don’t know about the Nation of Islam and its ideological connecton with Al Qaeda and terrorism (which was apparent in the comments section of this post).

Now, why does Cao need to establish this ‘ideological connecton’ (sic)? Simple… to date, there has been reported no tangible evidence linking the seven suspects to anyone in the Nation of Islam. So, lacking a substantive connection, Cao is forced to reach back into the history of the Nation of Islam and invent the vaporous ‘ideological connection’ as a justification for tying the NOI to the alleged terrorists. Read her claims carefully — the ideological connection is the only connection she even tries to make between the seven terror suspects and the Nation of Islam.

Note carefully: I am not defending, nor do I have any particular fondness for, the Nation of Islam. I find that group’s philosophy distasteful at best, and racist at worst. Their grasp of history, and of science, is only tenuous. But… the fact that I dislike a group’s teachings does not mean that said group is automatically proven guilty of plotting terrorism in the present instance. This is a distinction Cao seems unable to grasp.

So Cao can’t show any verifiable, present-day connection between the Miami suspects and the Nation of Islam. What else did she screw up? Well, she mounts an ad hominem attack on Aminah Beverly McCloud, professor of Islamic studies at DePaul University, for pointing out that the scriptures of the sect to which the Miami seven apparently belonged spend a great deal of time talking about Jesus. Cao never really gets around to demonstrating that McCloud is incorrect; instead, she makes a lot of noise about McCloud’s alleged connections to Louis Farrakhan and a group called The Muslim Students Association.

Of course, had Cao actually bothered to examine The Holy Koran of The Moorish Science Temple of America, she could have seen that in fact McCloud is right — the book does spend a great many pages discussing Jesus. But this is too much like work. It’s far easier to hurl a few accusations, make derisive noises, and dismiss whatever inconvenient facts may surface with a feeble “yeah riiiight”. No one will ever be able to accuse Cao of intellectual rigor.

But let us not forget the reason why Cao is doing all this ranting: I asked her a question to which she desperately does not want to give a straightforward, unambiguous answer:

Do you, Cao, want these arrests to be seen as an indictment of a particular religion? (That’s answerable with a simple yes or no, by the way.)

Cao knows the answer to that, as do I. But she is afraid to actually say it. So we see that there is another trait no one can ever accuse Cao of having: intellectual courage.