Although he volunteered for a left-wing peace group that favors building a mosque at Ground Zero in New York, the young drunk who stabbed a Muslim taxi driver last week has been indicted on charges of attempted second-degree murder and assault as hate crimes.
The story of Michael Enright, a film student who had returned to New York after working with Marines in Afghanistan, began last week when he went berserk in a taxi driven by a Muslim. When cab driver Ahmed H. Sharif told Enright, in answer to a question, that he was Muslim, Enright began slashing the hapless hack. “This is the checkpoint,” Enright said. “I have to bring you down.” These remarks, apparently, invited the hate-crimes indictment.
Though Enright landed in Bellevue, the most famous asylum for the criminally insane next to Bedlam, the media quickly began speculating that the stabbing was, of course, Islamophobia run wild thanks to the debate over the Ground Zero. The Cordoba Initiative, led by a Muslim imam connected to Hamas and who believes the Constitution embodies the most important elements of Sharia (Islamic law), is one reason the mosque has generated so much controversy.
The New York Daily News termed Enright a “boozed-up bigot.” The New York Times ran this headline: “Rider Asks if Cabby Is Muslim, Then Stabs Him.” Asked the Village Voice, “Was the Muslim Cab Driver Slashing the First ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ Hate Crime?” CBS News connected the stabbing to the mosque as well. “Reported” newsman Jeff Glor:
That alleged hate crime took place in the shadow of a heated and divisive debate over whether a mosque should be built near Ground Zero. It’s not just protesting near Ground Zero — the sentiment against building new mosques has reached from New York’s Staten Island 15 miles away to Tennessee where a debate over a proposed mosque near Nashville has raged all summer….
Other controversies over new mosques in Wisconsin and Kentucky have led some to question: is America becoming Islamophobic, a prejudice against Muslims?
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the left-wing business news tycoon, added fuel to the fire. The mosque’s leading public cheerleader, the Jewish Mayor said the stabbing “appears to have been motivated by anti-Muslim bias.” He assured the Bangladeshi taxi driver that “ethnic or religious bias has no place in our city,” and that “this attack runs counter to everything that New Yorkers believe, no matter what God we pray to.”
While the news media and Bloomberg were fingering Ground Zero mosque opponents for inciting Enright’s rage against the cabbie, an interesting little fact about Enright emerged: He worked for Intersections International, a leftist peace group that supports the site mosque developers have chosen: the site where their co-religionists murdered nearly 3,000 Americans. The group said Enright was a valuable volunteer for more than a year.
It remains to be seen how the media will shoehorn the Islamophobic angle into the story if Enright turns out to be, as suspected, an alcoholic nutcase.
No matter, expect crackpots on the Left to elevate Islamophobia into stratospheric threat. A leftist at the University of Michigan, Juan Cole, blamed the GOP and conservative columnists: “It wasn’t the 21-year-old Michael Enright who drunkenly slashed his New York city cab driver after asking ‘Are you Muslim?’ It was the Republican National Committee.” And columnists, he said, such as Michelle Malkin “have blood on [their] hands, and will have more if you go on this way.” Calling them “hatemongers,” he wrote that “people like Malkin are responsible for that atmosphere.”
The hate-crime charges against Enright feed this kind of moonbat frenzy. No word yet on what Cole thinks of his leftist confreres who openly wish for the death of ideological opponents such as Rush Limbaugh.
Photo of Ahmed H. Sharif: AP Images
