Boy oh boy, did Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) land himself in hot water on Sunday evening, when he posted this on X: “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” The uproar has scarcely died down since then, with everyone from California Gov. Gavin Newsom to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) calling for his figurative, if not literal, head.
Oh, and meanwhile, just as the uproar over Fine’s “Islamophobia” was reaching its apex of frothing-at-the-mouth, spittle-flecked rage, it came to light that Morocco is putting three million dogs to death. It looks if Morocco has made the choice Fine warned about, and it turned out to be a bad one for the dogs. In America, however, the leftists who are enraged at Fine are steadfastly refusing to face the fact that anyone anywhere is making such choices, or that they themselves might someday have to make them also.
The rage at Fine was over his being a racist, of course, even though race has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue at hand. Newsom wrote to him: “Resign now, you racist slob.” Unfortunately, the destroyer of California did not bother to specify which race was involved, as there are Muslims of all races. He needn’t be concerned, however, that anyone who actually takes him seriously will notice the oddity here; for the contemporary left, pretty much anything it doesn’t like is “racism,” and the charge doesn’t have to make sense.
For her part, AOC (D-McSorley’s) wrote: “This is genuinely one of the most disgusting statements I have ever seen issued by an American official. It should not stop shocking us that the Republican Party openly embraces this. Fine should be censured & stripped of committees. To ignore this is to accept and normalize it.”
Many other leftist pols echoed the calls that Fine be stripped of his committees or made to resign, with Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Newsom SSR) going for both: “This is disgusting Islamphobia [sic] and dangerous bigotry from Rep. Fine. Speaker Johnson should strip him of all committees and assignments and he should be forced to resign. I hope those that elected him are repulsed by his words and actions.”
None of the leftists who were raging at Fine, however, had a word to say about what was going on in Morocco. The Daily Mail reported Tuesday that “shocking images and reports of dogs being killed in Morocco have drawn global scrutiny of a campaign linked to the country’s 2030 World Cup preparations.” Animal rights activists have stated that Moroccan authorities plan to put to death as many as three million stray dogs, and “have said the alleged effort aims to make cities and tourist hotspots appear cleaner and safer, as well as more appealing to international visitors, fans, and media.”
They also say that those authorities “are using harsh methods, including clamping dogs by the neck, loading them into trucks and poisoning or shooting them before disposing of their bodies in mass graves.” Fine’s words (and mind you, he didn’t call for killing anyone, or deporting anyone, or for any action at all) don’t seem as harsh in light of that.
Morocco’s actions also happen to be in accord with Islamic law. Islamic tradition records that Muhammad ordered that dogs be killed: “Abdullah (b. Umar) reported: Allah’s Messenger ordered the killing of dogs and we would send (men) in Medina and its corners and we did not spare any dog that we did not kill, so much so that we killed the dog that accompanied the wet she-camel belonging to the people of the desert.” (Sahih Muslim 3811)
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It also accords with the words of far-left, pro-Hamas New York City activist Nerdeen Kiswani, to whom Fine was responding in the first place. In response to a news item about two grocery stores removing people who had dogs with them, Kiswani wrote: “Finally, NYC is coming to Islam. Dogs definitely have a place in society, just not as indoor pets. Like we’ve said all along, they are unclean.”
Kiswani herself got some blowback for this, and claimed lamely that it was a “joke.” Maybe it was, but it wasn’t funny, and it accorded fully with Islamic law at a time when Kiswani’s friend Zohran Mamdani, another observant Muslim, is mayor of the city. Whether he will actually restrict dog ownership remains to be seen, but it is not at all outside the realm of possibility that he might try some restrictions and see how they fly.
Leftists, meanwhile, have made their position clear: if their Muslim allies want them to give up their dogs, they will happily do so. After all, any other course of action would be “Islamophobic” bigotry, and we can’t have that, now, can we?
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