What do you call a photograph of a small plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of urine?

If you're part of the liberal establishment, you might call it "modern art" worthy of a generous taxpayer-funded grant.

Or how about the burning of an American flag in a protest? Our courts say that act is protected as freedom of speech.

Now, what do you call a Koran submerged in a toilet? If you were part of the liberal elite, you'd call it a "hate-crime" and a felony punishable by up to two years in prison.

Perhaps you remember my first example. "Piss Christ" was the blasphemous photograph that won an art competition and $15,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts. But you may not yet have heard about the student at Pace University in New York who was arrested last week on charges of criminal mischief and aggravated harassment (both felonies) for twice throwing a Koran into university toilets.

Pace University -- which stands just four blocks from Ground Zero in Manhattan and lost four students and over 40 alumni on September 11, 2001 -- initially classified the incidents as vandalism. But after some prodding by Muslim students and the perpetually outraged Council for American Islamic Relations, university officials capitulated and referred the matter to the New York City Police Department's Hate Crimes Task Force, which, naturally, deemed the student's actions "hate crimes."

Ridiculous as they are, these stories help highlight a perverse double standard that has emerged in recent years, one that elevates Islam to a protected status, while continuing to treat Christianity as the source of all that ails America

The double standard explains why Kansas City International Airport recently added several foot washing basins in restrooms to accommodate Muslim taxi cab drivers who use them to prepare for daily Islamic prayer. It also makes clear why Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport allows Muslim taxi cab drivers to refuse to carry passengers possessing alcoholic beverages or accompanied by seeing-eye dogs, because in Islam, alcohol is forbidden, and dogs are considered unclean.

Meanwhile, last Christmas the Seattle-Tacoma Airport removed its Christmas trees because of their religious symbolism.

Even worse is the double standard in some of America's public schools, where an intense effort to "Islamicize" curricula and textbooks is underway. In California, groups like the Council on Islamic Education and the Islamic Society of North America have succeeded in integrating the fundamentals of reading and writing with lessons about the life of Muhammad and the finer points of Sharia Law.
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Readers would do well to consider the words of Omar M. Ahmad, founder of CAIR: "Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant." ... "The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America , and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth."

Take heed America, CAIR and its Islamist friends have a dangerous agenda for us, and creeping sharia should be one of its most obvious tools - albeit only one of numerous ideological battlefronts we are faced with.

Zuhdi Jasser is a moderate Muslim and the founder and Chairman of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy based in Phoenix Arizona. He is a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander, a physician in private practice, and a community activist. On the matter of such battlefronts, he writes:

Political Islam's ideological battle fronts are many. They can include the obvious like the liberation of Iraq or the rampant domestic and foreign policy speeches given under the guise of Friday sermons in mosques around America. However, an ideological front which is gaining traction among Islamists is that of religious accommodations (or demands) in our free society. Every week, it seems we are seeing new iterations of the same issue. Soon we must all ask -- at what point do Muslim requests for accommodations to religious practices and beliefs cross the line of the fundamental basis of American liberty and freedom?

In case you've failed to realize it, special treatment for the Koran is indeed a special accommodation for Muslim religious practices and beliefs - and the bible and the Torah receive no such accommodations, nor have they been asked for by Christians and Jews. In fact, it's not even asked for by Muslims that are truly moderate.

Mistreating the religious books of any faith is wrong. But last time I checked we are still, for now, living in America where we have the freedom to be stupid and commit stupid acts.

Sharia will change that, and it can only become the law of our land if we allow it to happen by doing such things like prosecuting students for Koran flushing.

Related:
CAIR's Dreams of American Sharia
Ghassan Elashi's Sentencing Proves CAIR's Terror Ties

Cross posted from Hyscience