A word on Ellison's "swearing in" + Hitchens' smackdown

Old news, but I'm one more commentator who didn't care what book freshman Congressman Keith X. Hakim-Ellison-Mohammad chose for his photo-op "swearing-in" ceremony.

Perhaps Michael Medved said it best here on why we shouldn't require members of Congress to swear on the Christian Bible.

Rather, we should be concerned with Keith X. Hakim-Ellison-Mohammad's past affiliations with the (rather unIslamic) Nation_of_Islam, as well as his ongoing cooperation with the Hamas front-group C.A.I.R.. (For more, see Powerline's Scott Johnson's excellent September post Keith_Ellison_for_Dummies.

Tuesday brought us: Jefferson's_Quran:_What_the_founder_really_thought_about_Islam by Christopher_Hitchens:

In the first place, concern over Ellison's political and religious background
has little to do with his formal adherence to Islam. In his student days and
subsequently, he was a supporter of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, a racist and
crackpot cult organization that is in schism with the Muslim faith and even with
the Sunni orthodoxy now preached by the son of the NOI's popularizer Elijah
Muhammad. Farrakhan's sect explicitly describes a large part of the human
species—the so-called white part—as an invention of the devil and has issued
tirades against the Jews that exceed what even the most fanatical Islamists have
said. Farrakhan himself has boasted of the "punishment" meted out to Malcolm X
by armed gangsters of the NOI (see the brilliant documentary Brother Minister: The
Assassination of Malcolm X, which catches him in the act of doing this). If
Ellison now wants to use his faith to justify an appeal to pluralism and
inclusiveness and diversity, he needs to repudiate the Nation of Islam, and in
much more unambivalent terms than any I have yet heard from him.

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Read the whole thing.