Defining extremist up and down

Michael Goodwin:

There's a story about a Mideast zookeeper who insists he can get the lion and lamb to lie down together each night.

An incredulous visitor asks how.

Easy, the zookeeper says. I just bring in a new lamb each morning.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf reminds me of the zookeeper. I'm not sure if he would get the joke, or even realize it is a joke. And that's the problem.

It's also getting too late to care. If we still have to guess at his true sympathies, he forfeits any claim to our trust.

His public comments sometimes favor the lion and sometimes the lamb, depending on the audience and his mood. Even when he's on his best behavior, as he was yesterday at the Council on Foreign Relations, he raises more suspicions about himself and his plan to put a mosque near Ground Zero.

He talks about "amplifying moderates" and stopping extremists from "hijacking the discourse," but he has refused to call Hamas a terror organization and said the United States was an "accomplice" to 9/11. His elastic definition of who is an extremist makes his words meaningless.

...

He has mastered an appeal to liberals who chose to ignore the bear in the woods or the lion in the zoo. He is holding out on an obvious choice of moving the facility because he needs it that close to get the funding from those who think it is important.