Better Informed
Reader comment on item: Nike and 9/11

Submitted by John R (United States), Sep 19, 2006 at 12:18

Five years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, it is clear how terrorism has set back the cause of radical Islam.

We know the Islamic imperiousness and dogma now, the doctrinal non sense and what it portends. We have now walled in listening seriously to Islamic interlocutors.

The horrors of 9/11 alarmed Americans and fouled the quiet but deadly efforts of lawful Islamists working to subvert the country from within.

9/11 has fomented discord between the West and Islam. It has sowed much information that we all know the bs now.

Giving up all pretense of dignity, the company reported that "CAIR is satisfied that no deliberate offense to the Islamic community was intended" by the logo.

Oh come on, how many times have we seen the cross or the picture of Christ on almost anything!!!

Emboldened by this success, Mr. Awad traveled to the headquarters of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, a Wahhabi organization in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, one year later to announce that Nike had not lived up to its commitment. He flayed the firm for not recalling the full run of more than 800,000 pairs of shoes and for covering the Air logo with only a thin patch and red paint, rather than removing it completely. "The patch can easily be worn out with regular use of the shoe," he complained. Turning up the pressure, Mr. Awad proclaimed a campaign "against Nike products worldwide."

Much like the uproar that has occurred over the Danish cartoons and the Pope's statement. Overheated, overblown, little reason.

Today, all this is distant history. CAIR still can bully major corporations, as it did in 2005 with the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, but it can no longer shake them down for cash, nor can it ride a bogus issue like Air = Allah. The public is somewhat more skeptical (though not always enough so).

Nike case. What could have been a touchstone turned into gutter. Thanks to 9/11. Any such cases will now be forestalled.

Successes like the Nike capitulation inspired an Islamist triumphalism pre-9/11. One apologist, Richard H. Curtiss, captured its flavor in September 1999, when he called a decision by Burger King to shut a franchised restaurant in a Jewish town on the West Bank, Ma'aleh Adumim, "the battle of Burger King." He hyperbolically compared it "to the battle of Badr in 624 A.D., which was the first victory of the vastly outnumbered Islamic community."

You are making me laugh.

John R.

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