A bunch of self-important clergy are all in a tizzy because of a 7-minute film, “The Rise of al Qaeda,” planned for the opening of the National September 11 Memorial Museum. Sheik Mostafa Elazabawy, the Imam of Masjid Manhattan wrote to the NS11MM director,

The screening of this film in its present state would greatly offend our local Muslim believers as well as any foreign Muslim visitor to the museum.

Unsophisticated visitors who do not understand the difference between Al Qaeda and Muslims may come away with a prejudiced view of Islam, leading to antagonism and even confrontation toward Muslim believers near the site.

Unsophisticated. Because Americans are just too stupid to form the “correct” conclusions without the instruction of our betters.

And that difference between al Qaeda and Muslims about which the imam worries so? There surely are differences, but we wouldn’t know that from the words of any mullahs or imams identifying them, or from their decrying al Qaeda or other jihadists conducting terrorism in the name of Islam.  Their silence has been as loud as the roar of the fires in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.  No, we had to figure out those differences all by ourselves.  And we did.  Go figure.

Professor Akbar Ahmed, Chairman of Islamic Studies at American University, added this bit of contempt for Americans:

[W]hen you associate their [al Qaeda’s] religion with what they did, then you are automatically including, by association, one and a half billion people who had nothing to do with these actions….

You might, because you don’t think about what you’re doing; you only project your own failings onto others, as this example illustrates. I don’t at all make such associations, and neither do the folks I know. We think more clearly than that.

The museum plans to proceed with the showing, and that’s all to the good.