The New House Homeland Security Committee Chair Already Has the Left Enraged

 Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) has been tapped as the new chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security, and even though the new Congress has barely gotten started, he already has the censorious Left up in arms. Newsweek reported last Monday that Trump nominated Green to be Secretary of the Army, but “he ended up withdrawing his nomination from consideration for the role in 2017 after coming under fire for past comments about members of the LGBTQ community, particularly transgender people.” It seems that Green said: “If you poll the psychiatrists, they’re going to tell you transgender is a disease.” Horror of horrors! Everyone can see that men who think they’re women and vice versa are as sane and well-adjusted as the day is long. And now it has come to light that Green has violated Leftist pieties in another way as well: he has a history of making “anti-Muslim comments.”

The HuffPo sounded the alarm on this Thursday, doing its level best to portray Green as a racist, redneck yahoo. HuffPo claimed that Green, whom it identified as “a physician, Iraq War veteran and former GOP state senator,” that is, just the sort of person Leftists abhor, once said “that Iraqis smelled like ‘curry mixed with sweat.’” Sabina Mohyuddin of the American Muslim Advisory Council fumed: “If you hold stereotypes about communities, how can you effectively move on issues that are really nuanced and require a greater understanding of the issues?”

However, Rachel Del Guidice, Green’s communications director, shot back that “some media outlets cut and spliced” what Green said, and added: “Rep. Green has not, and will not ever, force his religion on anyone. He believes that every American has a right to defend their country. Having served three tours of duty overseas during the War on Terror, Rep. Green acted as a steadfast protector of everyone in this nation. Vilifying people of faith because they don’t agree with progressive policies is against America’s founding principles — the very principles he fought to protect.”

The HuffPo, however, wasn’t done. It claimed also that Green “once said he didn’t want students in Tennessee to learn about Islam.” This came up at a Tea Party meeting in 2016, “when an audience member read a passage from a textbook that correctly stated that Muslims believe in all the prophets in the Old and New Testament,” and Green replied, “When you start teaching the pillars of Islam … we will not tolerate that in this state.” According to the HuffPo, Green went on to say that “if students did have to learn about Islam…they should only learn ‘the history of the Ottoman Empire’ and ‘the assault of Islam out into the Levant and North Africa and into Constantinople.’”

You see? He’s ignorant as well as racist! And so Sumayyah Waheed of Muslim Advocates, which the HuffPo says is a “national civil rights group based in Washington, D.C.,” declared: “Rep. Green’s well-documented history of hate speech against Muslims, LGBTQ people, and immigrants made him unfit to be Secretary of the Army, and that history makes him unfit to chair the House Homeland Security Committee. As chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, Mark Green is a threat to Muslims ― especially to those that live at the intersections of the communities he has gleefully attacked for political gain.”

Related: Lefty Rag Says ‘Islamophobia’ Is Worse Than Ever, So Why Is It So Hard to Find Any?

But the HuffPo, true to form, doesn’t bother to tell you that what Green was actually talking about was his opposition to Islamic proselytizing and indoctrination in public schools, which has been abundantly documented. Green was pushing back against the whitewashed version of Islam that is taught in all too many public school textbooks around the country, but of course the HuffPo doesn’t give you even a hint that there was ever a controversy over the way Islam was taught in public school textbooks.

The only thing that could legitimately be seen as offensive is his alleged statement that Iraqis smelled like “curry mixed with sweat,” although to jump from there to the claim that he is a “threat to Muslims” is beyond ridiculous. It’s certainly impolite, at the very least, to say it, but I’m sure Americans smell like all sorts of strange things to non-Americans, too, and HuffPo is making a big deal out of a pungent quip in order to try to defame and destroy Green.

This is, of course, how the “Islamophobia” industry always operates: quotes without context given the worse possible spin, no explanation or rebuttal allowed, and demonstrably true statements presented as not only false, but offensive. These gutter tactics have worked wonderfully well for the Left in the past, but people are beginning to wake up. Green may not lose his chairmanship over these remarks; if he doesn’t, that may be an indication that the new House leadership really does have some spine.