Bin Laden's Willing Idiots

This post from Josh Marshall is spot on and his point is one everyone concerned about Al Qaeda and its influence in the Muslim world should be shouting from the rooftops. Whether or not one likes the idea of the Cordoba House, whether or not one thinks every Muslim is out to get America and whether or not you'd prefer no more mosques built in the US until there's a cathedral at Mecca (just for you Newt), this controversy is going to be OBL's best recruiting tool since America invaded Iraq.

Those who oppose the drive to block the Cordoba House project in lower Manhattan have mainly focused on the 1st Amendment and American pluralism in their public statements. And that is, in many ways, as it should be because those arguments go to the core of who we are as Americans. What's gotten far less comment is an at least as potent pragmatic or perhaps better to say strategic argument. Quite simply, the furor of opposition to the Cordoba House project and the spasm of Islamophobia is the best recruiting tool that bin Laden and his imitators could possibly hope for. As Ali Soufan, a near legendary FBI counter-terrorism interrogator has just written in Forbes, in the wake of the anti-Mosque furor, bin Laden's 'next video script has just written itself.'