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There’s a giant controversy brewing this week. It’s so big that I had to push back my planned skewering of Gavin “Slow Learner” Newsom for his massive self-victimization gaffe involving Ted Cruz a couple of days ago (maybe I’ll get to it as an addendum to this column; read to the bottom and we’ll see).

It’s about dogs.

And Muslims.

And Randy Fine.

You’re probably already aware of who Fine is — he’s a congressman from Florida who tends to get himself into controversies from time to time. Fine is Jewish, and the antisemites absolutely can’t stand him, but he gives as good as he gets.

He’s a Republican. I notice there’s an element out there who really, really don’t like Jewish Republicans. I notice that an element of that element is often Jewish Democrats, who are the majority of Jewish folks. And they’ll treat Jewish Republicans a little like black Democrats treat black conservatives — especially if the heterodox offenders get too loud.

Which Fine does.

We’ve got a Spectacle Podcast segment on the latest controversy Fine got himself into — a Fine mess, you might say — which is up today. But more has happened since Melissa and I recorded that segment. So here’s the whole thing.

It starts off with the fact that New York City is run by utter buffoons who are capable of absolutely nothing in the way of providing city services. Among those would be snow removal; when that big winter storm blew across the country a couple of weeks ago, snow piled up everywhere. And New Yorkers being New Yorkers, when the snow piled up, a lot of the city’s dog owners just let their canines poop in the various snow piles on the sidewalks. Apparently (I’m from Louisiana; we get snow in Baton Rouge once every four or five years and if it stays on the ground more than a day we think it’s the beginning of a new Ice Age, so I’m ignorant of these practicalities), it’s a royal pain to do the poop-bag pickup routine in the snow.

That led to this, when the snow melted:

Although:

And because this is New York we’re talking about, the idea of addressing this outside of politics and Big Government is long gone. It’s a crisis, and it must be addressed by the nanny state in some retributive and correctional way.

Which led to a moronic statement by a terrible human being. Nerdeen Kiswani is one of the Palestinian activists who have roiled New York’s universities with anti-Israeli riots, and she’s apparently influential within the circles of the new Muslim mayor of the city, Zohran Mamdani. Kiswani decided that rather than address the real problem, which is the stunningly poor performance of the city’s sanitation department in getting the snow, and its embedded filth, off the sidewalks in a timely manner, she’d attack the dog-owning infidels instead with something she later asserted was a joke.

Tweet discussing dogs and indoor pets in Islam.

And to be fair, this almost certainly was a joke. And as jokes go, not a terrible one.

Except Nerdeen Kiswani doesn’t get much benefit of the doubt. This is somebody whose organization, Within Our Lifetime, is partially responsible for violent demonstrations that left Jewish college students trapped in buildings. They don’t believe in a two-state solution between the Israelis and the Palestinians; they want to literally drive the Jews into the Mediterranean (which is what From The River To The Sea means). This is a genocidal maniac with an openly Islamicist ideological bent, and you can’t escape this obvious fact just by scrolling through her X account.

That post rankled, not just because of its author but because in Europe there is a growing problem of dog owners being harassed by aggressive Muslims who think it’s haram for people to keep dogs as pets. Kiswani’s joke is a reference to the fact that the more sharia law creeps into a society, the more contentious and inconvenient it’s going to be for dog owners in that society.

I can attest to this myself. Years ago, I had a neighbor who was Egyptian, and he was outright hostile not just to my dog but to the other dog owners as well. So much so that after he threatened to kill a beagle puppy who’d gotten out and made his way into the Egyptian’s yard, the police were called, and, I’m told, he commenced much caterwauling over the level of offense the dog’s presence gave to his religious sensibilities.

He got off with a warning. He also didn’t last long in the neighborhood.

And this is where Fine comes in:

And boy, did he come in. Especially when the various luminaries of a certain political party were aghast at his suggestion:

He even fended off Dan Goldman, who decided to blame Fine and his stance on dogs for antisemitism in America:

And then he got a little more serious about why this was more than just a hubbub about a dumb joke…

As I said, there seems to be a special amount of opprobrium leveled at this Jewish Republican congressman by Jewish Democrats.

First Goldman and then this guy, for example:

What Randy Fine is doing is playing the Democrats’ politics right back at them. What he did to Nerdeen Kiswani was performative, in bad faith, and over the top, certainly — but performative, in bad faith, and over the top is the sum total of what Democrats have to offer the public today.

If every single left-wing activist can accuse Donald Trump as a pedophile based on obvious lies — if there was proof of this in the Epstein files they’ve had more than a decade to air it when it would have done them good politically and yet it wasn’t done, the vast majority of the malfeasors outed in those files are Democrats, and we’ve now got proof that as far back as 2006 Trump had called the police on Epstein and fed them information about his activities, AND if you voted for Joe Biden, you are utterly disqualified from feigning outrage about child molestation, as it obviously isn’t a dealbreaker for you — then Randy Fine can raise Muslim distaste for dogs as a good reason to disfavor the spread of Islam.

Because when Fine says he’d rather have dogs than Muslims, it’s not a secret what he’s talking about.

He’s talking about a choice between an America where everybody is perfectly free to have a furry canine providing joy and companionship in their household — though we’d all agree that picking up after your pooch when taking him for a walk isn’t too much to ask — or an America where the sensibilities of a tiny minority of aggressive Muslims who are bent on imposing their will on the rest of us begin rapidly impeding the rights of dog owners.

Which has already happened in countries not that different from ours.

Fine is one of several members of Congress who are doing more than just starting fires on X. He’s part of the anti-sharia caucus in the House, which the foreign-influence group CAIR, which is the Sinn Fein to Hamas’ Irish Republican Army, has now called a hate group:

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today announced the designation of the House of Representative’s so-called “Sharia-Free America Caucus” as an anti-Muslim hate group. This is the first time in CAIR’s 32-year history that the organization has designated a congressional caucus as an extremist organization.

In the designation published today, CAIR noted that the caucus is advancing legislation that, if enacted, would effectively render the practice of Islam illegal in the United States. CAIR also noted that the caucus’ most prominent member, Rep. Randy Fine, has expressed support for the destruction of all “mainstream Muslims” and recently compared Muslims unfavorably to dogs. The caucus has 40 members from 19 states, with Texas (7), Florida (6), and Arizona (3) leading in representation. 

“Congressmen Randy Fine, Chip Roy, Keith Self, and other members of this so-called caucus have appointed themselves as religious police with the power to tell Americans how to worship,” said CAIR Research and Advocacy Director Corey Saylor.  “These legislators have put cancel culture on steroids, applying it to an entire faith. The bigoted rhetoric used by this caucus resembles the hatred that anti-Catholic politicians once unleashed against Irish Americans.

Saylor added, “Islam is an American faith, present for over 250 years. No one who wrote the Constitution or enforced it since has empowered these legislators to pick which religions get to exist in America.”

Islam is such an American faith that Thomas Jefferson obtained a copy of the Qu’ran and read it, and then declared America’s first foreign war against the Barbary pirates.

You don’t have to like Randy Fine. He can be a heavy lift at times.

But he is correct that this is a very lopsided issue. And that raising it as a fundamental difference between Republicans and Democrats, when not a single Democrat has come out in favor of limiting sharia’s reach in America, for the sake of the dogs if not the people, is a quite sane thing to do.

Even if it results in his being pilloried as a bigot.

Rejecting bad ideas is not bigotry. They’d like you to believe otherwise, of course. It’s imperative for them — all they have is bad ideas.

I know, I know. I didn’t get to Newsom. Check back tomorrow and we’ll do that.

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