Jack knew he wasn’t doing his career any favors by compounding that statement with reports that the mosque was being funded by a Saudi business consortium he believed had ties to a Wahhabi jihadist organization called the Hand of Allah. Several mosques funded by this same group had been built in London and throughout the United Kingdom, and Jack was convinced they were superficially mosques and fundamentally training facilities for Islamofascist sleeper agents. In the days that followed his initial remarks, Jack regularly took Prime Minister Griffiths to task for allowing these facilities to be built.
The last act of the drama occurred just ten days after it started, when he held a Truth Tellers panel debate on the topic, bringing in participants from across the political spectrum. The debate was civil until Jack asked a simple rhetorical question:
“How would you feel if Muslim extremists got hold of a nuclear weapon?”
There was a momentary chill in the air, then one of the panelists-a supercilious professor of legal studies named Aldrich-said, “You’re assuming that’s even likely.”
“You’re naive if you think it isn’t,” Jack told him. “And let’s not forget what Abd al-Rahman al-Rashid told us. That while it’s true that not all Muslims are terrorists, the majority of terrorists are Muslim.”
“All right, but considering there are approximately one billion Muslims in the world, how exactly do you propose to stop them?”
“When you factor in the laissez-faire attitude of much of our country,” Jack said, “the odds against us aren’t good. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that just ten percent of those one billion Muslims are fanatic haters who would kill all of us at the blink of an eye. A matter of us versus them.”
“And?”
“If it came down to it, would you rather see a hundred million of us killed, or kill a hundred million Muslims?”
Murmurs rose from the panel and Aldrich just stared at him with a self-satisfied grin. Within hours, a smear campaign was carefully orchestrated by a radical watchdog group called Media Wire, which spared no effort to grind Jack’s reputation into the dust beneath its jackbooted heel.