08.05.10
The Courage of Their Restrictions
I will not defend Islam in any way, so let me be frank (or maybe a Frank) about that from the start. Religious tolerance is an illusion of interpersonal diplomacy assented to by most and realized —in fact— by few. Leftists perceive of themselves as superior to ”Christianists” by virtue of their supposedly scientific convictions (e.g., certitude in the truth of Evolution but, then again, of anthropogenic global warming, too) and by virtue of a sounder grasp of the separation of church and state. But Leftists do not believe in religious tolerance any more than I do. They believe that the Constitution grants them a right from religion when it actually grants them the right of religion. As an atheist in the conventional sense, observing that distinction is what allows me to live as I do. But, insofar as these Leftists and their pseudo-liberal followers are Marxist at all, they can certainly have no genuine respect for the magic shows of the religious Right or the Catholic church. After all, those are the refuges of racist gun-owners and Bible-readers, not of the right-thinking “reality-based community” (as they used to refer to themselves, now with extra irony).
Anyway, when fools like Michael Bloomberg stand and declaim upon the moral superiority of allowing a goddamned mosque complex to be built a mere stroll away from the site of the atrocities of 11 September 2001 as the highest order of religious tolerance, it makes me wonder whether such moral exhibitionism is easier with the tacit but certain knowledge that the godforsaken thing will never be built.
No, it isn’t religious tolerance to allow an insult and then to pretend that it was never inflicted. One thing that Westerners need to know about the Muslim mind is that it turns on the spit of the provocative gesture. As an old friend once remarked, the capital of capitalism had its two front teeth knocked out —right down the street from where this thing is supposed to be planted. The attacks of 11 September 2001 were, in themselves, a deeply humiliating and destructive gesture of contempt and provocation. What self-respecting people would permit a second such gesture at such proximity to the first? It isn’t defensible as religious tolerance but explicable only as the rankest sort of self-hatred. Bloomberg and the other useful idiots of the Ummah need to shut up and sit down.
