Second Thoughts

The liberal party line, which I tend to toe, is that the "good" muslims have every right to proceed with building their mosque a few blocks from the World Trade Center site. 

After all, according to the new narrative, "scores" of muslims were also killed in the attacks and several were first responders.

I do not know if the aforementioned is necessarily true but the law of averages would hold out that some muslims were killed along with everybody else, so I will mark that as a given.

The question is why build a mosque so close? Does it spit in the eye of the victims and their families? Are we trying to shoehorn this positive image of the faith, along with a worldwide tour by the Iman subsidized by the state department, down the throats of the american public?

Is this a clash between the gods of private property fighting the gods of religious freedom? An attempt to create a level playing field where none may exist and in the most insensitive location conceivable?  Can liberals drop their huge sense of intellectual superiority for a second and engage in a moment of honest self examination?

I have been pretty adamant about the right to build the mosque. But in retrospect, I also think that we dismiss the feelings of the dissenters at our peril. Why build the mosque there in the first place? Is this some islamic remediation plan?  Is our American notion of fair play and equanimity so great that we simply can't conceive that a lot of this faith's devotees are simply vicious killers with a mile wide victim's complex?

I am sick about people drawing a moral equivalence between christians and muslims. It is rare that we get christian or jewish violence in this country, Eric Rudolph and Oklahoma City being the very rare exception.

Look at the Phillipines, or Indonesia, or Iraq and the history of fraternal violence since time immemorial in the arab lands. The internecine conflicts that have ravaged the kurds, bahai, druze, jews and the rest of the smaller tribes that revolve around the sunni/shia axis. The honor killings, the genital mutilation, the subjugation of women.

We are not all wired the same way. In civilization, the land where we try to live, you don't murder innocent people. You don't take down their planes, you don't throw the elderly off of cruise ships, you don't blow up their temples in South America. Or Bali. Yet the Islamic world gets a free pass, under the largely unsupported bet that there is some sanity present there, somewhere. Doesn't there have to be?

I think that the liberal intelligentsia needs to listen long and hard to the pain of their countrymen. They do not feel like we were attacked by individuals, they have cut through the horseshit and know that we were attacked by religious ideologues who dream of a global caliphate. They have a visceral grasp of a truism that a liberal can not accept, because it doesn't fit into his or her notion that all of god's creatures are destined to walk in peace in the Garden of Eden.

Our foes are bright. They tend to come from our own universities and the higher economic classes. They are remarkably well versed in using our own advanced technology against us. They can use us, feed off of us and then attempt to kill us without a hint of guilt, remorse or shame. Witness the recent Times Square bombing attempt. And we march forward, like saps, offering up the opposite cheek for them. Because we are so innately fair, you know?

On an ideal academic level, I can give you fifty reasons why the mosque should be built. Yet I also can foresee the day when we look at our country cousins and say, you know, they were right.