Sunday, August 15, 2010
[The following is a guest post by Ann Green.]
The word "tolerance" is being (over)used to justify the building of a mosque at Ground Zero as a ploy to make Americans -- among the most tolerant people on earth -- feel guilty about their disgust with this abomination. The purpose of the Obama Surrender Mosque is obvious to anyone with the intelligence to do a bit of research, and that is to celebrate a bloody victory, just as with the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the Grand Mosque in Constantinople and many more. The victory was the murder of almost 3000 people on September 11, 2001 and a sea change in Americans' sense of security and of the world they inhabit.
After a short burst of patriotism in the fall of 2001, there also came a huge advance in the willingness of members of the ruling class -- the press, the left, the elite, academia, many in government, and the glitterati, whether by ignorance, cowardice or a sense of superiority to us yokels, to enable the steady creep of sharia and dhimmetude. Take a good look at the guest list at the Ramadan bash at which our president scolded us for not being "tolerant" enough to allow a symbol of Islamist hatred of everything we hold dear to be built on the graves of those they murdered. The Muslim Brotherhood is more than tolerated in the White House.
As for the now exhausted and abused word "tolerance," I offer the words of William Bennett from The Death of Outrage
Tolerance rightly understood serves an important public purpose. In the classical liberal understanding, it means according respect to the beliefs and practices of others, and learning to live peacefully and civilly with one another despite deep differences. Tolerance allows for the "free trade in Ideas" (in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's phrase), which is the best way to ensure that the right beliefs will emerge. It assumes that all reasoned opinions will get a fair hearing, even when what is said may not be popular. Tolerance can serve as an antidote to the destructive passions inflamed by (among other things) misguided religious beliefs. So tolerance is a great social good, which is precisely why it needs to be rescued from the reckless attempt to redefine it. For it is a social good only up to a point, and only when its meaning is not massively disfigured. But tolerance can be a genuinely harmful force when it becomes a euphemism for moral exhaustion and a rigid or indifferent neutrality in response to very great moral issue -- when, in G.K. Chesterton's phrase, it becomes the virtue of people who do not believe in anything. For that paves the road to injustice.
I support the right for this mosque to be built on any private property in America ... and our duty to critique its funding source, motivation, and aims.
Rejecting Islam is a Defense of Religious Freedom.
When tolerance is a one way street it leads to cultural suicide. --- Col Allen West
The more this project is argued as a matter of religious tolerance, the more off-topic we find ourselves. This is a political shrine that Cordoba is trying to set up.
When we cite Islam as political, Islamics claim we're going after religious Muslims. Should we focus on the integrity of the religious aspect, they reply with "cultural" (Which one? Duh?).
Even as early as the 60's, The Roman Catholic Church in Vatican II cited, but not countered: “with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself”. This followed the Churches citing the Abrahamic tradition.
I find it essential to discuss this as purely a political vehicle of political Islam. The religious interpretation is the straw-man argument.