Here. Where is the money coming from?
Sarah Palin calls the building of this mosque an "unnecessary provocation." As opposed to what, a necessary provocation? But don't let Palin's infelicitous language distract you from the serious point she is making. It is indeed a provocation, and the Islamists are testing us to see how far they can go and to see how weak and supine we are. Will New Yorkers, sophisticated liberal fools that many of them are, put up with this abomination a couple of blocks away from where their fellow citizens died horrible deaths because of a terrorist attack fueled by Islamist ideology?
The fact that the building of this mosque will be perceived as a provocation by a majority is sufficient reason to block its construction. How can its construction do anything to improve relations between decent Muslims and the rest of us?
The first clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the "free exercise" of religion. True. But is Islam a religion? You will say, "of course!" But perhaps you should be a bit more thoughtful. Islam is a political ideology as much as it is a religion, and in this respect it is unlike Buddhism, or Christianity, or Judaism. I have never heard any Jew call for the destruction of any Islamic state. Muslims, however, routinely call for the destruction of the Jewish state. When I lived in Turkey in the mid-nineties I was warned that preaching Christianity there could get one thrown in prison -- not that I was about to do any such thing. And Turkey in those days was a relatively 'enlightened' country compared to the rest of the non-Jewish Middle East.
Muslims aren't very 'liberal,' are they? They are intolerant in their attitudes and their behavior. Now the touchstone of classical liberalism is toleration. Toleration is good, but it has limits. (See the posts in the category Toleration.) So why should we tolerate them when they work to undermine our way of life? The U. S. Constitution is not a suicide pact. We are under no obligation to tolerate the intolerant.
I said above that Islam is as much a political ideology as a religion. That is reflected in the fact that they have nothing like our church-state separation. And please note that church-state separation has a good foundation in the New Testament at Matthew 22: 21: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and to God the the things that are God's." Please point me to the Koranic verse that enshrines the same idea.
Apologists say that Islam is a religion of peace. Now 'peace' may be one of the meanings of Islam, but its dominant meaning is 'submission to the will of Allah as revealed to the propher Muhammad in the Koran.' Let us also not forget that Muhammad was a warrior. Was Jesus a warrior? Buddha? A religion founded by a warrior. An interesting concept, that. Somehow, I am more drawn to a religion whose founder says, "He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword."
So here is something to think about. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion. But to apply the Amendment, one must raise and answer the logically prior question, What is a religion? I rather doubt that the Founders had Islam in mind when they ensured the right to the free exercise of religion. So we need to ask the question whether Islam counts as a religion in a sufficiently robust sense of the term to justify affording it full First Amendment protection. To the extent that Muslims work to infiltrate and overturn our institutions and way of life, to the extent that they violate church-state separation, to the extent that they demand special privileges and refuse to assimilate, to that extent they remove themselves from any right to First Amendment protection.
Addendum and Corrigendum (7/22)
I made a mistake in the last paragraph that I will now correct. Although the sentence "I rather doubt that the Founders had Islam in mind when they ensured the right to the free exercise of religion" was true when I wrote it, expressing as it did a fact about my mental state, I now see that it is simply false that the Founders did not have Islam in mind. See The Founding Fathers and Islam. I thank Mark Whitten for the correction.
But I do not retract my main point, which is that we ought to give careful thought to the question whether, as I put it above, "Islam counts as a religion in a sufficiently robust sense of the term to justify affording it full First Amendment protection. " I am raising this as a question. So-called liberals, however, being politically correct and therefore opposed to truly open discussion, will no doubt haul out their list of abusive epithets: racist, xenophobe, Islamophobe . . . .
I should point out that 'Islamophobe,' a term employed by the benighted Karen Armstrong, the renegade nun, is a particularly silly expression that only a liberal could love. A phobia is an irrational fear. If you use the word in any other way you are misusing it. Fear of militant Islam is a rational fear. One would hope that Armstrong, a Brit, would have a better grip on the English language. These' -phobe' constructions are a dead giveaway that one is dealing with a PC liberal. Take 'homophobia.' Those who oppose homosexual practices neither fear it nor fear it irrationally. Some have arguments against it. In this case, then, the construction is doubly idiotic. As for 'xenophobe,' that is a real word of English, but our benighted liberal pals seem not to know what it means. It means 'irrational fear of foreigners.' It does not mean 'someone who combats liberal-left nonsense.' As one who has travelled the world and has lived for extended periods in Austria, Germany, and Turkey, I am hardly one who could be called a xenophobe. Someone who opposes the infiltration of his country by militant Muslims is not a xenophobe: his fear is rational and it is directed not at Muslims qua Muslims but at Muslims qua militant subversives.
Over at Gnosis and Noesis, Professor Richard Hennessey rather pedantically and uncharitably picks at my "Muslims aren't very 'liberal,' are they?" Do I mean that no Muslim is liberal? Of course not. A universal proposition can be refuted by a single counterexample. (And it is worth noting en passant that a necessary universal proposition can be refuted by a single merely possible counterexample.) Since it is obviously false that no Muslim is liberal, it is uncharitable to take my sentence as expressing that proposition.
One cannot assume that a sentence of the form Fs are Gs is always elliptical for a sentence of the form All Fs are Gs, or that a sentence of the form Fs are not Gs is always elliptical for a sentence of the form No Fs are Gs. For example, 'Old people go to bed early' would not naturally be taken to mean that all old people go to bed early, which is plainly false, but that most do, or that old people tend to go to be early, or something similar.
Professor Hennessey seems also to be ignoring the context of my remarks, which is the construction of mega-mosque near Ground Zero. That, I submit, is an outrageous provocation, a bit like building a Japanese Shinto shrine in close proximity to the U.S.S. Arizona. (See here.) I don't see how any rational person can fail to see that or fail to see that such a project cannot possibly bring together moderate Muslims and the rest of us. And so it is reasonable to interpret the project as an initiative on the part of militant Muslims to take advantage of our tolerance and naivete in order to spread their religion and culture whose values are antithetic both to the Judeo-Christian tradition and to our Enlightenment values.
So that is the context in which a sentence like "They are intolerant in their attitudes and their behavior" is to be read. The 'they' refers to militant Muslims: Muhammad Atta and the boys, their enablers and supporters, those who flog and stone to death adulterers, those who would would impose Sharia, the clitorectomists, the Muslim fathers who murder their own daughters for adopting Western ways. Our constitution forbids "cruel and unusual punishment." Perhaps Hennessey can point me to the passage in the Koran that does the same. And then there are Muslim taxicab drivers who refuse to pick up blind people with seeing eye dogs because of some lunatic Muslim aversion to dogs. Others won't transport a person who has an alcoholic beverage in a closed container. That sort of fanaticism has no place in America. I could go on, but the point is clear.
Just at the threat to the West in the 20th century was Communism, the threat to the West in the 21st is radical Islam. Both are totalitarian and internationalist. Both are extremely skillful in recruiting young fanatic followers. In one way the threat posed by militant Islam is far more dangerous than that posed by the Commies. The Commies, being atheists and materialists, had a good reason not to deploy their nukes. Muslims have no such reason. (And it seems clear that they will soon be getting nukes thanks to Obama the Appeaser.) They are eager to move on to their crude paradise wherein they will disport endlessly with black-eyed virgins and get to wallow in the sensuousness that is forbidden them here.
For more on this delightful topic, see my Islamism category.
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