Christians Sue To Prevent Muslims From Erecting Mosque

Brown on brown -- I'm not sure what my rooting interest is here, exactly. The brown Christians or the brown Muslims? Talk about a Hobbesian choice.

Whoever wins, I just hope the victors offer me a quick death.

In all seriousness, I suppose the Christians here are behaving badly. Muslims have the right to practice their religion, the same as anyone else.

But.

Even putting aside terrorism, and fairly widespread terrorist sympathetics -- which is, you know, kind of hard to put aside -- Muslims seem to be exacerbating tensions more than previous immigrant/minority communities have. Whereas previous immigrant/minority groups have sought to accomodate themselves with the prevailing culture -- or, at least, so it seems to me -- Muslims are particularly aggressive in pushing for the prevailing culture to accomodate itself with Islam.

I don't know of many other religions that force one into taking some kind of political stance so frequently. The live-and-let-live ethic -- the glue that holds together a pluralistic society -- becomes difficult when a minority culture so frequently requests or demands the majority culture to adapt to better suit it.

Sort of embematic of this is the Imam's statement in that video that the mosque will serve the purpose of "creating a better understanding" of Islam. I think I speak on behalf of approximately 95% of the population when I say we are tired of "understanding" Islam, and would very much like to treat Islam the same as any other religion we do not practice, that is, with an attitude of benign ignorance and benign irregard.

We don't care. Please allow us to go on not caring. True tolerance of an alien religion is usually marked by simply not caring about it either way.

Oh, and PS, not every jihadist bombing should be taken as an opportunity to lecture the rest of us about the Islamic religion. To be honest, I think that's rather the worst conceivable time to go about proselytizing on behalf of the faith that animates so many terrorists.

As I've said before, my first thought after hearing a CAIR official instruct me that I must go out of my way to learn more about Islam is "Good God, how many did they kill this time?"

Let me just suggest that a better time to "educate" Americans about Islam would be, say, after Muslims do something charitable or otherwise positive. That would probably be a scenario in which Americans are more receptive to learning about Islam, no? (It would also help if this charitable effort was in fact pure charity -- feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, etc. -- and not blatantly linked to spreading/promoting political Islam, as is so often the case with Islamic "charity.")

In other words, we'd like to go back to enjoying every American's penumbraic right to be left the hell alone. Muslims can increase their acceptance and tolerance not by "educating" Americans about their religion, but allowing the rest of us to go back to a 9/10 sort of thinking about Islam, which is to say, not thinking about it terribly much at all.

Thanks to Ari Goes Down.

posted by Ace at 05:15 PM

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