“Only Bigots Oppose the Mosque!” (And Patriots)
"Where are the
Republican leaders who will reject pandering and
prejudice?" wailed
The Washington Post in its most recent editorial in support of
Cordoba House mosque near Ground Zero.
Like the controversy over the
mosque, the Post
editorial reveals the two Americas we have become,
uncomprehending of and hostile to each other, even
as we drift apart.
To the
Post,
opposition boils down to three arguments, all of them
"objectionable." The first is a wrong-headed belief
"that the
terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center
and killed almost 3,000 people there in 2001 really did
represent Islam."
The second is that, as
many families of 9/11 victims associate the
terrorists with Islam, to build a mosque near the scene
of the massacre would be sacrilegious and wounding.
The third is cynical politics. As
two-in-three Americans oppose the mosque, siding with
them and savaging supporters of Cordoba House is to run
unconscionably with the crowd.
None of these arguments is
acceptable, says the
Post, for they
represent misunderstanding, prejudice or
"repugnant"
politics.
What the
Post is saying
is that opponents of the mosque are all either bigoted
ignoramuses or political panderers.
Quite a statement, when a
Time poll
finds that 61 percent of Americans oppose the mosque
and 70 percent believe that to build it near Ground Zero
would defile hallowed ground.
"(T)he right
response to misunderstanding and prejudice," said
the Post,
"is education, not appeasement."
In short, rather than yield to
ignorance, bigotry and demagoguery, the
Post will
undertake to tutor us on how to think correctly.
This is a pure extract of liberal
ideology. Few better examples of
faculty-lounge obtuseness to the feelings of the
people among whom they live are to be found. Yet, the
editorial has a point.
For, in
Webster`s, there are several definitions of
"prejudice."
The most pejorative one is
"an irrational attitude of hostility directed against an individual, a
group, a race."
Another definition, however, is
simply a
"preconceived judgment or opinion."
It is this idea of prejudice that
Edmund Burke endorsed:
"Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general
prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the
latent wisdom
which prevails in them.
If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail,
they think it
most wise to continue the prejudice,
with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of
prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason."
"Naked reason,"
pure rationalism, permeates the
Post editorial, which ignores that vast realm of sentiments, such as
patriotism and love, that reside in the terrain between
thought and feeling.
"The heart has
reasons that the mind knows not," said
Pascal.
True conservatives are people of
the heart who use the weapons of the mind to defend the
things of the heart.
Why would Americans be reflexively
skeptical and wary of Islam?
We were born a Christian nation, an
extension of Christendom. For most of us, it is part of
our DNA. And for a thousand years, our ancestors fought
a
war of civilizations with Islam.
In the name of Islam, Muslim
fanatics massacred 3,000 of us. In our media, the names
commonly associated with Islam are al-Qaida, Hamas,
Hezbollah,
Moqtada al-Sadr,
Ahmadinejad,
Ayatollah Khomeini, Osama bin Laden and the
Taliban.
What are sins in Christianity—adultery and homosexuality—are
capital crimes in Islamic countries. From the Copts in
Egypt to the
Chaldeans of Iraq,
Christians are persecuted and
purged in the Middle East. Few remain in the old
Christian towns of Jerusalem, Nazareth and Bethlehem.
Christian missionaries in Islamic countries risk
stonings and beheading. Muslims are attacking
Christians in Nigeria, Sudan, the Caucasus, Palestine,
Iraq, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Are there scores of thousands of
patriotic American Muslims, hundreds of millions of
decent, peace-loving Muslims around the world?
Undeniably true.
Yet one would have to be obtuse not
to understand that a Western nation that opens its doors
to mass migration from the Islamic world is
taking a grave risk with its unity and identity.
An apprehension about that is what
Burke called the
"latent wisdom" of a people.
This is not an argument for war
with Islam, but for
recognition that
"East is East and West is West" and America
cannot absorb and assimilate all the creeds of mankind
without ceasing to be who we are.
Prejudice is prejudgment. And if
prejudgment is rooted in the history and traditions of a
people, and what life has taught us, it is a shield that
protects. Only a fool would reject the inherited wisdom
of his kind because it fails to comport with the
ideology of the moment.
"Prejudice,"
wrote Burke, "is
of ready application in the emergency; it previously
engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and
virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the
moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled and unresolved."
Without prejudice, we are
tabula rasa, blank slates, upon which any ideology may be written,
including what
James
Burnham called the
ideology of Western suicide—liberalism.
COPYRIGHT
CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Patrick J. Buchanan
needs
no introduction to
VDARE.COM readers; his book State
of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and
Conquest of America
be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book
is Churchill,
Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How
Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost
the World,
reviewed
here by
Paul Craig Roberts.
