I like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I like to believe that John Boehner is kind to animals and Donald Trump has moments of self-doubt and George Bush sometimes is sleepless with regret. I want to think that most priests like the gospel better than little boys and most cops want to serve and protect more than they want to gut-shoot you for questioning their authority. I want to imagine that most churches get more pleasure from Sunday fish-fries and collecting canned beans for homeless shelters than picketing gay funerals and promising eternal immolation for insufficient faith. And I want to accept that the vast majority of Muslims are more concerned with feeding their children and loving their spouses than achieving martyrdom and exterminating godless infidels.
But these guys aren’t making it easy. Just as inner city blacks are doing nothing to diminish racial profiling and police brutality by randomly assassinating cops, Islamic fundamentalists aren’t helping their cause by blowing away journalists with AK-47’s. How does one even begin to comprehend the senseless brutality of the attack on the French satirical newspaper, Charlie Hedbo, resulting in the deaths of a dozen reporters, editors, and cartoonists? How is it even remotely possible to make any sort of apologies for a religion that takes itself so seriously that it believes the only response to heretics and blasphemers is violent death? Christians mostly gave up on this level of insanity back in the Inquisition and the Salem witch trials, with rare exceptions like the murder of Dr. George Tiller. But the soldiers of Islam make a habit of this sort of behavior. The events of 9/11 are certainly the prime example, but let’s not overlook the smaller but just as significant instances, like the fatwa on author Salman Rushdie. The very fact that Islam has a word, “fatwa”, specifically defined as a death warrant on an individual insulting the prophet, tells you most of what you need to know.
Ok, look, I know that the perpetrators of these abominations are the lunatic fringe, that they don’t truly represent the other billion or so practitioners of Islam, and that it’s wrong to condemn an entire religion, ethnic group, philosophy, or belief system based on the acts of the outliers, but as I said above, they’re not making it easy. So when Bill Maher describes Islam as “the motherlode of bad ideas”, I’ve come to the point where my only response is, “I wish I’d said that first”. I just can’t be like the ignorant hordes of Americans who refuse to go to the polls because “all politicians are alike”. They aren’t. Republicans are assholes and stand on the wrong side of virtually every important issue I can think of. Democrats are assholes who have at least a few policies that actually benefit regular Americans. And so it is with Islam. One religion or another has been at the root of most of the wars and a huge chunk of the violent deaths and tortures and rapes and outrages over the last five thousand years or so. But some religions have more blood on their hands than others.
So it is with Islam in the 21st century. Add another dozen bodies on the stack after today’s bloodbath in France. I’m not advocating, nor would I ever advocate, any sort of vengeance, and I would continue to advocate tolerance of everyone’s beliefs, no matter how idiotic or onerous…just so long as those beliefs don’t interfere with vital functions…like someone’s heartbeat. But at the same time, every fear is not baseless. Fear of heights or tight spaces or airplanes or pit bulls have a sound foundation in reality, and even serve an evolutionary purpose. Staying away from thousand foot cliffs probably increases your chances for survival and reproduction. Islamophobia is ugly, but it is, at least today, not irrational.
BW
Kibbitz Corner 