Tolerance and Timing
Either NPR or my local NPR station decided to run a story this morning on some Muslim woman who wanted to correct misunderstandings about her religion and feared that her sons would face discrimination in school. I turned it off. I was in no mood to hear about how Islam was a religion of peace, blah, blah, blah. It's not that I was without sympathy, because American Muslims, with very few exceptions, have proven to be good citizens. But there is the fundamental problem that hundreds of thousands of her co-coreligionists in other countries were currently attacking, burning and murdering in the name of that religion for transcendentally stupid reasons.
Tolerance cannot be a one way street, and if Muslims in much of the world are behaving badly, Muslims everywhere are going to be suspect at best. Some primitive part of my brain thought "disrespect, you call that disrespect? I'll show you disrespect", followed by turning Mecca into a large plain of radioactive glass. Oh my gosh - I seem to be thinking like a Romney voter.
To be sure, the grievances of Arabs are only incidentally related to religion, but they have really been leading with stupidity here.
Tolerance cannot be a one way street, and if Muslims in much of the world are behaving badly, Muslims everywhere are going to be suspect at best. Some primitive part of my brain thought "disrespect, you call that disrespect? I'll show you disrespect", followed by turning Mecca into a large plain of radioactive glass. Oh my gosh - I seem to be thinking like a Romney voter.
To be sure, the grievances of Arabs are only incidentally related to religion, but they have really been leading with stupidity here.
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