The Tolerance Surplus
By Daniel Greenfield
SultankKnish.Blogspot.com
If you ask American, Israeli and European liberals and leftists what the key problem with Islam is, they will answer that there is a lack of tolerance. Not of course a lack of tolerance on the part of the throat-slitters, car burners, gang rapists, car bombers and hate preachers of Islam. On the contrary they will assert that there is a great tolerance deficit on the part of Western nations toward Islam.
In a rational political calculus, we take for
granted that the people blowing up synagogues,
stabbing their sisters to death for wearing jeans,
and kidnapping and beheading people they don't like,
are the ones suffering from a tolerance shortage.
But to a progressive brutal violence by a minority
is always a symptom that they are being oppressed,
rather than that they are the ones doing the
oppressing.
Since progressives tend to define minority status as
proof of oppression, violence is simply another way
that the minority responds to being oppressed. So if
a pair of well off middle class Muslim professionals
drive a car bomb over to a Scottish airport, clearly
they were reacting to a whole boatload or planeload
of oppression. Perhaps they were outraged over a
terrorist being downed by a drone, or saw the name
of Allah in an ice cream cone, or maybe it was all
the unveiled women. Those are just details in the
bigger picture. And the bigger picture is that every
First World nation is oppressive and racist. Muslim
violence is comeuppance or blowback, and the only
solution is to be more and more tolerant of Muslims.
Having classified Western nations as always being in
the wrong, and Muslims as being always in the right,
where reasonable people see a failure to fight
terrorism, progressives see a failure to fight
intolerance.
Given a mandate, conservative governments will try
to get to grips with violent Islamists. Liberal
governments will try to get to grips with anyone who
criticizes Islam. And naturally it becomes a good
deal more difficult to point out that Muslim
violence is a serious problem, when you've passed
laws prohibiting anyone from making any mention of
Muslims and violence in the same sentence.
This has the convenience of making it illegal to
point out the stupidity of progressive policymaking,
which is something that their fellow People's
Democratic regimes routinely do, at least until
everyone begins starving to death. Tens of thousands
dead in America, Europe, Israeli and Australia has
not done much to chip away at the insistence of
multiple governments that Islam is a religion of
peace. And even conservatives have adopted the
liberal mantra that Islamic violence is something
carried out by splinter groups, in response to not
being tolerated enough. The solution being more
cowbell, or more tolerance. But so far the "Hug them
until they love us" approach has not yielded any
dividends, except more bombs and bullet holes, and
bodies in morgues.
The progressive insistence on a black and white
worldview, and on locating the locus of evil within
their own society, has made it impossible for the
vast majority of them to even consider the
possibility that the violent, reactionary,
patriarchal and misogynist ideology they should be
fighting is Islam, not Christianity or Judaism.
But the problem with expecting people to think
outside the box of their beliefs, is that it's
simply easier for them not to. For progressives the
problem remains not Islam, but people who aren't
tolerant enough of Islam. Which creates a rush to
feed the "intolerant ones" to the Muslim Crocodile
of Peace, in the hopes of being eaten last.
So, Israeli leftists offer up the settlers as the
problem. Europe offers up Israel as the problem.
European leftists offer up European conservatives.
America offers up Europe, Israel and anyone it can
lay its long foreign policy mitts on. The Crocodile
of Peace grins, chews and demands more.
The shocking truth though is that the problem has
never been a tolerance deficit, but a tolerance
surplus. Tolerance is all very well good, but there
are some things that shouldn't be tolerated. Murder,
rape, car bombings, airplane hijackings and Imams
preaching all of the above under the green flag of
Islam top the list. The more the tolerance surplus
grows, the worse the violence becomes.
Urban policymakers found this out the hard way when
they tried to tackle crime by blaming society, not
the criminals. Prisons became revolving doors. Cops
became social workers. Crime became rampant. It took
a new generation of conservative politicians to pass
mandatory sentencing laws, victim rights bills,
restore the death penalty and stop coddling
criminals. And so the tolerance surplus was closed.
Until the tolerance surplus with Islam is closed,
the violence that Islam brings to our shores will
continue.