Tolerance Surplus

From Family Security Matters:

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 ...

Read all of The Tolerance Surplus.