Muslims and the Left's Death by Tolerance
Aside from the three Muslim men who perpetrated the deadliest terror attack in France since 1961, there are some other individuals complicit in the Wednesday massacre. They have names such as Hollande, Merkel, Löfven and Obama. Their connection to the act will largely go unnoticed and unapprehended -- and they likely will never be held to account.
In the wake of the brutality at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, socialist French president Francois Hollande called for tolerance.
I call for intolerance.
The difference between us isn’t that, relatively speaking, I lack the quality. I have a lot of practice exercising tolerance because I have far more to tolerate — not the least of which is the political power and policies of people such as Hollande, Merkel, Löfven and Obama. The real difference is that I actually know what tolerance means.
Tolerance always implies a perceived negative. You wouldn’t have to tolerate a delectable meal or a beautiful car; you relish those things. But you would have to tolerate a stubborn cold, a painful rash or foul weather. So Tolerance Lesson One for Leftists:
If you say you’re tolerant of Muslims, it implies that you consider them a negative.
If you don’t — if instead you like them or just view them neutrally — tolerance doesn’t enter the equation.
Of course, not everything we perceive as negative actually is so. We may dislike broccoli, but tolerate it in order to avoid offending a host or for health reasons. In such cases, when the perceived negative is not objectively negative and there are good reasons to put up with it, tolerance can be a great exercise of virtue.
It also can be virtuous when dealing with an objective negative (ON), such as unjust imprisonment or a terminal illness, that you cannot remedy. Soldiering on nobly in such situations often builds great character and provides inspiration for others.
But what of when at issue is an ON that can be remedied? This brings us to Tolerance Lesson Two for Leftists:
The only virtue in this case lies in wiping the negative out.
Unlike when bearing up nobly in the face intractable ONs, tolerating those that could be eliminated renders one guilty of a failure of omission; it is dereliction of moral duty. An example would be a man who could prevent someone from habitually invading his home and endangering his family, but who fails to do so out of neglect, cowardice or in deference to twisted ideology. (This could, by the way, be viewed as a microcosm of something that perhaps, just maybe, we might want to start having an honest national discussion about.) Another example was when the Spaniards encountered the bloody-altar Aztecs in 16th-century Mexico; they didn’t say “Hey, tearing the hearts out of thousands of innocents while they’re still alive and hanging their body parts in the marketplace isn’t our thing, but we’re good multiculturalists and don’t impose values.” They were intolerant — and, thankfully, an intolerable Hades-born “religion” was vanquished.
Also note that since being neglectful, a coward or a twisted ideologue is an ON itself, it generally doesn’t engender respect. Remember that allowing the continued existence of remediable ONs sometimes amounts to people letting themselves be used as doormats. (People wipe their feet on doormats.) Of course, other times an individual won’t perceive the ON as a negative; noteworthy here is that ingested poison will kill you whether you recognize it as poison or not.
Many interesting lessons on tolerance could be learned from the Muslim world. Note that when pious Muslims perceive something as negative (this isn’t to imply that all their perceptions are accurate), they often stop at nothing to wipe it out. Just consider the tens of thousands of non-Muslims killed and thousands of churches burned by jihadists during the last decade, the enforcement of Sharia law, and the Muslim-conquered parts of European cities euphemistically known as no-go zones.
The leftist response to this Islamic chauvinism is well exemplified by the reaction to the 2014 “Trojan horse scandal,” involving the supplanting of Western curricula by Islamist doctrine in seven London schools. Critiquing one offending institution, British officials noted that pupils didn’t “learn about different faiths and cultures” and, critiquing another — and this is the money line — said that students “understanding of…mutual respect and tolerance…is underdeveloped.” “Ah, yes, these Muslims just need to be tolerant like us,” say the good leftists.
Talk about being dimmer than a 15-watt bulb in a North Korean night.
Since these Muslims view other faiths and cultures as inferior to their own, as negatives, they would have to be tolerant of them — if they didn’t think they could vanquish them. But because they’re making great headway on that front, they have no need to be tolerant. You needn’t tolerate what you can terminate.
And they’re really just taking a leaf out of the left’s book. How tolerant are liberals, really? Remember again, the only test of tolerance is how well you abide things you dislike. And no one is more vicious in destroying perceived negatives than leftists. Just ask the people who’ve lost jobs for defending marriage or criticizing homosexual behavior, such as former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich or ex-Atlanta fire chief Kelvin Cochran. Ask those punished under hate-speech laws or bitten by speech codes on college campuses. Ask the bakers and other Christian businessmen put out of business for refusing to be party to homosexual “weddings.” The reality is that when leftists hate something — and it is all emotion with them — they have no mercy. (Mind you, this is one reason liberals accuse conservatives of being “haters”; it’s projection. Governed by emotion, they only oppose what they despise, so they naturally view opposition as synonymous with hatred.)
So leftists’ calls for tolerance amount to a request that Muslims and others practice what leftists themselves merely preach. But if you consider their working definition of the word — confusing tolerance with affinity or indifference — there is an irony here: these secular fundamentalists have the same message the Islamic fundamentalists do:
Believe what we believe.
Like what we like.
Hate what we hate.
Become one with our collective.
And we can live in peace.
Secular and Islamic fundamentalists have something else in common. Both groups have many perceived negatives that aren’t actually objectively negative, so they try to wipe out the wrong things. Thus do they work together to destroy Christianity and Western civilization. And this is why I named as co-conspirators in the Paris attack Francois Hollande, Angela Merkel, Stefan Löfven and Barack Obama. But this brings me to my last Tolerance Lesson for Leftists, and I direct my words now specifically to leftists: There’s something else pious Muslims perceive as a negative, and it also happens to be something that is an objective negative.
You.
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