PrintSeptember 8, 2010
Liberal Preachiness Takes a Name: Bloomberg Syndrome
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants Americans to embrace the Ground Zero Mosque as a step toward "building an interfaith community." The Mayor believes that the mosque would "bring [New York] City even closer together and help repudiate the false and repugnant idea that the attacks of 9/11 were in any way consistent with Islam."
In the weeks since the remarks, liberals have staged a gaudy performance. Let's take a look, beginning with Bloomberg's sermonizing.
No amount of hand-waving can erase truths that signal possible treachery in the mosque backers' objectives. The project's leader, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, maintains Muslim Brotherhood associates who support radical Islam's literal interpretation of the Koran. Islamists carried out the 9/11 attacks based on the literal interpretation. As David Horowitz observes, members of "virtually all the mosques in America" remain silent on the "genocidal intentions" of Islamists who demand "a second Holocaust." And finally, Bloomberg would surely recoil from the "repugnant idea" that American Muslims aren't saying much to condemn 1,400 years of religious intolerance. The Mayor's belief in the current viability of an "interfaith community" involving Islam is naïve at best.
An elitist brand of naïveté further leads Bloomberg to pretend that loved ones and neighbors of 9/11 murder victims would see the mosque as inspiration to draw "closer together" with worshipers in the religion whose radicals committed the murders. The line of reasoning showcases a dangerously juvenile aspect of the liberal mentality that drives the world's Bloombergs to preach tolerance toward humanity's darkest souls.
Bloomberg kicks his lecturing up a notch by declaring that mosque critics "ought to be ashamed of themselves." Despite having publicly raised the mosque issue in the first place, the Mayor adds, "It is a shame that we even have to talk about this." The masses, suitably shamed, are expected to listen as sages provide enlightenment.
And Bloomberg keeps talking. The Mayor accuses mosque critics of merely wanting "to stir up things" in order to get votes for equally insincere conservative politicians. As Barack Obama is also fond of doing, Bloomberg has essentially implied that only liberals can be trusted to be honest.
Yet sanctimony, not honesty, dominates the pronouncements made by liberals who followed Bloomberg's lead.
The New York Times editorial writers scold New Yorkers for acting on "people's worst instincts." Apparently, by exercising judgment instead of blindly accepting the purity of the mosque backers' motives, New Yorkers missed "a great chance to lead by example." The Times argument boils down to a plea for tolerance based on hope. Events in America since January 20, 2009 don't bode well for the approach.
Our head hope-pusher, Barack Obama, counsels us, "This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable." Only nine years after religious totalitarians murdered thousands on our soil, the president wants us to veil our souls in "religious freedom" and welcome a dubious reminder being built near the site of the killings. Obama's tortured logic argues for tolerance of vulgar intolerance.
Religion professor Stephen Prothero praises Bloomberg for taking "the road less traveled," the political "high road." But the Mayor's road makes a U-turn to the Dark Ages. Like Obama and Bloomberg, Prothero ignores the sound reasoning of people who point out the Ground Zero Mosque's sinister symbolism. The mosque's Spanish namesake, Cordoba, was built atop the tenth-century ruins of a Christian church destroyed during the Muslim conquest. Also, by assigning nobility to Bloomberg's posturing, Prothero exhibits a textbook blend of liberal hero-worship and gullibility.
An otherworldly perspective comes from columnist Mike Barnicle, who says that critics of the mosque are "not really thinking about the idealistic trek, they're thinking about their own reality. And their own reality is that we were attacked on September 11." In contrast to primitives who trudge through the real world, enlightened liberals take "the idealistic trek" through an imaginary realm where evil people don't do the things that evil people do.
In a vitriol-laced rant, Time's Joe Klein attributes Ground Zero Mosque opposition to a "small-town white America" anxious over "South Asians ... moving in and running the local motel" or "Latinos ... moving into these areas" or fears that "their grandchildren are coming out as gay[.]" Whites, it seems, just want "ethnic purity." The left's self-anointed elites see humanity as a planet of simpletons requiring guidance by gurus. To liberals, Klein's track record of issuing mean-spirited verdicts makes the man a spotlight on the ignorance and bigotry of the simpletons.
Pompous moralists like Bloomberg, Obama, and Klein advocate tolerance toward everyone except traditionalists, who refuse to credit all ideas with equal validity and all cultures with equal value. The traditionalist thought process is seen as wrong -- not in the absolute sense, because to the liberal, there is no absolute wrong. Traditionalists are wrong by virtue of disagreeing with liberals, who are right -- not in the absolute sense, because there is no absolute right. Liberals are right just because.
In similar empty-headed fashion, liberals used a collective amorality to excuse immorality. Copycatting is the preferred modus operandi. Barack Obama initially remained silent on the Ground Zero Mosque, but he couldn't resist joining the calls to tolerance. Being one with the chorus became more important than leaving issues which are "appropriately debated at the local level" to the "local community to decide," as White House Press Secretary Gibbs claimed Obama would do.
Liberals don't leave morals to locals. And sadly for America, the liberal echo chamber houses nothing resembling traditional morals. Moral paralysis passes for wisdom. Shrewd-sounding dictums earn stroking.
The echo chamber hubbub surrounding the Ground Zero Mosque has at times grown deafening. Preachers preach tolerance while ridiculing anyone who observes that the 9/11 attacks fell in line with more than a millennium of history. The preachers advise kindness while viciously demonizing people who argue that a mosque intentionally located near the site of the deadliest attack is meant as a shrine to the most immoral act imaginable -- mass murder.
A writer, physicist, and former high tech executive, Chuck Rogér invites you to visit his website, www.chuckroger.com. E-mail Chuck at swampcactus@chuckroger.com.
