Standing Fearless Before the Muslim Threat

Anyone who opposes Imam Rauf's plan for a NY mosque located near the World Trade Towers ground zero with the reasoning that all Muslims are implicated in the terrorist attack of 9/11 should be barred from any serious discussion of the issue. You can know immediately that their emotions have hijacked their brains. Guilt by generalizing association is for totalitarian regimes, not democracies. This logic, if extended, would agree to killing all Jews because they are not Aryans; or to use a more recognizable Americanism--the only good Indian is a dead one. Is this what we have come to now with Muslims?

What we have here is a fine tuning of the psychology of fear. At first it was patriotic Republicans trading on the approaching anniversary of 9/11 to accuse Democrats of insensitivity for supporting the mosque, particularly Obama. But this political gambit lost its punch as a wider list of prominent individuals gave voice to plain sense, rejecting Muslim guilt by false association, and realizing the liability of appearing to be opposed to freedom of religion.

Then it was the plain and simple bigots who jumped on the wagon. But the media-chosen poster boy, Pastor Jones, mishandled the bigotry card. He was over his head in this role and backed off when the recognized leaders of most prominent religious communities in America doused him and his Qur'an burning idea with water, and General Petraeus warned of the danger to our troops from inflaming Muslim terrorist reaction.

This leaves only the more ambiguous, less observable fear mongers, who, whether they realize it or not, are pawns of the terrorists. The key strategy of terrorists is to arose fear among us, a clever way to get us to maim ourselves with "friendly fire." How easy it seems to get us to forget who we are and what America stands for. It is the radical right, posing as the defenders of Christian America, who are the most frightened, and who thereby serve as enablers for the enemies of our democratic heritage, and to boot, prove to be wayward claimants of Christianity.

I won't add to what I have already said in my most recent blog about what fear does to Christians. But having eliminated illogic, politics, and bigotry from the Muslim equation, I can easily expose "fear" as the charlatan it is. The NY mosque provided a stage for promoting the "fear" that Islam is secretly plotting to take over America and substitute Shari'a law for democracy. Don't forget that our Constitution was suckled on centuries of English development of the idea of freedom; it is rooted in the American psyche, and is fortified by sound legal scaffolding. I can imagine only three ways a Muslim revolution could be effected in America, none of which has the slightest chance of happening.

First: Our Constitution could be amended piecemeal, but on details, not on principles (details are explicit, principles are implicit). For Muslims to gradually undermine the Constitution by amendment will not happen unless a majority of the population becomes Muslim and works toward this end with conspiratorial unity. Because of the difficulty of gaining a 2/3 vote in Congress, plus affirmation of 3/4 of the individual states by separate voting, since the Bill of Rights we have passed only a hodge podge of 17 amendments in over two centuries on mainly procedural matters. To highlight the difficulty of this method of "taking over," even abortionists have not been able to stabilize the pro-choice "reading" of the law with a Constitutional amendment, and amending to assure capital punishment fails to unite all Christians, not to mention that women (with 51% of the population) could not get the ERA proposal passed. Neither Muslims nor any other special interest group is going to "take over" this way. Besides the term "Muslim" is loosely and indistinctly tossed around today as if the Muslims in the United States have the same unity of mindset as those operating in Middle Eastern Arab cultures where there is no democratic tradition.

Second: The only other procedural way to capture our national legal system is to hold another Constitutional Convention to write a new code, the way we set up our current Constitution. The Philadelphia Convention, in 1787, performed its task extra-legally, but the leaders of the movement were respected national heroes, political scholars, and experts on democratic practice. They represented our history of 168 years of local, colonial self governing experience, and had won the favor of the people.

There is a third approach--to sink democracy by military conquest. This is not going to happen either. Random Muslim terrorist attacks can not accomplish this; and which established nation is reckless enough to try?

He who is rightfully confident need not be scared so easily. The real threat is not Islam. The lurking hazard is an anemic self perception. The solution is to know who we are and to build on that. To shout out intolerance is to suck the oxygen out of our blood flow. Intolerance is a toxic rust on democracy's surface. It is fear's twin, but can easily be overcome with the sunny dynamic found in communal relationships, which provides the steady power of democracy. If we choose to remember this, we can feel the firmness of the ground on which our multifaceted citizenry stands.

Doug Good