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The Enigma of Our Age


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The Enigma of Our Age
August 15, 2010 - by Victor Davis Hanson

From Arizona to Ground Zero

The recent controversies over the Ground Zero mosque and Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration law are windows into our collective souls. Think of the paradoxes.

A self-professed ecumenical Islamic organization picks a spot next to the site of the mass murder of 2,700 New Yorkers by radical Islamic terrorists — a deliberately provocative act designed to, at best, bother millions and, at worst, provide the sorts of visuals and optics that will shortly appear in DVDs and on the internet throughout radical Islamic enclaves in the Middle East, as a mosque is juxtaposed to the memorial shell of the World Trade Center. (We know what’s next: “O blessed Holy Warrior Atta, you took down the looming tower of the infidels and raised a mosque in its place!”)

The president weighs in on a local issue (cf. the Professor Gates/Officer Crowley mess), deliberately misrepresenting it and inflaming passions quite gratuitously by suggesting critics wanted to ban by law the mosque rather than pressure the organizers to reconsider. Surely Barack Obama knew the issue was one of decorum and taste and reverence, and surely Barack Obama tried to obfuscate all that by demonizing opponents as awful sorts of un-Americans without tolerance of religious diversity (revisit the clingers riff of 2008).

Then there was the question of reciprocity. To build a church in Mecca would mean death on the spot (to visit Mecca as a Christian or in general as a non-Muslim is a suicidal act). Why would not reform-minded Muslims seek first to change the hearts and minds of bigots in the Middle East, before testing the patience of liberal-thinking Americans?

And, of course, there is the old issue of “compared to what”? Americans object to the decorum of building a Middle East-financed, 13-story mosque next to Ground Zero, but, of course, grant the legal right of someone to be so boorish should they choose. But why would not the world turn its attention to the Chinese and their rather illiberal treatment of Muslims, or the Russian scorched-earth strategy in Chechnya — or the endemic intolerance of Muslims themselves?

In Arizona’s case, review the now tired paradoxes. Mexico, with an awful record on illegal immigration to its south, lectures Americans about its ethical shortfalls up north. Millions of illegal aliens are angry that the state wishes to enforce federal statutes, but not quite to the extent of being too angry to quit residing illegally in the United States. The federal government sues a state for enforcing federal law, and ignores cities that subvert it. The president weighs in again, unnecessarily so, and once more misrepresents the issue, by suggesting the innocent on their way to buy ice cream will be profiled and deported.snip
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