"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Who Do They Make Excuses For, and Who Do They Always Suspect?

Victor Davis Hanson, as is his wont, today speaks a good deal of truth about both the Obama administration and radical Islamists in the Middle East:

We see this [gullibility] in the administration’s fashionable collective denial that the Islamic State has anything to do with Islam — as if foreign tourists visited Mecca as freely as they do the Vatican; as if Muslim apostates picked and chose their new religions as easily and safely as do Protestants; as if beheadings and stonings were as frequent in Paris and Houston as they are in Riyadh and Teheran; as if Bibles were brought into Iran and Saudi Arabia as freely as Korans are into America; as if churches sprouted up in Turkey, Iran, and Gaza as do mosques in Britain and Michigan; and as if women and gays were as equal in the Middle East as they are in the West.

Hanson is honest and courageous in an age of euphemism.... the truth is that no sane person is afraid to walk into any Catholic Church anywhere in the world, but everyone who isn't Muslim would rationally be terrified to walk into any number of mosques in London or Paris or Amsterdam, much less in Mosul.   And shouldn't that be the test of whether Islam really is a "religion of peace," as Obama tries to tell us?

But what interests me is the impulse of liberals to make excuses for Islam and reject tarring the entire religion because of the sins of some of its adherents.    It interests me because it is the exact opposite of what liberals do with Christians.   In America, our liberal elites in the media and academia never excuse Christians, never check themselves from generalizing from the actions of a few to the beliefs of the many.   You can see it in the products of Hollywood most clearly -- how many times in TV shows has the villain been a Christian, Catholic or Evangelical?

It tells you a lot to observe who liberals will make excuses for, and who they always hold in suspicion.

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