Mosques and the People who Love to Hate Them: Part 2.

"'As a mother and a grandmother, I worry,' Ms. Serafin said. 'I learned that in 20 years with the rate of the birth population, we will be overtaken by Islam, and their goal is to get people in Congress and the Supreme Court to see that Shariah is implemented. My children and grandchildren will have to live under that.' '“I do believe everybody has a right to freedom of religion,' she said. 'But Islam is not about a religion. It’s a political government, and it’s 100 percent against our Constitution.' NYT-8/9/10

But even as the mayor called for the mosque to be embraced, those opposed to the project pledged to aggressively fight it, using both litigation and public pressure. A prominent Republican and foreign policy analyst said he was working with business, civic and political leaders to organize a campaign to persuade architects, contractors and donors to steer clear of the project. He said they would also aggressively scrutinize any donors who supported it.

The Republican, Daniel Senor, a former high-ranking official with the coalition government in Iraq, said that anybody who works with the center “needs to know there is going to be a real stigma associated with this project.”

“Do they really want to be involved with something so detrimental, that might set New York back?” he asked. NYT: 8/3/10

"Glaringly
Obvious
Projection", wagged some poster in a FARK.com thread on this matter yesterday.

And indeed, the modern Republican party sells itself on the promise that conservatism is not just a general tendency of tendency of thought, but the means of combining all truth; physical, moral, religious and philosophical, into an objective concrete whole. It goes without saying that there can be no honest disagreement with any part of this unified truth, it is only embraced in whole by the worthy or rejected in whole by the damned.

Further it is taken as a given that for anything to physically exist is necessarily to battle for supremacy over other things of the same kind. It is understood that all belief systems exist primarily as pretexts for seeking temporal dominance, a dominance which rightfully belongs only to those who have embraced the real truth of American conservatism.

(In that vein, this Daniel Senors veiled threat of extortion is about as vile and bilious as it gets.)

This basic mindset certainly can and certainly has been just as easily embraced by Muslim supremacists, Leftist revolutionaries, or any degree of neo anti disotata you could think of. There are many complex reasons for why fanatical, absolutist appeals to this or that person. For the purpose of this post let us state simply that there are emotional comforts to be had in convincing oneself that we are here mainly to fight each other. There is relief to be had in putting death into a human form that can be fought back against, and maybe even the promise of a bastard immortality for those who fight and hate and believe enough.

Even George W. Bush warned against picking a fight with Islam as a whole; obviously such a fight would be catastrophic for everyone involved. But what those pundits and editorializers who mildly scold the bigots about the dangers of causing a rift with the Muslim world or whatever is that this is exactly what they want. A grandiose, furiously burning, Olympian, apocalyptic 'Clash of Civilizations' is precisely what they want. And as "their" country and "their" civilization grows ever more pluralistic and leaves them ever further behind, they are only going to want it more and more.

They will never have the cosmic triumph they were promised. They will never be the demi-warriors they were taught they had to be and assure that they were. Those of us who do not share their sickness can pity them, otherwise there is little else to do but dismiss them as the fascist brats they are.