The minority that matters
Via Kathy Shaidle comes this very sobering account of a blogger's discussion with an elderly German who had lived through the Nazi era. The man's family were aristocrats who were not Nazis, and who in fact thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So they sat back and watched the Nazis take over their country, and lead it to ruin. There's a lesson here, says the blogger:
The blogger goes on to say that most populations in history have arguably been "peace-loving," but history shows that in so many cases, the good people who did nothing allowed the worst people, "full of passionate intensity" as Yeats said, to come to rule society, with horrific results. The blogger says that the peaceful majority of Muslims are made irrelevant by the violent minority, and that if they don't speak up and fight back, the violent ones will bring rack and ruin down upon all Muslims. In any case, says the blogger, the rest of us ought to pay close attention to the ones who mean to do us harm, because in the end they are the ones who matter.
How true this is. I am certain that most white people in the Jim Crow South were not Klansmen, and were basically decent people. But their silence in the face of Klan terror made their basic decency irrelevant in the eyes of black folks. Can you imagine a white pastor after the Birmingham church bombings going on TV to say that most white people aren't violent, and that black people would be wrong to think ill of them because of the violent racism of a few? The blacks would have every right to say, "If that is true, then prove it by risking something to stand up against the terror! Fight back against it! If you don't, you are asking us victims and targets of terrorism to absolve you when you have done little or nothing to prove that you stand with the victims, not the victimizers." As someone once said, a long face is not a moral disinfectant.
You know, as a Catholic, I can sleep well at night knowing that there are tens of thousands of fellow Christians in this town who think I'm going to hell because of my religious convictions. I get along fine with hardline Christian fundamentalists, because no matter how strongly we disagree, I have never once had to fear that any of them would commit any sort of violence, much less murder, against me or people like me (which wasn't always the case, not when the KKK was active in Dallas about a hundred years ago). Funny, but whenever liberals I know say there is no difference between Islamic fundamentalists and Christian fundamentalists, I ask them if they had to choose, would they prefer to ride on an airplane piloted by graduates of Bob Jones University, or graduates of a Pakistani madrassa?
We are told again and again by “experts” and “talking heads” that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unquantified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.
The fact is, that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars world wide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. The hard quantifiable fact is, that the “peaceful majority” is the “silent majority” and it is cowed and extraneous.
The blogger goes on to say that most populations in history have arguably been "peace-loving," but history shows that in so many cases, the good people who did nothing allowed the worst people, "full of passionate intensity" as Yeats said, to come to rule society, with horrific results. The blogger says that the peaceful majority of Muslims are made irrelevant by the violent minority, and that if they don't speak up and fight back, the violent ones will bring rack and ruin down upon all Muslims. In any case, says the blogger, the rest of us ought to pay close attention to the ones who mean to do us harm, because in the end they are the ones who matter.
How true this is. I am certain that most white people in the Jim Crow South were not Klansmen, and were basically decent people. But their silence in the face of Klan terror made their basic decency irrelevant in the eyes of black folks. Can you imagine a white pastor after the Birmingham church bombings going on TV to say that most white people aren't violent, and that black people would be wrong to think ill of them because of the violent racism of a few? The blacks would have every right to say, "If that is true, then prove it by risking something to stand up against the terror! Fight back against it! If you don't, you are asking us victims and targets of terrorism to absolve you when you have done little or nothing to prove that you stand with the victims, not the victimizers." As someone once said, a long face is not a moral disinfectant.
You know, as a Catholic, I can sleep well at night knowing that there are tens of thousands of fellow Christians in this town who think I'm going to hell because of my religious convictions. I get along fine with hardline Christian fundamentalists, because no matter how strongly we disagree, I have never once had to fear that any of them would commit any sort of violence, much less murder, against me or people like me (which wasn't always the case, not when the KKK was active in Dallas about a hundred years ago). Funny, but whenever liberals I know say there is no difference between Islamic fundamentalists and Christian fundamentalists, I ask them if they had to choose, would they prefer to ride on an airplane piloted by graduates of Bob Jones University, or graduates of a Pakistani madrassa?
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