William F. Buckley was often amused at
the Leftish reflex to confuse an ethical objection with a pragmatic
objection; and he would tease it out by asking with his disarmingly
raised eyebrows, “Well, which is it?”—implying that it seems curiously
convenient that it should be so glibly both.
This comes up often, too often, among many in the Counter-Jihad, when they balk at the Deportation option by objecting first to its supposed impracticality (if not pragmatic impossibility), then quickly appending the supposed ethical problem. Or it may (also) come up when one argues for the logical underpinning of Deportation: the systemic nature and effects of the deadly dangers which Islam through its Muslim enablers poses to the free world—and, in light of that systemic problem, our inability to distinguish adequately the harmless Muslims from the deadly Muslims and their Muslim enablers.
At any rate, the problem with Mohammedans is not whether they are “all
evil” or not; but rather that we cannot tell the difference between those whose
evil spells mortal danger to our society, and those who enjoy the
privilege of being exculpated—through various speculative taxonomies
we in our anxious need to preen our ethical narcissism, superimpose upon them—from the evil of the system they, qua merely being Muslim, enable.
The grim answer is that we do not have the ability to discern such an
exigent distinction, and that we should not play “Muslim Roulette” with
our lives, and the lives of our loved ones and fellow citizens, on the
basis of our dire agnosticism in this regard. And lives are on the
line: our society’s safety should be more important than whether we feel
ethically good about ourselves, I should say. It is dismaying to see
so many in the Counter-Jihad, for all their affectations of being tough and no-nonsense about the problem of Islam, basically when the rubber meets the road paraphrase Gen. Casey’s distastrous priority in the wake of the one-man razzia by an American Mohammedan at Fort Hood.
William F. Buckley was often amused at the Leftish reflex to confuse an ethical objection with a pragmatic objection; and he would tease it out by asking with his disarmingly raised eyebrows, “Well, which is it?”—implying that it seems curiously convenient that it should be so glibly both.
This comes up often, too often, among many in the Counter-Jihad, when they balk at the Deportation option by objecting first to its supposed impracticality (if not pragmatic impossibility), then quickly appending the supposed ethical problem. Or it may (also) come up when one argues for the logical underpinning of Deportation: the systemic nature and effects of the deadly dangers which Islam through its Muslim enablers poses to the free world—and, in light of that systemic problem, our inability to distinguish adequately the harmless Muslims from the deadly Muslims and their Muslim enablers.
At any rate, the problem with Mohammedans is not whether they are “all evil” or not; but rather that we cannot tell the difference between those whose evil spells mortal danger to our society, and those who enjoy the privilege of being exculpated—through various speculative taxonomies we in our anxious need to preen our ethical narcissism, superimpose upon them—from the evil of the system they, qua merely being Muslim, enable.
The grim answer is that we do not have the ability to discern such an exigent distinction, and that we should not play “Muslim Roulette” with our lives, and the lives of our loved ones and fellow citizens, on the basis of our dire agnosticism in this regard. And lives are on the line: our society’s safety should be more important than whether we feel ethically good about ourselves, I should say. It is dismaying to see so many in the Counter-Jihad, for all their affectations of being tough and no-nonsense about the problem of Islam, basically when the rubber meets the road paraphrase Gen. Casey’s distastrous priority in the wake of the one-man razzia by an American Mohammedan at Fort Hood.