“I loved Eliot on sight.”
“Isn’t there some other word you could use?”
“Than what?”
“Than love.”
“What better word is there?”
Eliot did to the word love what the Russians did to the word democracy. If Eliot is going to love everybody, no matter what they are, no matter what they do, then those of us who love particular people for particular reasons had better find ourselves a new word.” He looked at an oil painting of his deceased wife. “For instance—I loved her more than I love our garbage collector, which makes me guilty of the most unspeakable of modern crimes: Dis-crim-i-nay-tion.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, by Kurt Vonnegut, p. 86
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In his report of the latest incident of attempted lawfare by a Muslim(a) who is alleging discrimination at the hands of a United Airlines stewardess and pilot (as well as bigotry from nearby passengers), Baron Bodissey of the Gates of Vienna blog formulates a sentiment that at first glance seems robust:
That depends, however, on whether one’s definition of discrimination defaults to the politically correct definition: “Treatment or consideration based on class or category rather than individual merit; partiality or prejudice”—so deeply woven into our culture as to have become officially #3 in the American Heritage English dictionary (though, of course, refreshingly absent from the halcyon 1913 Webster’s definition).
If one refuses to presume the politically correct definition and instead presumes the saner definitions—“1. The act of discriminating (further clarified by looking up discriminating to find “Able to recognize or draw fine distinctions; perceptive”)” and “2. The ability or power to see or make fine distinctions; discernment”— one sees that to profile Muslims qua Muslims is, in fact, to be discriminating in the finest, aptest, most exquisitely incorrect sense.
Granted all of the above, however, one could go further and say that even the politically correct definition—“Treatment or consideration based on class or category rather than individual merit; partiality or prejudice”—comports just fine with our security concerns. For indeed we should be treating and considering Muslims as a class or category rather than as individuals. We should be prejudiced against them—in the sense of pre-judging them to be a security risk on a macro scale simply because their culture of taqiyya and terrorism in the service of a supremacist expansionism energizing an actual violent war they are waging against us now, coupled with their numbers, and with the complexity of our societies given our bustling freedoms and cultivation of diversity, all render our security needs incapable of the fine-tuned casuistry that would try anxiously to treat each Muslim as an individual.
Incapable, that is, if we focus on the exigencies of our #1 priority: in the coming years and decades, protecting our societies from horrific terror attacks that are part of an ongoing war which Muslims in their current global revival of Islam are waging against us.