Racism and religious conflict

But We're Not Muslims!

Samhita Mukhopadhyay writes in The American Prospect that “There is no such thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ minorities – racism affects us all.”

Thus he endorses the worldwide line of the generic left that Islamophobia is a species of racism and demands solidarity among minorities.

Well, actually, among South Asians.

Apparently, Middle Eastern men of the Islamic persuasion will have to work things out for themselves.

Anyway, in the 19^th Century the Mormons were driven by violent persecution from New York all the way to that godforsaken desert region around the Great Salt Lake they now make their headquarters, their founder and leader, Joseph Smith, having been killed for his religious views along the way in Illinois.

If today’s liberal propagandists felt the need to defend the Mormons they’d denounce the odium theologicum behind the persecution as racism.

It is as though there was some sort of vast conspiracy among pundits, journos, and historians to hide from us how dominated our politics are by religious ideas, loyalties, and organizations.

So many of us like to think ours is a secular age and that politics not only should be but mostly has been about secular differences, secular ideologies, and secular aspirations since the Enlightenment.

And so we pretend important political conflicts are not intimately tied to religion so we can pretend there is no need to quarrel specifically and frankly about religion.

Well, unless it’s the Christian religion, both in our past and in our present.

Seriously confused people aside, few on the left are shy about their fear of and loathing for Christianity – liberal, i.e., unbelieving Christianity excepted, of course.

Few indeed are the Jews who are shy about the same feelings toward the Catholic Church.

And the Israeli must indeed be rare who is not filled by fear and loathing of Islam every time he sees some Muslim holy man on TV insisting the Jews are beasts and devils whom Allah demands should be exterminated.