Friday, February 24

Moral equivalence aids the enemy

Joe Carter posted in Reflections on the Ports Controversy:
...the solution would simply be to institute a program of racial and/or religious profiling....We can simply say that if you are a young, male, Arab, Muslim, that you cannot get a job as a longshoreman.

The issue is not race, it is religion. That you persist in making this demonstrably false assertion is curious.

Resorting to such racial profiling, however, would signal to the world that Americans are—much like the people who were outraged over the Danish cartoons--irrational xenophobes who allow their emotions to replace their reason.

You just insulted 1.2 billion Muslims. What are you, some kind of Islamophobe? Or do you consider it rational to characterize those offended at an insult to their beloved prophet as "irrational xenophobes"?

Protesters (in Europe!) carried signs threatening beheadings and mass extermination against those who insult Islam. They've burned, tortured, and slaughtered around the world in reaction to the affront. To equate Americans opposed to giving to co-religionists of those who threaten to kill us access to our ports with those who threaten to kill us is immoral.

In light of Islam's "sacred" commands for violence against the Infidel (and its 1400 year history of actually carrying out those commands), there is nothing irrational about doubting the trustworthiness of those who are at least nominally affiliated with the god who requires such violence. Neither must one have an irrational fear of the "other" to prefer the fox not be given access to the henhouse.

With your mischaracterizations of those who prefer Liberty over beheading, it might be wise to pause for a moment and evaluate whose cause you're actually supporting.

Instead, we prefer to express our prejudice indirectly, by profiling a company based on the country of origin. (The fact that this country happens to be one of our stronger allies in the GWOT doesn’t seem to matter.) It still makes us look foolish, but at least we can be foolish as a crowd.

The fact that the UAE is a country of adherents to a religion whose god requires subduing and killing people like us apparently doesn't matter to you.

What is truly foolish is to trust in the decency of those who believe in a god that commands his people to "...kill the unbelievers wherever you find them" (Qur'an 9:5) and whose "ideal" man stated, "War is deceit" (Bukhari Volume 4, Book 52, Number 268).