Asserting The Right: To say 'I am!' When all around you are saying 'You are not!', is the true definition of power. As Thomas Mann so rightly said: "Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil."
IT HAS BEEN a hell-week for Tolerance. Tragic events in
France and unspeakable atrocities in Nigeria have tested her followers’ fidelity
to the limit. The temptation to condemn; to lash out in righteous anger; has
been overwhelming.
“What kind of people”, we ask, “can justify gunning down a
roomful of grandfatherly journalists and cartoonists? Or strap a bomb to the
body of a ten year old girl and send her into the middle of a crowded
marketplace?”
In responding to such questions others demand to know what
kind of people could crowd grandfathers and ten-year-old girls into “showers”
and drop deadly poisonous pellets of Zyklon-B on their heads?
Such responses are intended to remind us that cruelty and
violence are not the sole preserve of Al Qaida, Islamic State or Boko Haram
jihadists. That, within living memory, highly-educated Europeans set a
bench-mark for cruelty and violence that has yet to be exceeded.
They should also remind us that fighting for and defending
Tolerance is no job for pacifists.
Our fathers and grandfathers did not hesitate to condemn or
lash out in righteous anger against the Nazi regime. On the contrary, they made
war upon it until little was left of its German birthplace except bloody piles
of rubble. At Nuremburg, in the name of Humanity itself, they put Nazism on
trial and hanged its guilty leaders by their necks until they were dead.
There are some (thankfully a small minority) who compare the
Islamic religion in toto with Nazism and demand from the nations of the West
the same uncompromising determination to rid the world of a malign influence
that was displayed between 1939 and 1945.
Fortunately, Tolerance’s grip upon the vast majority of
Westerners is still strong enough to reject such annihilationist solutions.
Simple common-sense tells us that the murderous jihadists whose crimes have
dominated the headlines for the past ten days have as much to do with Islam as
the cross-burning members of the Ku Klux Klan had to do with Christianity.
Every bit as much. Because isn’t it true that even though
only a handful of white southerners actually wore the Klan’s hoods and robes,
its terrorist exploits (most of which, right up until the late 1960s, went
unpunished) could only take place in a social environment that made both the
moral condemnation and/or legal conviction of the perpetrators unthinkable?
Those southern towns were as full of churches as the cities
of the Middle East are filled with mosques. The hard truth remains that the
Klan was only defeated as a powerful terrorist force when the people among whom
it operated were no longer willing to justify its crimes or shield its members
from the claims of justice. When those churches finally stopped turning a blind
eye to terrorism, and their congregations finally stopped turning up to
lynchings.
Tolerance is a militant goddess – never to be confused with
acquiescence or clever apologetics. To end the reign of the Ku Klux Klan required
not only the courage and sacrifice of Dr Martin Luther King’s non-violent civil
rights campaigners; not only the steadfast support of defiant African-American communities;
not only the solidarity and assistance of progressive Americans from all over
the USA; but also the relentless interventions of the Department of Justice and
the covert operations of the FBI.
Tolerance rejects the racist suggestion that the Islamic
peoples are incapable of responding to the moral challenge of terrorism in the same
manner as White Christians in the South eventually responded to it.
Tolerance charges us to not only familiarise ourselves with
the fundamental tenets of Islam, but also to challenge openly the ways in which
the message of the Prophet has been distorted and defiled by the murderous
blasphemers and heretics who dare to march beneath his banner.
Tolerance knows that it is only when the body of the
faithful rises in revolt against the Kings and Ayatollahs, the Presidents and
Generals, whose personal and profane interests are served by the dissemination
of a creed that knows nothing of submission or penitence or charity, that the true
voice of the Prophet will once again ring out clearly across the lands of the
faithful.
But, most of all, Tolerance knows that her great enemy,
Intolerance, only ever triumphs when ordinary, decent people confuse doing the
right thing with doing nothing.
This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 16 January 2015.
