Spartans Bad - Muslims Good
Photo Credit: Warner Bros
There are people out there that revel in their ignorance. There are people out there that believe what they want to believe despite the evidence, despite logic, despite all cogent arguments against their beliefs.
Take this email making the rounds of the blogosphere which describes a customer service call that may or may not be bogus, but nonetheless describe perfectly people I personally know who are this arrogantly ignorant, this egregiously stupid:
Customer: "Hi, my son says that I have spartans on my laptop and I should bring it to you guys."
Me: "…Ma'am? Spartans?"
Customer: "Yes, I called my son at school and told him that screens keep popping up all the time, and he said that I have spartans."
Me: "Oh! You mean trojans! That's a possibility; let me run this analyzer on your laptop real quick and we'll see what's going on."
Customer: "Young man, my son is in college and he says it has spartans. You just stand here in a little uniform and make minimum wage. I think my son knows what he is talking about."
Me: "You're right ma'am. I was hoping to run a diagnostic and find out that it wasn't spartans, but just by looking at the login screen, I can tell that you probably have about 300 of the little guys running around."
Customer: "300?! Is that bad?"
Me: "It's horrible. They cram themselves into a bottleneck and kill wave after wave of data, until there is a wall of dead programs blocking any more traffic through your computer."
Customer: "Oh, that just figures. I'm going to go buy a brand new computer."
Me: "Ok, ma'am, I think that would be best."
Just as there are people who believe Spartans are bad for your computer, there are those who believe Muslims are good citizens.
Believe it or not, I personally know people who believe Islam is a religion and who believe Muslims pose no threat to modern civilization. They believe this because they were taught this in school. I even know someone who believes Muslims are just like anyone else because he has two Muslim acquaintances who are not raving Jihadists, but rather pleasant and well-behaved fellows and all that.
Readers of my blog know that a moderate Muslim is someone who has not yet spontaneously erupted into SJS (Sudden Jihad Syndrome (1)). Recall the case of Roshonara Choudhry, born in east London to a moderate Muslim family, raised in British society and culture, and who received A's throughout her education. Her teachers described her as “a pleasant and well-behaved student.” Ms. Choudry was a moderate, productive, educated, happy, seemingly assimilated Muslim who in no manner could possibly pose any threat to western civilization or to the country of her birth. Last November Roshonara Choudhry was sentenced to life in prison for the Jihadist-inspired attempted assassination of a public figure in the UK.
While the UK, The U.S., and European governments have been mostly successful in stopping terror plots by those who appear extreme, they have been singularly unsuccessful in stopping moderate Muslims, those pleasant, normal-appearing Muslims who suddenly erupt into Jihadist rage. But how can any government stop them?
Allowing moderate Muslims into one's country is like playing Russian Roulette, sure the odds are that most of the chambers are empty and it's unlikely that an actual round will fire off into your head, but why should we be forced to play Russian Roulette? Why should decent, law-abiding citizens be exposed to an unnecessary threat? And it is unnecessary - we certainly do not need millions of backward, self-righteous, accommodation-demanding immigrants who despise our culture, who view our way of life as decadent, who never intend on assimilating or integrating into our society and whose long-term goal is the eventual Islamization of the world.
ENDNOTES
(1):
FrontPage Magazine, 14 Mar 2006, Sudden Jihad Syndrome
“Individual Islamists may appear law-abiding and reasonable, but they are part of a totalitarian movement, and as such, all must be considered potential killers.” I wrote those words days after 9/11 and have been criticized for them ever since. But an incident on March 3 at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill suggests I did not go far enough.
That was when a just-graduated student named Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, 22, and an Iranian immigrant, drove a sport utility vehicle into a crowded pedestrian zone. He struck nine people but, fortunately, none were severely injured.
Until his would-be murderous rampage, Taheri-azar, a philosophy and psychology major, had an apparently normal existence and promising future. In high school, he had been student council president and a member of the National Honor Society. A number of UNC students told the Los Angeles Times that he “was a serious student, shy but friendly.” One fellow student, Brian Copeland, “was impressed with his knowledge of classical Western thought, adding “He was kind and gentle, rather than aggressive and violent.” The university chancellor, James Moeser, called him a good student, if “totally a loner, introverted and into himself.”
In fact, no one who knew him said a bad word about him, which is important, for it signals that he is not some low-life, not homicidal, not psychotic, but a conscientious student and amiable person.
