A friend poses the following: Imagine that there really were these fundamentalist Christian terror cells all over the United States, as the Department of Homeland Security imagines. Let’s say a group of five of these terrorists hijacked a plane, flew it to Mecca, and plowed it into the Kaaba.
Now let’s say a group of well-meaning, well-funded Christians — Christians whose full-time job was missionary work — decided that the best way to promote healing would be to pressure the Saudi government to drop its prohibition against permitting non-Muslims into Mecca so that these well-meaning, well-funded Christian missionaries could build a $100 million dollar church and community center a stone’s throw from where the Kaaba used to be — you know, as a bridge-building gesture of interfaith understanding.
What do you suppose President Obama, Mayor Bloomberg, the New York Times, and other Ground Zero mosque proponents would say about the insensitive, provocative nature of the proposal?
Do you think the State Department would make the leader of the Christian missionaries a special emissary and send him to represent the United States on diplomatic business overseas?
What do you suppose the Saudi reaction would be?
What do you suppose those ecumenical GZ mosque proponents at Hamas would say?
What do you suppose Pope Benedict and other Christian leaders would say?
What do you suppose imam Feisal Rauf and his friends at CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America, the International Institute of Islamic Thought, and the various other Muslim Brotherhood affiliates would say?
How would building the church/community center in Mecca affect Saudi Arabia’s standing in imam Rauf’s Sharia Index Project?
3 comments:
Is there a prohibition against Muslims in New York that I don't know about?
The hypothetical is not a parallel analogy because there's nothing similar about Mecca and New York City/US in terms of freedom-of-religion civil rights, pluralistic culture, etc etc. (Also, less important point, but the World Trade Center isn't really parallel to Kaaba in meaning, unless we worship money.)
For these sorts of flip thought-experiments to be illuminating, the foundations have to actually be similar. These are not.
Please tell me that the conservative argument against the cultural center runs deeper than this. Or would you have me believe that the solution to this or any other issue we may have with countries under Sharia law is to be just as intolerant as they? I thought we were supposed to be the ideal they should aspire to, not the other way around.
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