Why Tolerate the Hate? - New York Times

We have often been critical of Irshad Manji for her spotlight-coveting, gadflying about, trying to walk in the Muslim camp and the Western society camp at the same time. We have lost trust in her because she seems to want to have Islam (the cake) and Westernism (eating the cake at the same time). She has all the evidence she needs to reject Islam, and all the intelligence anyone could ever want to see Islam for what it is. We do not withdraw any of these objections.

Yet, in today's New York Times, she has one of her better op-ed pieces, and it is one that deserves reading in its entireity. Here are some tidbits from it:

Why Tolerate the Hate?

By IRSHAD MANJI, Toronto, 9 August 2005, New York Times

FOR a European leader, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain has done something daring. He has given notice not just to the theocrats of Islam, but also to the theocracy of tolerance.

"Staying here carries with it a duty," Mr. Blair said in referring to foreign-born Muslim clerics who glorify terror on British soil. "That duty is to share and support the values that sustain the British way of life. Those who break that duty and try to incite hatred or engage in violence against our country and its people have no place here."

With that, his government proposed new laws to deport extremist religious leaders, to shut down the mosques that house them and to ban groups with a history of supporting terrorism. The reaction was swift: a prominent human rights advocate described Mr. Blair's measures as "neo-McCarthyite hectoring," warning that they would make the British "less distinguishable from the violent, hateful and unforgiving theocrats, our democracy undermined from within in ways that the suicide bombers could only have dreamed of."

But if these anti-terror measures feel like an overreaction to the London bombings, that's only because Britons, like so many in the West, have been avoiding a vigorous debate about what values are most worth defending in our societies.

As Westerners bow down before multiculturalism, we anesthetize ourselves into believing that anything goes. We see our readiness to accommodate as a strength - even a form of cultural superiority (though few will admit that). Radical Muslims, on the other hand, see our inclusive instincts as a form of corruption that makes us soft and rudderless. They believe the weak deserve to be vanquished.

Paradoxically, then, the more we accommodate to placate, the more their contempt for our "weakness" grows. And ultimate paradox may be that in order to defend our diversity, we'll need to be less tolerant. Or, at the very least, more vigilant. And this vigilance demands more than new antiterror laws. It requires asking: What guiding values can most of us live with? Given the panoply of ideologies and faiths out there, what filter will distill almost everybody's right to free expression?

Let's have that debate - without fear of being deemed self-haters or racists by those who twist multiculturalism into an orthodoxy. We know the dangers of taking Islam literally. By now we should understand the peril of taking tolerance literally.

(Emphases mine)

Irshad Manji is the author of "The Trouble with Islam Today:
A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith."

Just how much better off the entire world would be if Muslims would adopt this approach to differences. How nice it would be to stop regarding a "reasoning Muslim" as an oxymoron.