It pains me to say itâit's always painful when you have to say thisâbut the Michelle Malkins of the world have a point: politically correct timidity seems to have prevented the Fort Hood shooter's colleagues from taking appropriate action against him before he shot and killed 13 soldiers. They were so afraid of being labeled "Islamophobic" that they refused to move against Maj. Nidal Hasan despite believing him to be psychotic because he was also "espousing... extremist Islamic views." If Hasan had merely been crazy they might have kicked his ass out. But he was crazy and a conservative/radical Muslim and no one wanted to appear intolerant. Irshad Manji correctly diagnoses the problem on Hardball yesterday:
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The money quote: "We are willing to tolerate intolerance in order to be perceived as tolerant ourselves." And that's a mistake and it has to stop. Advocates of tolerance have to be aggressively and unapologetically intolerant of intolerance. Islamic bigots, Christian bigots, racist bigotsâthey're all aware of this weakness, this desire on the part of the tolerant to model tolerant behavior, and they actively exploit it. Call bullshit on their discriminatory and hateful political agendas and they whine, "You say you're all for tolerance but you're not willing to tolerate me when all I'm doing is attempting to discriminate against you!" And this moronic line of argument seems to paralyze people.
Look at it this way: Everyone agrees that violence is always wrongâexcept in self defense. It's wrong, for instance, to shoot people. But it wasn't wrong for that cop at Fort Hood to shoot Nidal Hasan. That was appropriate violence, violence employed to put a stop to violence, violence in self defense. Being intolerant is always wrongâexcept in defense of tolerance. That's appropriate intolerance, intolerance employed to put a stop to intolerance, tolerance acting in its own self defense.