In this era of violent intimidation, it is crucial for the continued life of our free society that we speak out, and do so fearlessly....A Time To Speak Out, Robert Spencer, Frontpagemag.com
When the founder of the Minutemen, a nonviolent organization devoted to informing border patrol and National Guard units when and where illegal immigrants are coming across the American border, tried to speak at Columbia University last week, he was shouted at, booed, and the stage from which he spoke was overrun by friends of the Left and of Islamist terrorists among students. The Minutemen's founder smiled throughout, and finally left. He was not able to finish a speech which he had been invited to give.
It never changes. In Europe, in America, wherever someone tries to tell an inconvenient truth about either the Left or about Islamists, violent intimidation is the instant response. The irony of this in the face of the Pope's remarks on Islam and violence is not very subtle. Not to put too fine a point on it, but every time someone tries to engage Islam in a dialogue, Islamists perfectly demonstrate what they're accused of, as does the Left. Reason, dialogue, compromise and peacemaking are alien to both. Both are unremittingly opposed to a world of varied, compex human beings; both insist that only one model need apply.
Spencer's article is about the second Truth Forum conference, held this past past April in Washington, DC. But what he targets is a paradigm of the current struggle for sanity in the world. Only one side operates on a basis of reasoned dialogue. And that will remain the dominant truth until a point of view emerges on both the Left and among Islamists that the only future for their faiths, one secular and the other religious, is that they accept another face in the picture besides their own. Another big truth is that doesn't seem very likely.
Martin Buber put it simply. You cannot converse with evil but, for the sake of our self-esteem and our civilization, we have no choice but to try.
Luther
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