The problem with Islam

Andrew McCarthy writes compellingly about the problems — the big problems — we in America should have with the proposed Ground Zero mosque.  What I like is his pithy summary of the reason Islam is different from all other religions, and this is primarily because, while it calls itself a religion, it isn’t really.  Instead, it’s a complex governmental system and world domination system that simply points to God as its ultimate authority:

Dawa, whether done from the rubble of the World Trade Center or elsewhere, is the missionary work by which Islam is spread. As explained in my recent book, The Grand Jihad, dawa is proselytism, but not involving only spiritual elements — for Islam is not merely a religion, and spiritual elements are just a small part of its doctrine. In truth, Islam is a comprehensive political, social, and economic system with its own authoritarian legal framework, sharia, which aspires to govern all aspects of life.

This framework rejects core tenets of American constitutional republicanism: for example, individual liberty, freedom of conscience, freedom to govern ourselves irrespective of any theocratic code, equality of men and women, equality of Muslims and non-Muslims, and economic liberty, including the uses of private property (in Islam, owners hold property only as a custodians for the umma, the universal Muslim nation, and are beholden to the Islamic state regarding its use). Sharia prohibits the preaching of creeds other than Islam, the renunciation of Islam, any actions that divide the umma, and homosexuality. Its penalties are draconian, including savagely executed death sentences for apostates, homosexuals, and adulterers.

Read the rest here, please.

Americans who push back against Muslim demands on public life are not religious bigots.  Instead, they show their understanding that, in a pluralist society, an ordinary religion imposes its strictures on its own followers, not on everyone else in town.  Islam is no ordinary religion and we are wrong to treat it as such.  Its practitioners should, of course, be allowed to engage in their own religious practices peacefully and without government imposed conditions.  We, however, must guard vigilantly against any attempts Muslims makes to change the lifestyle of non-Muslims within that same community.

You don’t like pork?  Fine, but then don’t get a job at the meat counter of a super market — and then demand that the super market stop carrying meat or that the market assign you to a different job for which you never applied.  You don’t like alcohol?  Fine, but then don’t get a job as a taxi driver and then refuse to carry people who have alcohol?  These demands, and the hundreds (thousands?) like it that we routinely read about from Europe and, increasingly, America, are not about religious freedom.  They are about a religious minority trying to shape the dominant culture into a brutal, limiting sharia mold.