THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

Peter S. approvingly quotes Carl Ernst on the urgent “task” of contemporary Islamic studies, which is none other than “to humanize Muslims in the eyes of non-Muslims.” Ernst – and, as we may assume, Peter S. – can only be of the opinion that Westerners chronically and habitually dehumanize Muslims, but this is an absurdity. On the contrary, Westerners have romanticized Muslims since the eighteenth century, and Western elites are even more prone to such romanticism today than their bien pensant precursors were three hundred years ago. In evidence I cite the never-ending palaver about “the religion of peace” that President Bush II inaugurated within days of 9/11. Those of us who suspect such romanticism, and who disdain to participate in it, and who carefully criticize Islam do so precisely because we are the inheritors of a specifically non- and pre-Islamic idea of universal humanity, which we owe to Biblical revelation and especially to the Gospel. Because we recognize that Muslims are indeed human beings, we hold them to the same standards of morality and civilization by which we judge ourselves. 

Peter S.’s long entry conceals a false and insidious syllogism, that because X is human we must tolerate, respect, facilitate, embrace, celebrate, or participate in X. (This is the generic “diversity” syllogism.) On the contrary, when we condemn the Moloch cult of the Carthaginians or the Death-God cult of the Aztecs, we do so precisely because we hold all human beings to the criteria of love and charity, as revealed in the example of Jesus Christ, who forgave an adulteress and chased away in humiliation those who wanted to stone her. If the Carthaginians and Aztecs were mere beasts, there would be no point in condemning them. The irony is that Peter S.’s position could only arise in a Christian society; or, let us say, in the dissolute phase of a Christian society that has fashioned a new fetish out of tolerance, whose worship excludes all other virtues.

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