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You’d think, maybe, the best way to respond to Terrorism is to not run around with a damp spot in the crotch of your Dockers all the damn time. The goal of “terrorists,” you see, is to inflict “terror” — stop me if I’m going too fast here  — and so maybe, just maybe, it would not be a particularly good idea to constantly act “terrified.” It’s a theory!

But not a theory to which Andy McCarthy subscribes. This is perhaps because (a) acting hysterical on the Wingnut Internet beats a real job all to hell, and (b) he’s a genuine nut for whom the concept of “behaving responsibly” is utterly foreign.

A tectonic shift is in motion: How fitting that its focal point is Ground Zero, the inevitable fault line between Islam and the West.

He means that the proposed Islamofascist Swimming Pool of Islamofascist Death is located in the very general vicinity of where the Two Towers were destroyed by deranged religious shitheads of the Muslim class nine years ago tomorrow, and that this is making Real Americans all of a sudden very queasy and terrified about Muslims in general as opposed to just the deranged terrorist shitheads.  If this strikes you as a grotesquely oversimplified thesis, well, buckle up:

Only the blink of an eye ago, uttering the unpleasant truth that in terms of doctrine there is no such thing as “moderate Islam” resulted in one’s banishment from what our opinion elites like to call the “mainstream,” by which they mean the narrow-minded, viciously defended circle of their own pieties and fictions. You could say it, but your skin had better have an extra coat or two of thick: You were in for a fusillade of rage, the likes of which our candor-phobic elites would never dream of unleashing at our Islamist enemies — no matter how clearly those enemies announced their intention to destroy us.

Andy McCarthy thinks sensible people are “enraged” at him just because they say “what the fuck are you talking about?” His perception of this response is inaccurate. Sensible people merely tend to become irritated at nonsense.

This is because the idea that “in terms of doctrine there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam’” is gibberish. It is, indeed, precisely the kind of charge that could be leveled at any doctrine or ideology. I could just as easily prove that “defining yourself as a Conservative leads inexorably to a tendency to make an ass of yourself on the Internet,” for instance.  Probably it’d be even easier.

Either you accept that someone is to be judged not by a jaundiced deontological inquisition into their Foundational Belief System, but by the content of their character, to very loosely paraphrase Glenn Beck, I think it was, or you think otherwise, in which case you start babbling a lot of horseshit at NRO. I mean please.

“Moderate Islam” is a dream, not a reality. It is a dream with potential, because there are millions of Muslims who are moderate people, and because there are dedicated Muslims working to transform their faith into something that is institutionally moderate. But they work against great odds. They confront Islamists whose dedication to theocratic principles is deeply and undeniably rooted in Islamic scripture. And they confront American opinion elites who, wittingly or not, serve as the lifeline of the Islamists.

Oh, bullshit. If you honestly believe that “in terms of doctrine there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam,’” what you are quite bluntly saying is that every Muslim on Earth, or more to the point, in America, either has to convert or become an atheist or accept forevermore that Real Americans will be perfectly justified in considering you a traitor who is likely to walk into a mall and suicide bomb it at any fucking minute. Or that you should be ashamed at even bothering to suggest you might have the right to do what you want with your own private property a couple of blocks away from where people you didn’t know and had no connection with did something unspeakable.

That’ll sure convince them to Like Us — if we are the US that McCarthy thinks we are, which I hope to fuck we’re not.

McCarthy’s column is full of sneering at “elites,” like this chinless fuck is a fucking fireman or something. Well, feel free to cover yourself in the street cred of the People, the True National People — because when it comes to an educated fellow determined to whip up popular dislike of a selected minority, there’s a Proud History of that sort of thing, Andy, my man.

Nice company you keep, asshole.