[RC] Some People Don't Want to 'Coexist'

[BILROJ via Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community]

Real Clear Politics
 
Some People Don't Want to 'Coexist'
By _Heather  Wilhelm_ 
(http://www.realclearpolitics.com/authors/heather_wilhelm/)  - February 12, 2015

 
Last week, a French graffiti artist named “Combo” was beaten on the 
streets  of Paris, left with a black eye, a dislocated shoulder, and massive 
bruising.  His offense?  Painting a giant “Coexist” mural in a largely Muslim  
neighborhood, integrating the letters with a Muslim crescent, a Star of 
David,  and a Christian cross. 
You’ve likely seen similar bumper stickers, which, in America, usually also 
 integrate a peace sign, male and female symbols, pagan images, and a 
yin-yang  symbol. They seem to thrive in certain specialized habitats, most 
commonly the  backs of Priuses, Subarus, or rusty Plymouths sporting 
approximately 5,000 other  fascinating half-peeled-off, multi-layered stickers. 
“Coexist”
 stickers share an  admirable and hopeful sentiment — similar, perhaps, to 
the “Visualize World  Peace” stickers that dominated the 1980s.  
Unfortunately, they are also, as  Combo’s experience might indicate, a bit 
naïve.
 
The course of human history, in fact, has made it quite clear that some  
people, no matter how “enlightened” the era, simply do not want to coexist. 
On  Tuesday night, Craig Stephen Hicks, a militant atheist in Chapel Hill, 
N.C.,  gunned down his three Muslim neighbors. The victims were students; two 
were  recently married. In the wake of the murders, many commentators 
suspected  Islamophobia was to blame. Local police, meanwhile, suggested a 
trigger 
that was  far more banal, but equally frightening: “An ongoing neighbor 
dispute about  parking,” they announced on Wednesday, may have inspired the 
brutal,  execution-style murders. 
Whatever the motivations of Mr. Hicks, one sad fact remains: People often  
kill each other for really ridiculous and terrible reasons. Over the past 
few months, faced with a radical Islamic group tearing up  the Middle East, 
much of America’s political dialogue has revolved around why  this is so. Most 
of that dialogue, somewhat uneasily, has centered on religion.  Most of it 
is also, unfortunately, pretty wacky. 
One instinct, at least when it comes to certain groups, is to downplay  
religion altogether. In a recent interview, when President Obama described the  
January murders at a Paris kosher store as “random,” the Internet exploded 
with  criticism—the radical Islamist killer, after all, had called a TV 
station,  crowing that he had targeted Jews. But, strangely, in the days that 
followed  Obama’s “random” comment—and despite the fact that, earlier in 
January, Obama  himself had called the attacks anti-Semitic—high-level 
spokespeople from both  the White House and the State Department refused, over 
and 
over again, to admit  that the attack was religiously based. After a 
relentless, thorough, and painful  grilling from the press, they finally 
buckled. 
This pales in comparison to the administration’s more common—and more  
troubling—approach to religion: The suggestion that violent religious “zealots”
  don’t really believe what they say. “Whatever ideology they’re operating 
under,  it’s bankrupt,” Obama declared in response to ISIS’s live burning 
of a caged  Jordanian pilot. This is a weird thing to say, isn’t it? We all 
know what  ideology ISIS is “operating under,” because they’ve told us so. 
Repeatedly. It’s  radical Islam, a highly militant interpretation of things 
that you can actually  find in the Koran. 
When that rather awkward point comes up, of course, we—and by “we,” I mean 
 President Obama—change the subject, quite naturally, to the Crusades. “
Lest we  get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other 
place,” Obama  told attendees at the February 5 National Prayer Breakfast, “
remember that  during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed 
terrible deeds in the  name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim 
Crow 
all too often was  justified in the name of Christ.” 
Obama has been widely pilloried for his ISIS/Crusades comparison, and for  
good reason. On both historical and religious grounds, it is ludicrous, 
murky,  and unhelpful. On the other hand, it might not be such a bad thing for  
Christians to take a look back at the history of Jim Crow, as well as the  
decidedly un-Christian behavior of certain so-called followers of Christ 
during  that era. This would demonstrate the important ability to look certain  
uncomfortable realities in the face—an ability that the Obama 
administration, at  least when it comes to faiths other than Christianity, 
seems to lack. 
At its basest level, the president’s rhetoric suggests that all religions 
are  the same; no one really believes in all that silliness, do they? This  
is the faith of the secularist: If we could just stop clinging to our 
religion,  which is all rather dated and meaningless, we’d be a lot better off. 
When shed  of all that God baggage, after all, people might be free to make a 
better, more  progressive world. The recent killing spree by Chapel Hill 
atheist Craig Hicks,  unfortunately, seems to suggest otherwise. 
This week, a particularly telling 1922 _New  York Times clip_ 
(http://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2015/02/10/1922-hitler-in-bavaria/?smid=tw-share&_r=
1)  made the Internet rounds. Reporting on Hitler’s rise in  Germany, the 
article cited “several reliable, well-informed sources” who  “confirmed the 
idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as  it 
sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to  
catch 
masses of followers.” 
In other words, he couldn’t really believe all that, could he? You  bet he 
could. Some people, it turns out, just don’t want to coexist. Pretending  
they do, regardless of their religious stripe, is a dangerous  game.

-- 
-- 
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community 
<RadicalCentrism@googlegroups.com>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org

--- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to radicalcentrism+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.