Notes from America

Terry Jones has chickened out on time. Rauf wouldn't give a hoot for his proposed quid pro quo. In the end, a few flags were burnt and angry rallies came out in familiar places shouting slogans like "rasist America v/s victim Muslims".

The talking heads went into a tizzy right from white house to the basement blogger introspecting on the bigot within, need for bigger concessions and chiding ignorant Joes and Bobs for their misplaced fears. From the right, speculations of global religious war carried a little more space than usual. The casualties this time have been the stand up comedians sense of humor and the average Joe's right to ignore the bigotry and carry on with his everyday dysfunctional debt ridden life in the time of regressive economy.

Even on the day of another memorial of September 11, its interesting to find how the debate invariably is about the secular credentials of the other, including religions and agnostic ideologies, but not about the intolerance and fanaticism of Islamic belief. It is always about the heightened sensitivity of every believer, but not the indifference of its majority when the passionate few among them assaults humanity in grand expressions of cruelty. Why there is never any movement from the "moderate" to fight the political and killer ideologies of its extreme member? Why is it easy to hide behind the status of minority and scuttle dialogues within the community or outside of it, even in the west where security and freedom of speech are held in higher standards?

Fundamentalism is always about the measure of the others liberalism until it vanquishes the other. Modern discourses and philosophies find it hard to counter fundamentalist ideology of Islam. Christianity and Communist ideologies went through intellectual and moral turmoils over centuries through inquisitions, church-state strife, world wars, collapse of states and on and on. However with Islamic ideology, there is no space for introspection or conversation. Its practitioners reject any critique and tactically attack all of it by bringing (amoral) equivalence of similar bigotries committed by the ideology or religion its critic purportedly stands for.

It is this turbulent True-believer syndrome, deafening rejection of dialogue and reforms from within make Islamic faith potent that seeks to carry the entire planet to a regressive monolith through great bouts of neurosis and pain.