The controversy over the proposed mosque and community center in Manhattan is a case in point. In fact, it is the case point. It is true that Imam Rauf wins both ways: If he is allowed to proceed with his project, he scores both a concrete and a propagandistic victory for Islam in the United States; if he loses, he succeeds in confirming the Islamic world in its hatred and contempt of America. On the other hand, it is equally true that President Obama stands to lose both ways, whether Rauf loses or if he wins. And not the president only, but the American political establishment as well. Wide-spread anti-Muslim feeling among the American public is the greatest thing the governing elite has to fear. In the present historical context, it is a more vital threat to the imperium’s goals, and plans toward those goals, than anti-immigration, anti-diversity, anti-war, anti-internationalist, and anti-globalist sentiment feeling could ever be. That is because a popular reaction against Islam—Islam abroad and Islam in America—is a reaction against all of these things wrapped into an entity, a single object of resentment and revulsion. By rebelling against the mosque at Ground Zero, the American people are in rebellion against the overweening elite agenda taken as a whole. This rebellion must be what our elected “leaders,” somehow become our self-appointed masters, have feared for decades. If the thing spreads, and it shows every sign of spreading and taking hold across the country, how will they handle the crisis? There will be only two ways of doing so: Either they renounce their agenda—or drop every pretence to popular democratic freedoms in this country by asserting their right and capacity to exert undemocratic control over a supposedly free people. Last weekend, Pastor Terry Jones in Florida held in his hand, together with his box of matches, the power to wreck every American military, diplomatic, economic, social, and cultural initiative undertaken over a large portion of the earth. Had he struck that match, the war in Afghanistan would be concluded many moons sooner than July 2011, and the 50,000 American troops remaining in Iraq would not be around past Thanksgiving or Christmas to back up incompetent Iraqi brigades assailed by a few ragged fighters for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Nor would Richard Holbrooke and Hillary Clinton be presiding for long over a massive, and massively expensive, humanitarian effort to alleviate the sufferings of flood victims in Pakistan. Nor…the list of things the American government would not be doing, and the number of Muslim-inhabited places the world over in which it would not be doing them had Pastor Williams actually burned his stack of Korans, is far too long to record in a column of 1200 words. One can say this at least for the Muslims peoples: They will not continue to accept the aid of our troops, our guns, our food bundles, or even our almighty dollars, once insults by Americans to their religion become commonplace in this country. To the contrary: They will wish us and all our expensive presents OUT—and, if we do not move fast enough, they will attempt to kill all the American malingerers left among them. While Mr. Jones, in the crisis, blinked and withheld the match, the fact that this gray theological nobody was personally implored by the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and VIPs abroad to stay his hand speaks volumes about the level of panic in high places over the weekend of last September the tenth. But that is only the beginning. Right away the copycats sprang up. Two pastors in Tennessee held a private Koran burning over the weekend, and an anonymous protester set fire to a copy of the book outside a mosque in East Lansing. In response, Muslim crowds rioted in Afghanistan and Kashmir and a number of people were killed. Ours is an age of mass enthusiasms and participation, also of mass hysteria. It is possible to imagine Koran burnings across the country becoming as common as flag-burning was in the era of the Vietnam War. In such circumstances, it takes no imagination at all to anticipate what the international consequences would be, and into what chaos it would throw the best-laid schemes of the State Department, the Department of Defense, the CIA, and the rest of them. The fact was not lost on Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who suggested Koran burning may be found by American judges to be the equivalent of shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater. His response suggests what we have to expect from the establishment in this matter. Apparently it is legal to burn the Stars and Stripes only because Americans do not start deadly riots over such demonstrations. The outraged response to plans for a mosque at Ground Zero is an act of popular rebellion against the powers that be in America. It is an aspect of the wider rebellion that that includes the virulent reaction to the Federal stimulus plan; to the bailout of the banks and the automakers and the irresponsible house buyers; to the nationalized health care bill; to the jobless “recovery;” to the government’s overt refusal to limit or even control immigration but rather to defend and encourage it; to its incompetence in dealing with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico; and to the simple fact of a seemingly alien President in the White House. The Tea Party is part of that rebellion, and so is the turn toward the Republican Party by a majority of independents and many Democrats. Yet, despite the Tea Party, it is still largely a rebellion without an agenda. That is to say, it is primarily an emotional rather than a political rebellion, as Glenn Beck’s rally in Washington last month suggested. The American public is aware that the country is afflicted with a wasting condition, possibly fatal, and that this state of affairs was brought on by the political, administrative, and bureaucratic classes: by people willing to risk, and possibly even determined to achieve, the destruction of the country. It took that public a long time—far too long—to understand what was happening or even to pay attention to the process, but the brazen effrontery of the Obama administration’s half-term in office has awakened it, and seized its attention at last. A significant number Americans now realize that they want no part of their “leaders’” agenda, and they are more than eager to say so; indeed, they are saying it openly and passionately. The Great Awakening of Middle America—and parts of America above and below the middle—has begun. The nightmare dreamed for so many years by the managerial class as a whole, and the neoconservatives in particular, is becoming a reality. The Great Beast they fear has been aroused, and is alert to the pit that has been dug for it. Similarly, the Establishment is now forewarned by the newly self-reassertive Beast. The fact makes it certain that the future will be a dangerous one. As James Kalb asks in his recent book, The Tyranny of Liberalism: Who knows how far liberals are prepared to go—in discouraging disagreement and outlawing opposition to themselves and their agenda? The answer is, surely: As far as they dare to go. It is up to the rest of the country to convince them that they dassn’t go any further, as American Southerners and frontiersmen used to say. ### |