Tolerating intolerance

Neo-Neocon turns her gimlet eye on the cartoon controversy and, as usual, says things that are worth listening to. The most important, I think, is this statement:

Tolerance should not be tolerant of intolerance, or it sows the seeds of its own destruction.

That's pretty much it, isn't it. The tolerant are essentially stretching their necks out for the intolerant executioner's blade. Neo-Neocon doesn't stop there. I'll amuse myself and entice you with a few other important things she says, and then urge you to read her article yourself:

If an extremist minority is sizeable enough, angry enough, active enough, and well-armed enough, it can do a great deal of harm; especially if the majority is silent, and is cowed by that minority. *** But that fatwa [against Salman Rushdie] seems to have represented the rumblings of a strain of Islam that has since become bolder, more widespread, and more vocal. In Europe in particular, this strain has been widely catered to in the name of tolerance and diversity. But the Europeans should have recognized far sooner that this may be another case of feeding an alligator in hopes that it will eat you last. And that's because alligators are never sated; they just grow stronger and hungrier when fed. *** The intolerance of Islamicist extremists runs very deep: they feel that they should be able to impose their own standards on the European societies they have entered but not embraced. In their successful attempt--encouraged by European tolerance--to keep their own customs and religion and culture, they have failed to adopt the most important tenet of Enlightenment thought: the idea that they cannot dictate their own mores to others.

Go ahead! Make your day. Read the rest.