NY Times asks: Are Muslims the new Catholics?

The politically correct New York Times ran an unusual op-ed piece on Monday, contributed by Doug Saunders, writing from Toronto. Mr Saunders draws a strong analogy between contemporary "concerns" about Islam and the Islamization of the West, on the one hand, and 20th-century American anti-Catholicism on the other.

He makes the point that as late as 1950, American Freedom and Catholic Power sold nearly a quarter of a million copies in the USA, and was on the Times best-seller list for weeks. earlier feelings of anger and to anti-Catholic sentiments of earlier generations.

"The view that members of a religious minority are not to be trusted — that they are predisposed to extremism, disloyalty and violence; resist assimilation; reproduce at alarming rates, and are theologically compelled to impose their backward religious laws on their adopted home — is not new.... From the 19th century on, distrust, violence and, eventually, immigration restrictions were aimed at waves of Roman Catholic immigrants."


Mr Saunders continues: "Many Americans shunned such views, but some liberals did not. Mr. Blanshard’s book was endorsed by the likes of John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, and respected scholars like Seymour Martin Lipset, Reinhold Niebuhr and Sidney Hook debated Catholics’ supposed propensity toward authoritarianism."

The point Mr Saunders overlooks -- thus rendering his argument specious -- is that the moral and social values espoused by Catholics are virtually identical to the Protestant Christian values on which America was founded and built.

Muslims, however, follow a false prophet and seek to impose on Western society a culture which is backward, barbaric, and alien to our way of life. If we think the Islamists are predisposed to extremism, disloyalty and violence; resist assimilation; reproduce at alarming rates, and are theologically compelled to impose their backward religious laws on their adopted home — we do so with good reason.

Further reading on WWW: "How can we be silent in the face of Islamization of our country?" This post has been in the top five on Walt's "hits list" for weeks now.