Another reason I’m very distrustful…

…about the aroma of nativism that suffuses the dishonest coverage of the GZM by organs like FoxNews is articles like this:

“An Unprofitable Mosque: Muslim Troubles in New Haven.” The mosque on one of New Haven’s finest residential streets had been dedicated five years earlier, but only after a struggle in which the imam was pressured to accept an alternate site.

As article put it, “When the residents of this aristocratic avenue discovered that they were in danger of seeing a mosque spring up among them, with all that the establishment of such a structure implied, they bestirred themselves to oppose the project. The wisest of the Muslims here did not favor it, and the mosque was induced to exchange the lot for a good one in some other locality.” But that site was also deemed “too good” for Muslims, so a lesser lot was found. The imam refused this, according to article, and built the mosque as originally planned on wealthy Hillhouse Avenue.

According to the article, the mosque fell into debt (its members being mainly “unskilled laborers”). “The result shows how foolish were those who persisted in building the mosque on the spot where it stands,” The article concluded. “How much spite had to do with it cannot now be ascertained, but the complete history of the negotiations would be very interesting. The edifice invaded the most exclusive homes of wealth and culture. It is an eye-sore on the avenue, a source of annoyance and injury to neighboring residents, and a complete failure as a business enterprise.”

Oh wait! Did I say mosque? This article was actually about St. Mary’s Catholic Church and was written in 1879. As a member of an immigrant Church which is only here on the sufferance of a population that is finding it harder and harder to contain its contempt for my faith, I am reluctant, for prudential reasons, to urge that post-Christian population to be too swift to treat immigrant religions like excluded outsiders.

Not that this changes my equally practical opinion that the imam needs to face reality about the hostility his mosque has engendered. But, with respect to Team Catholic’s approach to the problem, I’m not so hot on Keep All Them Murdering Muslims Out of the Neighborhood rhetoric because it provides an excellent prologue to Keep All Them Child Abusing Pervert Catholics Out of the Neighborhood rhetoric. Anybody who thinks that can’t happen is innocent of the tactics that totalitarian states used against the Church throughout the 20th Century. And, as one of the most Tired Democracies on the planet, we are well on the way to the embrace of some form of totalitarianism. My big fear is not guys in caves. My big fear is of what Lincoln articulated 150 years ago:

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?– Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!–All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.