"It is Cowardice."

So says Catholic blogger Mark Shea:

It's easy as pie to generalize to millions of people the crimes of a few. We Catholics have had it done to us. And we can have it done to us again. So we should be bloody cautious about insane schemes to do it to 18 million fellow citizens.

The grotesque excuse "But the the first amendment is dead, and Islam killed it. There is no 'freedom of speech' or 'freedom of religion' with the threat of Muslim violence hanging over your head" is rubbish. Cancelling the rights of 307 million people because you are, by your own admission, afraid is neither patriotism, nor courage, nor Christian fortitude. It is cowardice. And it is extra-special cowardice when you are ready to cancel your most precious national heritage because you are afraid of a speck.

Bravo. I have been calling this cowardice "stupidity" since I started blogging, and it is monumentally stupid. But that's just the adjective. Cowardice is the noun. There are less than 10,000 people worldwide who are members of al Qaeda, according to Get Religion. That's 10,000 out of 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. These 10,000 people have, by and large, scared the shit out of over 300 million Americans to the point where we're actively restricting our own rights to speech, religion, the press, and assembly in order to root out possible sympathizers to those 10,000 because, well, 19 such people were capable of killing over 3,000 of us using box cutters to hijack four planes. We are willing to torture, maim, kill, and otherwise victimize 18 million Muslim Americans as like-minded in every respect to those 19 and their 9,981 cohorts around the world.

"Oh," you retort, "but how many millions more are not active al Qaeda members but who sympathize, support, and cheer them on from the sidelines? Shouldn't it be worth it to do all of these things to all Muslims to find out who the bad ones are?" Well, why don't we just intern them, OK? Like we did to Japanese Americans, whom we just assumed were sypathetic to Japan and hated America. Has it ever occurred to the right wing nuthouse that Muslims might hate Americans because we would really like to do these hateful things? Bubbling just under the surface of one of the major American political parties is the outright rejection of one whole group of people, religious bigotry, and white supremacy. Remember, the most significant bloc comprising this party are southern Christian whites, and we all know that many in the South still have a problem relinquishing the flag of the slavery-loving Confederacy, 145 years after losing in the Civil War.

But, instead of calling this what it is -- cowardice -- the media treat it like it's a rational debate. Please tell me -- what's rational about cowardice? No, we hear about the "insenstivity" of Muslims who want to build a mosque "at" or "on" Ground Zero. Nice try, but most of us see through that.