From the WSJ Opinion Archives
CITIZEN OF THE WORLD
I Can't Stand Pat
Robertson had a point. That's why he should have kept his mouth shut.
Pat Robertson is at it again, and as usual it's not pretty. He is a man with whom I wouldn't normally concur--a man, in fact, with whom I wouldn't be caught dead (let's face it, would you want to sit down with him for a meal of milk and meatloaf?). Recently, however, he said something with which I am in narrow agreement, though he did, in his typically scattershot way, dilute the truth of his basic assertion with an anti-immigrant screed that brought him only discredit.
Islam, said Mr. Robertson on his Christian Broadcasting Network, "is not a peaceful religion that wants to coexist. They [sic] want to coexist until they can control, dominate and then if need be destroy." If this was a commentary on the kind of Wahhabi Islam emanating from Saudi Arabia, practiced by the Taliban and pursued by Muslim fundamentalists from Algeria to the Philippines, then one can have no quarrel with Mr. Robertson. This is the brand of Islam that is at war not merely with the West, but also with Jewish Israel and secular India (whose majority is Hindu, but whose elites are highly Westernized, and which has the world's second-biggest Muslim population, after Indonesia), as well as with the moderate versions of Islam practiced in such Muslim countries as Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Turkey.
Yet sometimes a defensible message is vitiated by its messenger, especially when the latter has a history of intemperance and bigotry. One suspects that Mr. Robertson is incapable of telling the difference between one kind of Islam and another, between the circumspect Islam of the moderates, on the one hand, and, on the other, the destructive/triumphalist variety practiced by our foes. One's suspicions are bolstered by his accompanying remarks, which veered away from a legitimate theme--Does Islam, as practiced by hardliners in Muslim countries, offer a threat to our civilization and way of life?--toward some silly nativist ordure about immigrants.
Unable to resist the call of his innermost instincts, Mr. Robertson added that "the fact is that our immigration policies are now so skewed to the Middle East and away from Europe that we have introduced these people into our midst and undoubtedly there are terrorist cells all over them." Dang! as a follower of the Rev. Pat might say. Now why did he have to ruin a perfectly respectable assertion ("Islam is not a peaceful religion") with this hackneyed claptrap about immigration?
The real shame to all this, alas, is that Mr. Robertson, in his clumsy, ugly way, has done a disservice to us all: He has now made it doubly difficult to have a frank, unembarrassed discussion about the threat posed by fundamentalist Islam, both by Islamists abroad and by those Islamists (note: I didn't say Muslims) who reside in our midst. He helped lay the ground for a politically correct backlash, in which candor about Islam is prohibited, and a meaningful censure of the triumphalist practitioners of that faith is likely to be mistaken for racism, or xenophobia, or intolerance.
Couldn't he have just kept silent for once?
Mr. Varadarajan is deputy editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Tuesdays.
