Progressive Mugged By...

It used to be said that a conservative was a liberal that has been mugged.  Sometimes, but often only in a metaphorical sense.  I think of myself as a libertarian who was mugged by reality (or whatever you call the state of the San Francisco Bay Area).  Front Page has a fascinating article by a progressive filmmaker named Eric Allen Bell who started to make a documentary about the narrow-minded people of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, who were protesting the building of a 53,000 square foot mosque.  (How many Muslims are there in Murfreesboro, anyway?)

He started out full of progressive contempt for these rubes...but the more he looked at the effects of Islam on societies in which it is a majority, the more he begin to see that perhaps the rubes were not expressing themselves well, but they did have a point worth considering:

Over the coming months I watched as the Muslim Brotherhood gained political power in Egypt.  I saw that cab driver’s worst fears come true as Coptic Christians were attacked by Islamic mobs.  I saw Tunisia institute Sharia, the brutal Islamic Law.  After Libya fell, the Transitional Council also instituted Islamic Law.  The nuclear armed Islamic government of Pakistan arrested and punished those who cooperated with the United States in killing Osama Bin Laden.  A woman under the Islamic government of Afghanistan faced execution for the crime of being raped.  Similar news stories emerged from Iran.  A man who typed “there is no god” as his Facebook status in Indonesia, the largest Islamic country in the world, was arrested for blasphemy.

 Several Muslim men in England were arrested for handing out leaflets to Londoners demanding that homosexuals be executed by hanging for violating Islamic Law with their lifestyle.

And it struck me.  Even though these angry townspeople in Mufreesboro, TN had not articulated their concerns very well, they were only half wrong.  

And when he went to the Hollyweird set who were prepared to fund his movie about the dangers and evils of Christianity dominance in America, he started to point out that for all their errors, they were only half wrong. There was a real issue that needed discussion--and suddenly, he became anethema to progressives, for pointing out that the left's alliance with and defense of Islam was contrary to progressive values.

It has clearly been a sobering experience for him.  He now realizes that much of what progressivism stands for concerning Islam is actually a reactionary, cliche-ridden defense of a system that will have no problem whatosever destroying everything that progressives support.