If you read Naipaul and especially Ibn Warraq, you get a better picture of the secularist west’s use of the image of Islam as a foil against Church.

Fr. John, can you expand on this?

The truth of things, according to Islam’s ‘posse of believers’ serves as another example of what it means to be a sincere believer in that book. The Christ we find in our Book requires much of us; the voice ‘incarnated’ in theirs requires much of the rest of us, insisting that we be cowed.
I wonder what the limit of our tolerance for their intolerance is, and what will our intolerance look like when it manifests? The court case in France regarding the veiled woman driver and her polygamous husband right now may be the tipping point.

South Park has already been the subject of an entire politically-oriented book, S.P. Conservatives. To go off about Frank Schaeffer at this point is silly – this is about the genetic trait native to Islam to resort to terrorism. We ought to question our complacency in the face of this overt threat, certainly. The genesis of secular Western islamophilia is in anti-catholic Reform polemic, not in any political stance currently on the scene. If you read Naipaul and especially Ibn Warraq, you get a better picture of the secularist west’s use of the image of Islam as a foil against Church. I don’ think Zwingli or Calvin really qualify as “leftist” – though they were the Progressives of their day.

Essentialist arguments conflating tolerance for Islamism and any political slant are baseless and easily refuted. Generally, people use whatever rhetorical tools at hand to best their opponents. It distresses me once again to read comments of such divisive nature on this blog. I don’t read AOIUSA to confirm my mistrust of ‘those other people I disagree with on policy’ but to get the zeitgeist of the Orthodox scene and its intersection with popular culture. Please be reasonable. I can search out the crankiness of an Anne Coulter readily enough elsewhere.

Fr Peter, that’s the point. Jews, Buddhists, but most especially Christians are still the likeliest target for bigotry. Southpark per se doesn’t bother me (well, a little) as it’s a satire and it gleefully skewers the pieties of the Left with abandon. In fact, that’s probably a reason that so many on the Left are laying low: not only are they cowards, but they’ve been the target of Southpark’s withering mockery in the past.

It’s the more serious liberal commentators who are ever-ready to stab Christians in the back on some important issue that worry me far more than a silly, poorly-drawn cartoon. Think Barry Lynn, Al Sharpton, and our own Frank Schaeffer. They and their ilk have done incalculable damage to the traditionalist point of view, effectively silencing counterveiling forces on the Right. Let’s be honest, up until fairly recently, they’ve had a hammerlock on the media.