Isn’t Newt Gingrich supposed to be the intellectual, the “ideas man,” the not-as-loony-as-Sarah Palin option in the GOP? Apparently not:
There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.
Matt Yglesias is spot on:
Why on earth would we adopt this standard? There are no synagogues in the Vatican City, and yet we have Catholic churches all over the place. That’s because the United States of America isn’t a small city-state run by a religious leader. In Denmark, they have a state-sponsored church, but we don’t have a state-sponsored church because in the United States we have a strong belief in a brand of religious pluralism that’s served both the country and religion well. Saudi Arabia is notorious for its lack of freedom of religion, but we don’t improve anything by mimicking Saudi Arabia’s flaws.
Seriously. What political philosophy does Gingrich’s recommendations represent? That our freedoms should be gauged by the lowest common denominator anywhere on the globe, and calibrated accordingly on a case-by-case basis? What the worst of the worst regimes do, so too shall we to groups that share some cultural similarities to the regimes in question?
Brilliant.
I mean, if Israel won’t let Arabs buy land in 80% of Jerusalem, does that mean we shouldn’t let Jews buy real estate in 80% New York City? Obviously not, but by Gingrich’s standard, presumably, yes?
The rest of Gingrich’s piece is a mish-mash of demagoguery, misinformation, ingornace and dog whistle bigotry. He even claims to know what “every Islamist in the world” thinks (that “Cordoba” is a “a symbol of Islamic conquest”) and conflates the Cordoba House sponsors with Islamists (they are most definitely not, as they do not espouse that particular doctrine - not that, even if they were, we should persecute them).
UPDATE: Adam Serwer adds:
My first observation here is that Gingrich so admires the intolerance of his declared enemies that he wants to imitate it. The second is that Gingrich’s attempt to hold Muslims collectively accountable for the actions of a relative handful of extremists doesn’t simply reinforce al-Qaeda’s narrative that America is at war with Islam as a whole; it skirts dangerously close to accepting the terrorist-friendly premise that “innocents” as we generally understand the term don’t actually exist.
Yup.
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