We've been hearing more talk, buzz and chatter about Shariah lately than I imagined was possible. Unfortunately, much of it is still uninformed and reliant only on the emotional bouyance of 9/11, as though the battleground of Lower Manhattan is the only place a Shariah-advancing imam should be barred from building an anti-Constitutional outpost of Islam. Defenders of the mosque project, meanwhile, exhale testaments to religious freedom and tolerance that crest and crash over the apparently unimagined, unknown, ungrasped perils to liberty, equality and freedom of conscience that are actually advertised in Islam's mainstream tenets. We must support this mosque, we are told, lest we become, as MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell actually said on the air (without blushing, fainting or otherwise convulsing), like the 9/11 jihadists. But this is a kind of tolerance without limits.

And how virtuous is that? The British philosopher Karl Popper formulated his answer more than a half century ago.

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed and tolerance with them.... We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade (Italics added.)

As the situation vis a vis the Shariah-spreading, Wahhabi-supporting, Qaradawi-admiring, taqiyya** (deception) - mongering,  open-to-jihad-funding Imam Fesial Rauf tells us, the West is now at the point where enforcing “openness” trumps preserving “tolerance.” In other words, better to be “open” to intolerance (read: Islamic doctrine as codified in the Shariah on women, non-Muslims, freedom of conscience) than “closed” to anything -- including intolerance. There is some ripe irony in the fact, according to this mindset, that tolerating the intolerant becomes the ultimate act of openness -- literally “ultimate,” as Popper tells us, since tolerance of the intolerant leads to the destruction of the tolerant.

Call it terminal tolerance.

With several changes, from The Death of the Grown-Up, pp. 161-162

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** Taqiyya is Islamically sanctioned deception. When I first ventured  onto Imam Rauf's Cordoba Initiative website earlier this year, I found this classic example, now scrubbed from the site, along with other extremely interesting information, as Christine Brim startlingly reports at Big Peace.com (more on that in this week's column):

Here's what I saved from the Cordoba Initiative website, circa May 2010:

The Qur’an makes it clear that Mohammed did not establish his new faith in a vacuum; he simply reinstated a primordial religion originally founded by Abraham, making it accessible to all of humanity.

Catch the blenderizing of Judaism and Christianity into Islam.

Because of this, Jews and Christians (known in Islam as “People of the Book”) are seen as brothers and sisters of Muslims and common followers of scripture. Forced conversion, as a result, was never a policy of Muslim conquerors during the period of Islam’s spread.

Never (no, not much)!

Instead, Jews and Christians living under Muslim rule simply had to pay a tax to finance their protection by their Muslim overlords.

"Simply had to pay a tax" ... Sounds greatl Gee, where do we sign up? The Ground Zero Mosque?

In the post-9/11 environment, some Americans tend to think of Islam as a violent creed and of those who practice jihad as terrorists by definition. Jihad, however, is a large and complicated concept, whose meaning actually boils down to the need for peaceful struggle for self-betterment—the war that we wage against the vices within ourselves—

like Weight Watchers.

-- a central injunction to all Muslims. That Americans associate Islam with violence is, of course, entirely the fault of the extremists who perpetrate crimes under a false Islamic guise.

Lies. But not because I say so. Because Islam says so. From Reliance of the Traveller, the multi-mufti and Al Azhar approved guide to Shariah (that every American should study to learn about Shariah):

o9.0

(O: Jihad means to war against non-Muslims, and is etymologically derived from the word mujahada, signifying warfare to establish the religion. And it is the lesser jihad. As for the greater jihad, it is a spiritual warfare against the lower self (nafs), which is why the Prophet ... said as he was returning from from jihad,

"We have returned from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad."

The scriptural basis for jihad, prior to scholarly consensus (def. b7) is such Koranic verses as:

(1) "Fighting is prescribed for you" (Koran 2:216)

(2) "Slay them wherever you find them" (Koran 4:89) ...

It goes on from there, moving from the Koran to the Hadiths (lore of Mohammed) but the gist is clear.

The Rauf site failed to come clean about a crucial, authoritative definition of jihad; in fact, the only definition of jihad that actually matters to -- and endangers -- non-Muslims. That is, it's all very nice if Muslims successfully take up their greater jihads on a personal level, but it's the so-called lesser jihad (holy war) to Islam (submission) that counts for everyone else.

Flimflamming jihad -- how "moderate" is that?