Well, if we read the polls right, in the light of the port-management imbroglio, it may indicate that there is a sort of sub-rosa, grass-movements, silent-majority distrust of… well, international Islam. Surprise, surprise, surprise. This comes as a matter of slack-jawed amazement or grave concern to parties as various as the Zogby polls, CAIR, and our local congress-critters on both sides of the aisle. The rote insistence on Islam being a Religion of Peace is wearing very thin, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary… evidence that bulks large despite all the heroic efforts of Hollywood, an assortment of well-meaning civic associations, the intellectual strongholds, and last and not least, that final bastion of telling truth to power, those major news establishments.

Whoo-hoo! We must have all been brainwashed by the powers of the major media, at the express bidding of the eeeeeevviiiil Bush administration.
Yes, that would be the major media who have no trouble “disappearing” all those pictures of people jumping from the Twin Towers, tying up the 2004 presidential race in a pretty pink bow and handing it to a favored candidate, and making a mockery of every brave pledge of a free press and all the news that’s fit to print, unless it’s mockeries of Mohammad. The lords and grandees of our established press are powerless to banish uncomfortable suspicions amongst the proletariat, who have latched on to the very infra dig notion that the forces of militant Islam— which might possibly incorporate quite a lot more than the tiny percentage which is always being presented to us as being that which has committed the outrage du jour— presents to us a real and present danger. Despite our marching orders from our betters, we persist in our peasant conviction that the Religion of Peace is something other than advertised. This knowledge is the elephant in the room. Not looking at it’s wide flappy ears, long ropelike tail, and tree-trunk legs and all the rest of it, will not make it go away. The elephant is in the room, and has crapped copiously all over the carpet. Some politicians and pollsters, whose livelihood depends on accurately sensing certain aromas on the breeze are reacting already— an otherwise competent, well-thought of, and efficient port-management concern may have caught it in the neck because of this conviction. Interested and easily offended parties like CAIR are frantically applying the metaphorical room freshener, with less and less effect. It’s all gotten very, very stale, and I suspect that a lot of us are very, very tired of it all.

We are tired, and wearied to death of it all, and the Affair of the Danish Cartoons was the final straw. Or perhaps a sentence of death for apostasy for a Christian Afghan convert is the penultimate final straw… unless there is one absolutely final, ultimately ultimate straw, a Religion of Peace inspired outrage which I desperately hope will not involve a mushroom-shaped cloud over Tel Aviv, or some European or American city.

Whatever the Islamic outrage du jour is, we are tired of it. We are tired of easily-set off mobs, burning and murdering, of hatred preached in mosques and middle-eastern newspapers, of vile insults and lies, of beheadings and bombs, of bullying and threats, of rapes and mutilations and the oppression of women, and the usual slickly-suited creatures oozing justifications for it on the TV and radio afterwards. We are tired of the same old whine about persecution by the same creatures whose co-religionists practice persecution with vigor and keen enjoyment. We are tired to exhaustion of the Islamic worlds’ tattered woobie of the Palestinian people, taken out and shaken about whenever interest flags—never mind that the so-called Palestinian people seem to have suffered more at the hands of their so-called friends than they have gotten from their ostensible enemy. (If we need an example for strategic stupidity, counter-productive behavior and bad choice of friends in the face of misfortune and adversity, the Palestinian State must be Exhibit A through Exhibit-X whatever. But that is material for another rant, another day.) We are tired of being told we have to understand, to respect and to tolerate… and yet to see that that understanding, respect and toleration is not reciprocated in any meaningful way, in most of those places where Islam meets the other.

We are tired of being hectored about getting to know the Koran, and the Islamic street; especially since the more we get to know it, the more we dislike it, all of its works and ways; prejudices, ignorance and barbarities on full display, courtesy of the unfiltered blog media.
We are just tired, tired of being tolerant and calm and understanding and enduring. We want to think the best of people, truly we do— but there is a limit, and someday — probably terrifingly soon– it will be reached. I hope, personally, that it will not be tomorrow or the day after, when the last patient nerve is shredded into microscopic threads, and the limit has been reached. If and when that happens, the going will get really, really ugly.

Note to the Islamic world; please, please do not step on that last un-shredded nerve. Just, please. Don’t. It won’t be worth it. Trust me on this. Just don’t.