SLO County doesn’t need holy rants or secular sneers. We need honest debate | Opinion

When our district attorney hit “share” on posts linking New York’s new Muslim mayor to the 9/11 hijackers, he thought he was sounding a prophetic alarm. In reality, he joined a local arms race in moral panic.

In a thoughtful response, Dr. Rushdi Cader, a Muslim community leader, said, “In our increasingly polarized time, it is not indignation that inches our nation forward, it is forgiveness.”

That magnanimity didn’t last long. In short order, the same “dear friend” was being accused in print of “character assassination,” as Dr. Cader traded private affection for public denunciation.

So the spiral into our septic tank of toxic partisanship continues.

On one side you have Dan Dow’s Facebook theology. On the other, joining Dr. Cader, you have political leaders, retired judges and Tribune voices happy to brand SLO County Republicans of “fascism” and “spreading racist tropes.”

Different villains, same lazy move. Find a label, skip the facts, light the match.

Cards on the table. I am an apophatic non-theist who pays taxes but can’t vote. I have no emotional stake in which prophet or politician wins the argument. My only stake is in the fragile public square that lets Muslims, Christians, Jews and skeptics like me live as equal citizens under the same civil law.

Truth is, two things can be true at once.

First, American Muslims are not the enemy. They are doctors, teachers, judges and shopkeepers

Second, radical Islamism is real. If 9/11 and the culture wars in Dearborn, Michigan — the first Arab-majority city in the United States — are not warning enough, Europe is the canary in the coal mine. For 20 years European capitals have lived with Islamist terrorism. Europol’s terrorism reports describe jihadist extremism as their primary terror concern.

This is not “Islamophobia.” It is a sober description of who has actually been planting bombs and stabbing strangers.

To see how bad it gets when a state cracks, look at my home country, Nigeria. Boko Haram, translated as “Western education is a sin,” has murdered or displaced more than 2 million Christians and Muslims. That is what happens when the thin tissue of liberal norms tears and theology picks up a machete.

None of this justifies smearing ordinary Muslims. It does justify taking the ideology of Islamism seriously.

For all its sins and Crusades, Judeo-Christian nations eventually made its peace with secularism. Much of the Islamic world still hasn’t.

There are Muslim democracies; Indonesia and Turkey show Islam and democracy can coexist. Islamism is something else. Through Dawah — the non-violent, ideological spread of Islam — Islamists propagate a long-term project to soften up and ultimately replace liberal democratic values with Islamist norms.

Recent polling in France shows that 57% of Muslims between 15 and 24 believe Islamic law should outrank French legislation.

In Sweden and Denmark, once progressive governments now institute mandatory cultural assimilation and anti-ghettoization programs.

For all its hypocrisies, the modern West has mostly pushed Christian theocrats to the margins. Even in the United States, two-thirds of Americans reject Christian nationalism. By contrast, Pew’s global Muslim survey finds overwhelming majorities in many Muslim-majority countries wanting sharia as official law.

Refusal to talk about this cultural clash is not tolerance. It is evasion.

Here’s the twist. Some of Islamism’s fiercest critics are Muslim states. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman and Bahrain treat the Muslim Brotherhood as a mortal threat. They know the line between piety and a bid for power in God’s name.

So should we.

Before conservative gets smug, the US has its own theocrats. Nick Fuentes preaches white supremacist Christian nationalism while Tucker Carlson blesses “replacement” fantasies. That is as far from the Sermon on the Mount as Hamas is from Rumi.

Islamism and Christian nationalist fascism are two sides of the same coin. Each rejects pluralism. Each wants a state that baptizes its political prejudices. Each insists that God has taken a side in their culture war. If you care about liberal democracy, you resist both.

Which brings us back to San Luis Obispo County. Mr. Dow was wrong to smear Zohran Mamdani. It is equally wrong to speak as if every local Republican were a closet brownshirt. This is not argument but reciprocal vilification. It renders any serious conversation about real dangers impossible.

A grown-up county and a grown-up country can hold three truths at once:

Bigotry against Muslims is wrong.

Radical Islamism is a clear and present danger to the liberal order that protects all of us.

The answer to religious or political extremism is not our own tribal theocracy, hijab or red cap. It is a stubborn recommitment to liberal, post-Enlightenment, Judeo-Christian-shaped culture where no faith owns the state.

SLO County does not need one more holy rant or secular sneer. It needs more people prepared to sit down, dispense with cant and debate honestly without importing a choir.

Clive Pinder hosts “CeaseFire” on KVEC 920AM/96.5 FM and writes at clivepinder.substack.com. He suspects if outrage is a virtue, California is well on its way to sainthood.