The Joy of Hate (4 page)

But the commonsense argument is, Why would you? I mean, it’s
what people at the bar call a “dick move.” Yeah, I’m free to make jokes about 9/11, but I pretty much don’t. I know the difference between exercising my freedoms and bad taste. And the mosque, let’s face it, is in bad taste, only because they didn’t seem at all concerned about bad taste. But I also realize, bad taste is not illegal. If it were, every reality star on Bravo would be on death row.

But of course the moment this anxious sentiment about the mosque was raised, it drew ire from the mainstream media. They called it evidence of intolerance—or rather, Islamophobia. You—the Islamaphobe—don’t want the mosque built, obviously, because you hate Muslims. All of them.

I say, No, I don’t hate all of them. I just hate the ones who kill us. And the ones who cheer those who kill us. And the ones who don’t say anything about the ones who support those who kill us. And the ones who make excuses for them killing us. So yeah, I hate those Muslims. And throw in the non-Muslims who can’t bring themselves to see this difference. I hate them more, actually, than the Muslims.

I suppose that makes me intolerant.

Now, this is hilarious. Think about it: Because you hold a sensible opinion that’s sensitive to others’ emotions about a hugely traumatic event in our collective history, you’re a bigot. You’re intolerant. It’s the kind of thinking that ensures that Gitmo has a state-of-the-art soccer field while your kid’s high school holds bake sales in the rain to build one of their own. It’s amazing that looking out for those who have suffered, you become the bad guy.

And so there were two key things wrong with the arguments attacking those critical of the mosque.

One, nearly all of the sensible people opposed to the mosque
still understood
that the mosque had every right to be there
. We
were not questioning whether the “community center” could be built—we were just questioning the wisdom of building it. So that’s not intolerance at all. That’s just an opinion, and in fact, an incredibly tolerant one. Because you’re saying you don’t want it there but you wouldn’t stop it from being there. That’s the true definition of tolerance. Tolerance only matters when it comes to actions and things you don’t like. You want to see intolerance? Try to build a Jewish temple in Saudi Arabia’s capital. Your entire construction crew would be transformed into kindling before the first shovel hit the soil.

The real intolerance, in effect, was coming from those accusing the rest of us of intolerance
. They called us hatemongers. Yet it was those tolerant tools who were refusing to respect, or “tolerate,” an opposing opinion. They were the truly intolerant, the narrow-minded, the closed-brained. (And to add insult to injury, they wanted to use public funds to help build it—all in the name of “healing.” So you’re telling us you want to build this thing to bring the faiths together? You’re off to a great start, guys. Why not just produce
UBL: the Musical?
Wait, maybe that’s not a bad idea!)

So this got me to thinking: How odd was it that a mosque—which has coddled preachers of hate—was being championed as a beacon of tolerance?

That’s when I decided to test the mosque and its defenders. I announced on my blog that I was opening a gay, Islam-friendly bar next to the proposed mosque. I was sincere about this, and I had spoken to folks who were seriously interested in investing.

After I made the announcement, I received, in a matter of days, thousands of offers, ranging from financial advice to actual investment. Actually, the offers of money poured in—from a few
bucks to tens of thousands of dollars. It became so overwhelming, I gave up opening my e-mail. I received calls from networks all over the world—from Israel to Istanbul. Old ladies offered me part of their life savings; big-deal investment brokers wanted in on the ground floor (which, sad to say, didn’t exist, yet). I received a flood of suggestions for the name of the bar—some enormously clever, others just obscene and stupid. I liked the obscene and stupid ones the best. I’m simple like that.

But during this exercise, I exposed the true lie and hypocrisy behind those planning the mosque. The morning of the day that I was to appear on a major TV show to discuss the gay bar (tentatively titled Suspicious Packages), I made a few phone calls—first to the PR flacks fronting the mosque, the actual developers themselves, and the office of the imam who was heading the mosque project. No one got back to me. I finally found Park51 on Twitter (their handle is the actual street address). And there I asked them, bluntly, if they would support my gay bar.

They replied, “You’re free to open whatever you like. If you won’t consider the sensibilities of Muslims, you’re not going to build dialog.”

Bam! They made my point, in one simple sentence: If you won’t consider their sensibilities, get lost. This from a member of a group who refused to “consider the sensibilities” of the 9/11 victims’ families. The irony was so thick it would take you three tries to behead it with a large saber.

(Note: Because Park51 accused me of not wanting to build “dialog,” a friend suggested that I change the name of the bar to Dialog. That way, in effect, I would be building Dialog! Get it? No? Well, I don’t like you either.)

And there you realize how far Islamic public relations has come. They’ve discovered the secret to winning all debates:
hiding behind the shield of repressive tolerance. They were now more American than ever! For they quickly realized they can use “tolerance” as a weapon to subdue even its most polite critics, like me. Here you have a group, led by an imam who implicated the actions of the U.S., in part, for 9/11, calling me insensitive! These guys were learning fast, and I had to hand it to them. From the seventh century all the way to the twenty-first! How long until they cut a reality show deal? Or an album with the Dixie Chicks? The secret to blending, they found, was by bleating.

Just so you know, some of the mosque backers think Sharia law ain’t so bad. Mind you, Sharia law has no plank in its platform for tolerance—unless that plank is for hitting women over the head with. So in the most surreal mental mindmeld you can imagine, you have a group of intolerant people, open in their disgust of gays, women, atheists, and any religion that isn’t theirs, demanding tolerance for their intolerant beliefs. That’s balls: To them, tolerance is only a one-way street—the one Theo van Gogh died on. If you don’t know him, you should.

Before Park51 realized their Twitter feed was doing them no favors, they started responding to critics flippantly and, in attempts to be “hip,” actually poked fun at other religions. Here was one, directed at a guy with “Amish” in his Twitter handle:

This is funny—and possibly a not half-bad haiku, even without the intolerant hypocrisy. The Amish do not use modern technology like Twitter. How awesome is it Park51 had the guts to poke fun at those who aren’t even there to fight back?

When I engaged these folks on Twitter, more people found their feed, and the mosqueteers realized their hypocrisy was under scrutiny. So, suddenly, the tweeter disappeared, as did those silly (but no less intolerant) tweets.

Perhaps the mosque boss fired the poor tweeter and sent him home. Which, to me, is sad. Because in America, you can—and should—make fun of the Amish. You can make fun of Scientologists, too. And Catholics. This isn’t Islamabad, folks. It’s Islamagood! If the mosqueteers understood this, they would know that you can also make fun of Muslims. You can even print cartoons about them.

But actually, now that I think about that, I’d be dead wrong about the “making fun of Muslims” part. You can make fun of every religion in the book but Islam. To paraphrase Gavin McInnes, writer and founder of
Vice
magazine, there is a
Piss Christ
. But there’s no
Piss Anybody Else
. After all, rich artists prefer bundles of money over beheadings. You can’t relax at the Chateau Marmont, sipping champagne and chasing pool boys, without your head. Better to rip on Catholics—they’re nice people who obey the law!

To make my point clearer about the gay bar: I was trying to show that if the Muslim faith were truly tolerant, then they would welcome a gay bar. But the point doesn’t need to be made clearer—we know they wouldn’t—for they hate gays. In some countries they kill them. What I wanted to accomplish, I did: I revealed the fundamental hypocrisy of their “tolerance” defense.

It was too easy.

But more important, I exposed the hypocrisy of the gay left. Here’s a test: If a gay man had to choose between a straight, conservative male advocating gay rights, or an intolerant cleric espousing the death of homosexuals, who would he defend?

You would be surprised, for aside from a few gay bloggers and writers, the gays on the left assessed my proposal as “anti-gay.” Yep, my idea to open a gay bar was seen as “anti-gay.” In effect, my challenge to Islam to face the reality of gay life … was perceived as homophobic. And so you witness the shape-shifting nature of tolerance. Leftists would rather be tolerant of people who want them dead than a person fighting for gay acceptance. Why? Well, because that person doing the fighting, isn’t a leftist like them. Talk about Stockholm syndrome. Unless being murdered in a fundamentalist pogrom is the latest fad sweeping Manhattan’s Chelsea district, I’m just not getting this.

How tolerant is that?

Short answer: not very.

Longer answer: The controversy arising from the Ground Zero mosque provides a beautiful lesson in repressive tolerance. The ploy—protecting intolerant ideas under the shield of tolerance—underlined the surreal nature of the media circus. In the end, it could prove dangerous. With Muslim women now asking to be exempt from security practices while boarding planes, we find that tolerance requires you be treated the same and differently—simultaneously. And the result, a more unsafe world—all in the name of tolerance. I’d call it cartoonish, but that would be insulting to
The Family Circus
. Or
Garfield
. Or even
Brenda Starr
.

Which reminds me. As the mosque controversy exploded, and the media began painting all mosque critics as Islamophobes, newspapers decided to remove a single paneled comic strip from syndication. The cartoon—titled “Where’s Mohammed?”—was a parody of “Where’s Waldo?” And there was no Mohammed in the cartoon. Still, out of fear, thinly masquerading as tolerance,
the editors of the
Washington Post
Style section had it removed. Other papers followed. The irony—that a few in the media labeling citizens as Islamophobes were suddenly acting like moral cowards under the mask of tolerance—tells you everything you need to know about the wussification of modern life. Honestly, spineless hypocrisy like this is why no one’s buying papers anymore, and instead would prefer to get their news from a short, loud talk show host with an embarrassing birthmark situated awkwardly above his pelvis.

THIS IS A CHAPTER ABOUT
the male breast. The beautiful, succulent, but often misunderstood, male breast. See, as we become a society overrun by scolds and whiners, we will come across stuff that’s deemed evil, when it’s not.

Colloqualisms are often the first to get hit. Whether it’s “chink in the armor” or perhaps a word like
niggardly
, the easily offended would rather not have such things present in everyday language—even if you’re using them correctly and without offense. But for the most part, I get it. These days, I can’t believe anyone would use the word
niggardly
in a headline if it wasn’t intended to get a snicker from a racist who takes pleasure in the not-so-veiled similarity to the vile slur against blacks. I’ll give a pass, however, to Ohio Democratic senator Sherrod Brown, who, when appearing on MSNBC’s
The Dylan Ratigan Show
back in March 2012, used the word
niggardly
to describe how some in Congress are acting toward veterans. He used the word correctly, and without malice to blacks. I make this point knowing that an equivalent writer on the left would not give the same pass to a Republican senator who might do the same thing. I guess I am just a better person (I can bench-press twice my own weight and I’m learning Esperanto).

So we’ll let that go. My concern, for the moment, is “moobs.” Moobs are man boobs. You’ve probably seen them around town—usually at the public pool, or at the Sandals resort you made the mistake of visiting in the late nineties. Moobs travel in pairs and are often connected to middle-aged men who suntan poorly. Possessors of moobs are generally gentle souls who shun exercise in favor of beer and television. Moobs are a scourge of dudes as they drift into their forties (and also for young, unfortunate men suffering a medical condition called gynecomastia). I had moobs for about three years, when I gave up the gym in England in favor of red wine, Indian food, and training bras. When they became too big—so big, in fact, that I would get aroused by them when I caught myself in the mirror—I realized it was time to return to the toning and firming that I’d performed with relish years before. That’s the cruel prank of exercise—all those bench presses I did to give me that hardened V-shape chest were now paying me back in erotic flab. Once you stop pumping iron, that muscle sags like CNN’s ratings. It was time to either hit the gym or switch genders.

I bring up moobs for the sake of a man named Eduardo Ibarra Perez, who, back in May 2010, ended up on a most-wanted flyer, shirtless. Perez was wanted for a variety of infractions, but it seemed the most obvious one at the moment was his gigantic moobs. What made them stand out, though, was not their flabbiness but the fact that the flabbiness had been blurred, so you could not make them out. Yes, whoever in law enforcement decided to distribute the flyer felt that Perez’s breasts might be too offensive to our puritan sensibilities, perhaps because they so closely resembled the pouting female bosoms of a local female (the similarities to my 1983 prom date were uncanny; oddly, she also ended up on a law enforcement poster).