Tolerance Is Our Virtue New York is oasis of acceptance in a world of faith-based fanatics These days, for all its stupidities, New York is clearly a model of reason and toleration for the world. New Yorkers kill for love or the lack of it, for money or parking spots, for gold chains or respect, and even, in at least one recent case, to get a rent-free apartment. They don't kill over religion. They don't kill over competing visions of paradise. They don't kill for a faith. It's impossible to imagine happening here what has just happened in Tel Aviv, when a faith-based messenger arrived in the night at the crowded Pasha disco, full of certainty and death. For him, a blessed eternity was at hand. He exploded his bomb, ripping life out of himself and 20 young men and women, and mutilating about a hundred more. For a fraction of a second, he must have felt suffused with divinity. Then, in the name of his god, that sliver of the Earth, warmed by the ancient Mediterranean, became a screaming wilderness of torn legs and heads, brains and blood, and kids who would be 19 forever. Nor could New York ever be like Afghanistan, where the faith-based Taliban wave Kalashnikovs and the Koran and harden their iron grip on all aspects of human life. The goons of the religious police are everywhere. They force women to wear head-to-toe burkhas, have banned high heels and makeup, and forced women to stay home. Women are no longer allowed to work or be educated, and even boys' schools have been crippled, because before the Taliban triumph, two-thirds of the teachers were women. Music is, of course, forbidden in the name of their snarling god, along with television, card games, movies and dancing. All fundamentalists fear the same things: pleasure and laughter. Now, after their great triumph over the Buddhist statues, the Taliban are insisting that non-Muslims must soon wear yellow badges, like the Jews of the Nazi era. Viciousness Spreads As bodies are buried in Israel, the fundamentalist virus is spreading all over the world. In Sudan, faith-based hard men in the Muslim north continue to kill Christians in the south or kidnap them into slavery. In the Philippines, faith-based Muslim guerrillas kidnap, torture and behead hostages in the name of Allah. In Algeria, faith-based insurgents routinely enter isolated villages and cut the throats of men, women and children. And while millions of Africans are dying in the greatest human calamity since the Black Death in the 14th century, Muslim regimes are preparing a ferocious No to life. Libya, Iran, Sudan and Pakistan plan to block efforts at the United Nations AIDS summit this month to create a concrete program that might halt the plague. They object — on religious grounds — to sexual education for women, or the supply of condoms to women. They object to helping homosexuals, prisoners and prostitutes. Fundamentalists always believe that there can be no redemption until you die. New York is mercifully free of such grim stupidity. In spite of our rough manners, we remain insistently plural and tolerant. The idiots who blew up the World Trade Center were not really New Yorkers. The city's thousands of Muslims know they can live according to the humane and tolerant traditions of Islam, while their daughters go to a university. In this city, nobody will ever be forced to wear a yellow badge. Serious Laughter Is in Order One of the keys to the New York style is laughter. When Mayor Giuliani talks about his own branch office of the Taliban — the decency committee that will inspect publicly funded art — most New Yorkers laugh out loud. Who can take seriously a committee on decency that includes the barrister Raoul Felder as one of its members? We also laugh when George W. Bush stands up and says, in effect, that the wall between church and state must be breached and the instrument for this assault will be the faith-based initiative. This is such a bald form of payoff to the fundamentalist yahoos who helped him win the presidency (if not the popular vote) that the rest of us must laugh. When Bush says that Jesus Christ is his favorite philosopher, we wonder if his philosopher would have presided over 150 executions. Jesus the Nazarene, after all, remains the most famous victim of capital punishment. And when we read that Attorney Mullah John Ashcroft starts his day with a prayer meeting in government offices, we think of "Saturday Night Live" or the Knicks' locker room. To be sure, we've had our outbreaks of religious violence. The events in Crown Heights were dreadful, but they couldn't compare with the Orange Riots of 1871, where Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants collided on the 12th of July on Eighth Ave., just as they still do in some parts of Northern Ireland. The British-borne virus of faith-based intolerance left more than 60 dead and more than 100 injured. We've never done that again. New York learned its bitter lesson. Successful Formula Is Simple From Israel to Kabul, there are lessons to be learned from the social alloy that has been forged in this city. The most important is this: never weld religion to power. Believe whatever creed you choose to believe, but do not try to impose it on others. The Founding Fathers were flawed men, particularly about slavery. But they knew history. They understood the gangster nature of the faith-based Crusades. They knew that almost 300 years of religious wars in Europe had led to mountains of corpses and the destruction of cities, art and human liberty. That's why they insisted on separating church from state. And for a long time, there has been no better example of the value of that separation than New York. We can't be smug, of course, because right now some faith-based idiot might be mixing chemicals in a New York basement. He will have few allies. The rest of us are too busy working and bitching, dreaming and dancing. Or watching our daughters raise diplomas toward the summer sky. Original Publication Date: 6/4/01 New York Daily News |