Summary: I'm grateful for Terry Jones' Koran-burning intolerance. Right wing rhetoric has escalated to the point where more is better, crossing the line into detachment from reality that should still be recognizable to most Americans as proto-fascism, a self-confirming, untestable ideological faith that demands that reality goes along with it. Terry Jones is an embarrassment the movement that spawned him. So out of touch, he believed that burning Koran's would win over moderate Muslims, and yet his style is on only inches from that which the Right is leaning into so enthusiastically these days, the rhetoric of crusaders or jihadists. Back in the 60's the CIA would seed peace rallies with hippie-clothed agents acting crazy and violent and ruining the rallies’ reputations. Jones’ is the Right’s own crazy—no need for CIA operatives. And there will be more like him, and there’s still hope that mainstream America will respond with a backlash of civility. Inconsistent with many of my progressive friends though, I agree with Jones about one thing. Jones’ believes we must fight back against Militant Muslim intolerance and violence. He believes as I do that sometimes you have to fight fire with fire, intolerance with intolerance. There’s a tendency among us civil-minded people to believe that one should never exercise intolerance since intolerance is always bad. I operate on the fundamental moral principle that since intolerance is bad, one should be intolerant of intolerance. I know that’s paradoxical, and forces me to admit to the hypocrisy of sometimes being intolerant because I hate intolerance, but that’s why I consider it fundamental. Since the principle can’t be acted upon simplistically, it confronts me with the real and difficult question: Under what circumstances is intolerance appropriate, acceptable and unacceptable? – a question some of my nicer progressive friends sidestep. The saying goes, “Don’t fight with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.” The pig in question is any bully—a person who fights dirty, imposing incivility, deaf to negotiation or reason. There are three basic pieces of advice about bullies. Depending on who you had for parents your probably heard at least one of these. 1. Ignore him. He’s only doing it for attention. When you ignore bullies, they always go away. 2. Be nice to him. He probably just has low self-esteem. If you’re nice to bullies they always stop bullying. 3. Beat the crap out of him. That’s the only way to get a bully to stop. If you fight them, bullies end up scared of you. If you don’t win, at least they’ll respect you. Either way, if you fight them they always leave you alone. Now that we’re adults we can take the bad news: No one strategy always works to stop a bully, and sometimes none of them work. If Stalin, the world’s biggest bully sent you to Siberia as he did tens of millions of others, it wouldn’t have mattered if you ignored him, were nice to him, or fought him. We owe it to the unsung victims of such bullies not to pretend there’s a surefire recipe for getting bullies to stop, that these victims just failed to employ. We owe them the respect and honor of recognizing how hard it is to know what to do about a bully. Still, say some, getting the bully to leave us alone, isn’t the most important thing. It’s more important to live a moral life. A bully is intolerant but you don’t have to stoop to that. When Newt Gingrich argued that we shouldn’t let a Muslim YMCA be built near the World Trade Center’s ground zero, because, "There are no churches or synagogues in all of Saudi Arabia. In fact no Christian or Jew can even enter Mecca,” many countered that that’s no reason for us to be intolerant. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, therefore we shouldn’t fight the pi
