The Day After Is Always A Harder Slog

I waited until the day after "the day" to post here. My belief that the day after a tragedy, when we really start attempting to make sense of what happened, however inadequate the tools and information we may have at hand then, is usually the more important day.

It was this way in 2001, anyway. There is a Park-Ride lot for NJ Transit buses near where I reside, and the day after 9/11/01, even while so many businesses were closed, there were an awful lot of cars still parked there from the day before. Then not so many on 9/13. Then less than that on 9/14. And it seemed obvious that the drivers of at least some of those cars were never coming home. (Tow trucks in the lot the following week seemed to confirm that.) There are life lessons to be learned from and in parking lots (as an early Beach Boys song, "In The Parking Lot," reminded us), honest.

I also walked the streets of the "Muslim section" of Paterson last week, as I sometimes do. Duly noted the demurely and Koranically properly attired traffic coming in and out of the large store right off Main Street which sells burqas. (I don't know why I'm surprised that several stores in Paterson sell these and hijabs too, I didn't comparably believe that local Muslims hand-sewed their own garments in the comfort of their own homes.)  And also paid attention to the posters thrown upon local walls.

There is, it seems from these posters, an entire circuit of speaking engagements in venues, usually hotel ballrooms, from Paterson to Michigan, where American Muslims gather to hear speakers who from their short bios and teasers for their talks are distinctly from the militant, fundamentalist side of Islam. Several of these gatherings also seem to feature, for some jarring reason, the former British Parliament member George Galloway, who in the British press was long described as the "MP from Baghdad" for both his closeness to Saddam Husssein and stalwart defense of Islamic fundamentalism but is certainly not terribly well-known here. Except that he seems to regularly appear at gatherings of the Muslim faithful in this country.

I also went into two Muslim bookshops, asked to see a copy of "The Protocols Of The Learned Elders of Zion" and in both stores was asked if I preferred a hardcover or a paperback edition. And it's scary that it is sold so openly and that there seem to be so many copies lying about. (It is not that easy, after all, to find, say, a white supremacist bookstore in Jersey.) Who buys this stuff? Who takes this notorious Czarist-era forgery by the Russian secret police even half-seriously, believes that "Zionism" is intent on world domination? (Besides Iran's Ahmadinejad, that is, and the neo-Nazis out there with whom he shares some ideological affinity.)

This led me, in turn, to wonder if American Muslims ever in fact help constitute the crowds which still flock to see "The Book Of Mormon" on Broadway. Mormons may indeed grit their teeth over this show, I don't know, but they don't demand it be shut down. Maybe they do in Salt Lake City at Temple Square, but not in the NY metro area. They may not laugh, but they also don't riot. Nor, however, can I ever imagine a like-minded show called "The Koran" running to similar acclaim. (Even the NY Times' theater critics, I'd bet, would flee into cowering silence on this one.) Anywhere in the world, let alone on Broadway. Just to write such a show would be an act of great moral courage, though to do so would also be to automatically incur a fatwa, I'm quite sure.

What most baffles me is why moderate voices in the Muslim world remain silent, outrage after outrage. (And there are plenty of sites covering them, believe you me, which detail the seemingly almost daily litany of incidences of suppression of freedom and speech and non-Muslim religious belief in Muslim majority countries; just start with googling sites which feature the commentary of historian Daniel Pipes.) Of course, too, another such outrage occurred just testerday, thanks to a country which, strangely enough, Obama seems to think we're now pals with. A better-covered one than so many others, to be sure, but really, just yet one more outrage in a long skein of them.

That this outrage supposedly occurred, both in Libya (only maybe, given what seems to be coming to light on, yep, the day after - who, after all, brings Kalashnikovs and rpg's to a supposedly free-form and "spontaneous" street demo?) and Egypt over a movie which may not even exist and one that certainly its protesters have never seen, doesn't make it any more explicable. So what, in terms of American-style free speech, if it offends a certain form of Islamic religious sensiibility?, you might even plausibly say. This may just be part of the cost of genuine freedom, and to maintain otherwise might be merely to foolishly defend dreadful cultural backwardness. Americans have already endured, ever since the silent film era, any number of movies about religious flim-flam, phony faith healers and lecherous preachers. (Some, such as the Burt Lancaster version of "Elmer Gantry," even garnered awards and Oscar nominations.) And we have not comparably rioted and made "demands" of Hollywood. Even Jews (who after all basically created the American film industry in the first place) never so much as demonstrated even in Brooklyn when Laurence Olivier played the most old world-ish of rabbis dismissing his son Neil Diamond for wanting to be a "jazz singer." Now really, if American Judaism could display such amazing patience over that one...

So here goes: things will not really get appreciably better re religious tolerance amongst fundamentalist Muslims until the Muslim world produces its own version of "The Book of Mormon." (No matter, either, that its creators would be in deep doo-doo with their co-religionists; such danger has to be part of the equation, I fear.) And I think its local premiere should be in Paterson, which has a perfectly fine multiplex in its downtown mall.

Call me, maybe, if this ever happens.

PS: By way of coming attractions for this site, look for comments soon upon the Congressional election between Rabbi Shmuley, the "love rabbi" whose securing of the Republican nomination suggests better than most other horrors I can think of the essential foolishness of the Republican party in Passaic County, and Democratic incumbent William Pascrell, the former Paterson mayor (his tenure and subsequent Congressional career seems a nice example of the concept of "failing upwards") whose signed photos are easily found in Muslim-owned shops and restaurants in the Paterson-Clifton area. This one will be a massacre, folks.

And also for what bids fair to be a regular feature of this blog, the first installment of a "Star-Ledger death watch."