Where is today’s Maimonides?

Re “The politics of resentment,” Opinion, Feb. 4

Ian Buruma’s analysis of tolerance and Islamic fundamentalism suffers from two fatal flaws. First, the elites that he supports in their tolerance agenda do not separate the ideology from the population. Hatred toward Germans as a group may be despicable; the argument that not all Germans were Nazis may be a noble position, but it does not logically preclude someone from being a rabid anti-Nazi.

Second, even the 12th century Jewish sage Maimonides, a contemporary of Islam’s golden age of enlightenment, incurred the wrath of his contemporaries by concluding that the Karaites (the Jewish fundamentalists of his day) were heathens for taking the Bible literally. Where is today’s Maimonides within the world of Islam?

By allowing the fundamentalists to move its intellectual clock backward 1,000 years, the Islamic community as a whole has given implicit license to foment madness. By its silence, the Muslim community has aligned itself with and enabled its most demented sects, and it no longer has the right to feign victimhood.

Joe Helfer

Topanga

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Born Dutch myself, I know that Buruma touched on one of the most complicated issues of our age, the assimilation of Muslims into Western culture. Along with migrant Muslim workers, the Dutch have welcomed scores of Muslims requesting asylum. Yet many have refused to assimilate into the Dutch culture, insisting on spreading their own culture while mocking their host’s culture, abusing its welfare system and threatening or even willing to kill those who dare speak up.

When immigrants refuse to assimilate and mock your beliefs, someone has to speak up. Most of the Dutch are afraid to, fearing a violent retaliation by Muslims such as what happened to Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. This fear has made the Dutch tolerance synonymous with appeasement, conceding to the growing Islamic influence.

Joseph Sterling

Temecula