American Herderite Watch: Tim Pawlenty Believes American Muslims Bear Collective Guilt for 9-11

Rather than treating people as Lockean individuals, Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, attempting to score points with the Herderite Tea Party base of the Republican Party, treats American Muslims as collectively responsible for 9-11. This from the August 9, 2010 Star-Tribune: 

A dozen Minnesota Muslim groups have called for Gov. Tim Pawlenty to retract the statement he made Friday slamming a proposed mosque near Ground Zero in New York City.

The groups, who sent a letter to Pawlenty’s office Monday, wrote that the Minnesota governor should respect freedom of religion, and asked that he meet with local Muslim leaders to “understand how his comments have negatively impacted the Minnesota Muslim community.”

“Our governor has engaged in collective guilt by saying that all Muslim activities and images anywhere near Ground Zero are degrading and disrespectful,” Taneeza Islam, civil rights director for Minnesota’s chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said in a statement.

Pawlenty’s spokesman Bruce Gordon said there’s “no misunderstanding” over the governor’s comments, which suggested building a mosque near the site of the World Trade Center attacks was unpatriotic.

No misunderstanding at all. A man who is running for president is comfortable impugning a whole class of people with collective guilt. We get it. And he will not be moved.

We get that too. 

Pawlenty is utterly inflexible and inattentive to the concerns of individuals who belong to a religious minority, and we like that. 

We want his loyalty to lie with our visceral feelings, not theirs. That’s American. And the First Amendment’s guarantee of assembly and freedom of religious practice does not apply to Muslims because their religion is not a religion; it’s a cult. The First Amendment must not be a consideration. To regulate our feelings about this through reason, nuance, and making distinctions would be a failure of virtue.

Have I channelled the bullshit well?

Every American Herderite in the country gets heart palpitations from such a hard, hard man, and in doing so displays their stupidity concerning the true origins of our country, which are grounded in the Enlightenment, and reason, and the universal human rights of the individual, not the collective.