Hearings Fit For a King
I’ve been waiting to hear some of the major figures in the conservative intelligentsia express skepticism about the Congressional hearings on homegrown Islamism convened by Peter King, just as I’ve waited for someone to stand up and say that the proposed Tennessee statute outlawing Sharia might be an ominous next step in the fight that started over the Ground Zero mosque. Finally, the National Review has posted an editorial on the hearings. It is not, as I wished, skeptical, but looking at its headline I hoped that it would at least provide a more coherent justification for the hearings than King had provided. I was open to persuasion, or at least a complication of my own position. I wanted to know: What might make these hearings necessary, or even advisable, as a matter of public policy, national security, international politics?
Alas, NR doesn’t really address that question. The effects they imagine coming from the hearings, the benefits they might have, are entirely self-referential. The editorial offers a long list of specific acts and threats arising from homegrown Islamists, and then it delivers what appears to be the overarching motivation for the hearings, or at least NR’s defense of them: “[E]xcessive concern with the pieties of multicultural relativism has prevented us from being sufficiently critical of Islamism.” It continues: “A problem cannot be dealt with that is not faced foursquarely, and…we have for too long been a nation of cowards when it comes to addressing jihadist radicalism between our shores.”
So what has been missing from our fight against homegrown Islamism is a critique of it? And this owes to an “excessive concern with the pieties of multicultural relativism”? And the true first step in addressing this problem is “fac[ing]” it with a certain resolve, a certain nonrelativist foursquareness?
I honestly thought that such a critique would be redundant by now. Who needs to be convinced, through a critique of it, that homegrown Islamism is a bad thing? Who is addressing this danger with inadequate foursquareness? The Obama administration might not have come out publicly with a critique, per se, of Islamic radicalism grounded in a foundationalist interpretation of the Judeo-Christian-Western-Enlightenment-American-Exceptionalist Tradition, but, despite this, the Justice Department has gone ahead and arrested several of the subjects NR itself lists, anyway.
The editorial is a depressing reminder that much of the mainstream conservative intelligentsia views international politics and security policy as a bothersome girth of dog to be wagged by the tail of cultural polemics. Thus, what is missing from the fight against homegrown Islamism is a certain manner of talking about it, a public insistence from the highest levels that this fight is – per the Universal Morality from which emanates the American Exception (or is it vice versa?) – a just and good fight. It is just, in itself, good, in itself. Not relatively good, not just intersubjectively good. We’re talking objectively Good. And homegrown Islamist extremism? Bad. Objectively. Come on, Barack, say it. Say it. Summon a prominent Muslim to a public setting and say it into his face. Now make him say it. Announce a War on Homegrown Islamism. Come on. Show us you’re man enough to speak categorically. Do it. Come on.
Relativist.
I figure the Obama Administration hasn’t taken or advised this path not because they can’t decide if homegrown Islamist terrorism is truly bad, but because they think it tactically misguided to traffic in Bush-style declamations, calls-to-arms, gauntlet-tossing, and fight-picking. They think King’s hearings could easily do more harm than good – make American Muslims feel more isolated or embattled, give ammunition to radical imams, contribute to the self-glorifying persecution narratives of young and impressionable Muslims, raise the cost of cooperation for otherwise sympathetic Muslims. And since not even NR can point to any concrete benefits the hearings were supposed to have, beyond the self-regarding pleasures of being publicly foursquare and nonrelativist, I’m inclined to side with the Administration this time. Obama seems to be the one who realizes that, in this case anyway, it’s not all about him.
I think there’s a sense on the right that Homeland Security, the SPLC, and the media are focused on right-wing sources of potential terror either out of political expediency or systematic bias, and that the hearings are a way either to (1) shift the political balance; or (2) that it’s forcing Homeland Security to confront this blind spot.
There certainly has been a sense that the powers that be see each Muslim shooter as an unrelated one-off, but are convinced that the minutemen are about to pull off another Oklahoma City. For all I know, I guess, they’re right, but if I didn’t think so, I could see being pretty frustrated.
— J Mann · Mar 11, 04:49 PM · #
“I think there’s a sense on the right that Homeland Security”
And what is that “sense” based on?
Mike
— MBunge · Mar 11, 05:18 PM · #
There certainly has been a sense that the powers that be see each Muslim shooter as an unrelated one-off, but are convinced that the minutemen are about to pull off another Oklahoma City.
Off the top of my head, since Obama’s inaguration, we have had:
- The Spokane MLK parade bomber (recently arrested);
- The Holocaust Museum shooter;
- That guy who got into a shootout with cops when he was on the way to shoot up the Tides Foundation in S.F.;
- The guy who shot up a Unitarian church in Tennessee because it was allegedly liberal;
- The anti-feminist nut who shot up a gym in Pittsburgh;
- The murder of Dr. Tiller (and the long history of anti-abortion violence before it);
Wave the bloody shirt of 9/11 all you want, but it wasn’t a homegrown plot.
Today’s most successful and dangerous domestic terrorists aren’t Muslim. The body count speaks for itself.
— rj · Mar 11, 05:52 PM · #
I can understand that a valuable public service is performed when a stick is poked in the eye of people who have difficulty with counting, basic math, and logic (see rj’s comment). But Congress’s job is to legislate. I have always been opposed to Congressional hearings that are just a matter of grandstanding and are not intended to help write legislation. It’s hard to fathom what legislation Congressman King might have in mind, given that Amendment 1 of the Constitution prohibits any legislation having to do with an establishment of religion. I’m not ruling out the possibility that there might be some legitimate legislative proposals to come out of such hearings, but I haven’t thought of any yet. Maybe cutting off funding of some govt programs that promote Islaamic terrorism, if there are any. But the cutting off of funding is not something Congress has a lot of experience with, so I don’t know how serious such a possibility could be.
— The Reticulator · Mar 11, 06:05 PM · #
Since relativism is an incoherent and pernicious doctrine, fighting against it is one of the best possible reasons for these hearings. I wouldn’t be so charitable.
— John 4 · Mar 11, 09:28 PM · #
Matt,
What did you find objectionable or incoherent about the reasons Rep. King gave for the hearings in the first place? It seems like Major Hasan would be Exhibit A for why we need the hearings and why our leaders (Republican and Democratic, all throughout government) are out to lunch when it comes to dealing with Islamism in America.
Meanwhile, here are some specific proposals you won’t read about being discussed by Rep. King, but should be under consideration:
http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2010/12/disinviting_islam_part_ii_prop.html#more
— Jeff Singer · Mar 11, 10:16 PM · #
Mr. Singer, I presume you’re familiar with the concept of a two-edged sword. That one has three or four edges to it.
— The Reticulator · Mar 11, 10:33 PM · #
The NR wants the administration, and everyone else, to talk about Muslims the way the NPR guy talked about the tea party. Because when the tea partiers heard the NPR guy, the first thing they thought was “Well, gosh, that guy raises some excellent points. I’m going to moderate my views.” People – all people, not just Muslims and tea partiers – like to be painted with a broad brush, they like to held responsible for the acts of people they don’t know, they like to be looked at with suspicion. And they love walking down the street thinking of everyone who passes by “I wonder if he hates me because I’m a Muslim.”
— Geoff G · Mar 11, 10:39 PM · #
The Establishment Press is having conniptions over the King hearings because they are getting in the way of their Narrative: that white male conservatives with pitchforks and torches are The Threat. (Recall the MSM response to the Tucson shootings — It’s all Limbaugh and Beck and O’Reilly’s fault — and how it went on for days and days in that vein long after there wasn’t shred of credibility left.)
The King hearings send the perfectly appropriate message to Muslims in America that we are tired of their losers trying (and sometimes succeeding) at killing Americans and that they need to do something about it.
— Steve Sailer · Mar 11, 10:56 PM · #
The Reticulator,
Yes, yes, the hostile comments and responses to that post deal with those multiple edges and I still come down on the side of the more aggressive proposals for dealing with crazy Muslims.
As usual, the greatest blogger alive hits the nail on the head with his comment here — something is rotten in the American Muslim community (and pointing this fact out, in a calm and reasonable manner is very different than what the kook at NPR did thank you very much Geoff):
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2011/03/al-qaedas_american-bred_leader.html
— Jeff Singer · Mar 11, 11:03 PM · #
“As usual, the greatest blogger alive”
The torture advocate. Chickenhawk supreme who likes to criticize people who actually served the country and interrogated people, successfully. I wonder how many active duty military and active FBI CT experts King will bring in?
Steve
— steve · Mar 11, 11:32 PM · #
My only real problem with the comments above is that Rep. King can be an odious boob, and the NR staff destructive fools, without Obama’s course being particularly commendable. Time and again he has pusillanimously backed away from fighting the demonization of the American Muslim community. I don’t need him to summon an imam to the WHite House to demonize him — I need him to go to some damn mosques and praise their leadership like his predecessor did, and to mince no words in defending the rights of Muslims and the worth of their community. And that’s just not the President we have.
— Kieselguhr KId · Mar 11, 11:47 PM · #
So, the more often Muslim terrorists kill Americans, the more the American President should go tell Muslim leaders that they are doing a heckuva job.
Sounds like a plan!
— Steve Sailer · Mar 11, 11:53 PM · #
We should have had these kind of hearings years ago, but they would have undermined the Bush Administration’s main claim to fame: that they had protected us from all terrorist attacks post 9/11. Moreover, they would have raised questions about Bush’s Grand Strategy of Invite the World – Invade the World – In Hock to the World.
The consistent pattern of Muslim terrorism against Americans leads to obvious policy suggestions:
A. We should try to provoke less blowback by killing fewer Muslims abroad
B. We should let fewer Muslims into America.
— Steve Sailer · Mar 11, 11:58 PM · #
A good plan because, by and large, they are doing a heckuva job: one of the items highlighted by this brouhaha is that the intelligence leads on domestic Muslim terrorism depend strongly on goodwill from the Muslim community. Moreover there’s a large domestic Muslim population that isn’t going anywhere (and in fact is growing) and deliberately alienating it seems a guaranteed way both to produce disaffected young terrorists and to encourage a fuck-it-it’s-thankless-to-help attitude among the people who can do the most to contain that terrorism.
The idea that we can or should discriminate against immigrants based on their religion is … Saileresque.
— Kieselguhr KId · Mar 12, 01:42 AM · #
steve,
My post above was confusing — I was talking about Steve Sailer as the greatest blogger alive, not Marc Thiessen. Marc Thiessen’s post just had some good information that added some context.
KK,
You are literally funny — as in I read your posts and laugh. I mean, do you have any evidence that we are alienating our Muslims or that these hearings will alienate our Muslims? Or even better, that alienated Muslims are the ones who commit terror? (Oh heck — I’ll just answer that last question — radical terrorists are often well-educated, come from good family backgrounds and deeply committed to their odious ideology — but that doesn’t fit the liberal narrative).
Steve Sailer,
I love you man (I’m what is properly known around here as sychophantic when it comes to all things Sailer) but as a good neocon, I just don’t buy into the whole “blowback” theory. Islam has been aggressive and nasty from the start, i.e. ever since Mohammad emerged from Arabia. Obviously, folks like bin Laden have specific complaints with the U.S. (e.g. he doesn’t like the fact we support the Saudi monarchy), but the fact that we are tough and kill Muslims around the world is not a bug of our foreign policy, it should be a feature (when Muslims deserve being killed)!
— Jeff Singer · Mar 12, 02:46 AM · #
one of the items highlighted by this brouhaha is that the intelligence leads on domestic Muslim terrorism depend strongly on goodwill from the Muslim community
It may have been highlighted, but is it true? And how would we know? The Clinton-Bush-Obama administration doesn’t exactly have credibility on this topic.
— The Reticulator · Mar 12, 04:26 AM · #
“The idea that we can or should discriminate against immigrants based on their religion is … “
precisely the sort of question the ancient and robust Congressional power of inquiry should be applied to. For instance, what is obvious to anyone with a lick of sense is that Jihadist terrorists are motivated by religion. Whether their religion is the “true” Islam is entirely beside the point that their motivation for terror is religious in nature. Therefore we should very thoroughly examine, in a public and even provocative way, what we the people of the United States actually think about this notion, implied by liberal commentators constantly though rarely straight-up declared, that the First Amendment forbids any discrimination based on religion.
I say that declaration (were it ever made forthrightly) would be exposed to Americans as pernicious nonsense on stilts.
What if the religious doctrine in question is manifestly wicked and treasonable? What if it is clearly intolerable to any sane citizen? What if it proclaims that all unbelievers everywhere should come (violently, if necessary) under the rule of theocratic law, and that all unbelievers’ political authorities should be assailed by treacherous warfare and terror?
If our liberals believe that the First Amendment forbids discrimination against this sort of belief, why congressional investigation might just be a good way of exposing their folly to the people of this Republic.
— P. J. Cella · Mar 12, 05:11 AM · #
‘“The idea that we can or should discriminate against immigrants based on their religion is … “
precisely the sort of question the ancient and robust Congressional power of inquiry should be applied to.’
That was (grammatical problems aside) sarcasm, right?
In all things, you need to look at the source. Bad things almost always come from bad sources. It’s the ol’ poisoned fruit form the poison tree. Congressman King is a poisoned tree. Most likey anything he does is going to be self-serving, ignorant, douchery.
So, the question of whether or not we have a home-grown muslim terrorist problem is most likely going to still need answering.
— cw · Mar 12, 06:19 AM · #
It would be exceedingly easy to demonstrate how vital the Congressional power of inquiry has been to the success of American legislation over our history. Someone said upthread that “Congress’s job is to legislate.” But as even a cursory examination of the matter would disclose that investigation is an indispensable corollary of legislation.
That this power has also been subject to abuse by grandstanding politicians and other miscreants should not, in my judgment, blind us to its importance.
— P. J. Cella · Mar 12, 06:51 AM · #
The first Arab terrorist to damage America was Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian Christian immigrant who assassinated Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy on the one-year anniversary of Israel launching the Six Day War because, according to the assassin, RFK had promised to send 50 fighter planes to Israel.
— Steve Sailer · Mar 12, 11:47 AM · #
Islam has been aggressive and nasty from the start.
I believe any religion should be judged by the actions of its worst members, especially when those actions are widespread and have a long history.
— Jeff Singer · Mar 12, 03:58 PM · #
Wow, Singer, you must really hate the Catholics for those Nazis then. Now, just so I’m clear, you’re telling me that the folks who launch terrorist attacks on our society aren’t disaffected?
Reticulator, I take your point, but that’s been the widespread opinion of terrorism experts and of law enforcement; you don’t have to view them as credible but then you haven’t got much to talk about the sources of terrorism either, no?
It’s beyond silly claim that Islam is antithetical to our state, because generations of observant Muslims have now served in our civil service, our armed forces, and our government. That experiment would seem to trump the theory! It’s not “nonsense on stilts” to say that the First Amendment prohibits the attempt to disestablish a religion whose adherents have proven so able to serve the country; rather it is naked bigotry on stilts to claim otherwise.
And cw has the nub: looking into sources of radicalization and methods to counter it is a great idea (probably not something Congress wants to do directly so much as have FBI and other Homeland Security groups constantly working it, but, whatever). But that’s just not what King is doing: King, himself a vocal and die-hard supporter of terrorism, is looking to scapegoat Muslims, and that’s not a valid use of Congress’ powers.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Mar 12, 07:39 PM · #
Islam has been aggressive and nasty from the start.
You’ve made a rather a sweeping statement, and I’m not sure it’s true. It’s probably not true of all of Islam, anyway.
I believe any religion should be judged by the actions of its worst members, especially when those actions are widespread and have a long history.
Watch out — that sword again! Besides, that isn’t what your religion asks you to believe.
And if Islam is a good enough religion for the Rev. Billy Graham (not a Catholic, btw) why should we be so antagonistic to it?
— The Reticulator · Mar 12, 09:44 PM · #
Sigh.
Just so everyone is aware, because it is obvious “The Reticulator” is not, that last “Jeff Singer” comment is NOT me but my evil doppelganger who likes to pop up in these com boxes and torment me whenever he disagrees with my opinions.
Steve Sailer,
Agreed that our support for Israel has made us enemies — should those enemies be described as “blowback”?.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowback_(intelligence)
However, while certain aspects of our foreign policy have in the past and continue to provoke certain foreigners into wanting to kill Americans I don’t think that we should base our foreign policy on their murderous actions. You wouldn’t give up the push for tighter immigration controls just because some crazy Mexican terrorists said they were opposed to our closed border and started killing Americans abroad would you?
KK, “The Reticulator”, and the “fake Jeff Singer”,
Open up a history book and read about the exploits of Muhammad and the spread of Islam from the 7th Century onward and you’ll understand my comment about Islam “from the start” in context and why in any fair comparison of the crimes committed in the name of Christianity and Islam the butcher’s bill is always higher for “the religion of peace”. Certainly there are peaceful Muslims and even peaceful strains within Islam (e.g. Sufis) but they have never been dominant and all we can do is hope that Muslims either become secular, turn to Christ, or transform their religion into something that it currently is not.
KK — having studied WWII and the Nazi regime carefully, I have no idea what the heck you are referring to with respect to Catholics and Nazis. Yes, for the most part I believe folks who decide to commit terror attacks are not so much “disaffected” as they are inspired and excited by the prospect of killing infidels and going to paradise. And we should be trying to figure out who in America is providing the inspiration — hence the King hearings.
— Jeff Singer · Mar 12, 11:16 PM · #
Much of the Nazi leadership was at least nominally Catholic — but if you didn’t make that “judge by their worst” post then the point is moot.
I am very acquainted with the history of Islam — and you’re spouting nonsense. In particular in the Christianity/Islam split (assuming for the sake of argument that those are separate religions and not sects of one religion, which is unclear). I think it’s a bit silly — the word has changed much — to keep this tally, but if we must, then: Islam birthed Western math and science which Christians fought a single-minded and bloody holy war to purge them from “Christendom.” Later Christians sought to extirpate them repeatedly in the Caucasus. Muslims protected Jews against the Inquisitors, and so on. I think it would be very. very hard to honestly tot up drops of blood on that scale, assuming it’s worth doing at all, and personally I suspect the Muslims would come well up. While not a Muslim myself I have read much of the hadith and the Prophet seems remarkable and admirable for his time; obviously you feel differently but I think it’s flat silly to think it’s something everyone would feel: the Prophet was quite the dude.
— Kieselguhr KId · Mar 13, 12:17 AM · #
Singer, this issue of who is and who is not you has to get resolved because if you’re really the guy who put up the link to http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2010/12/disinviting_islam_part_ii_prop.html — wow, it’s shockingly offensive, even for the Internet.
— Kieselguhr KId · Mar 13, 01:03 AM · #
Wow.
OK, let’s go back to the start, to perhaps the only thing of significant value modern European civilization has to offer the world: the enlightenment notion that objective truth exists, that we can confirm it by multiple observations, and that the only practical basis for judging ideas and conclusions, the free choices of all the people, requires freedom.
The United States Constitution assumes these values, and it reflects a sense of confidence in them. The founders believed their work, and the values that informed it, could stand the test of popular choices over time. They set up a constitution that allowed Americans to advocate for peaceful and lawful change to the constitution to introduce Sharia Law, or a Japanese-style imperial system, or any other form of government, because they believed the public would never choose to make changes that would harm the nation. And they understood that their vision would survive as long as it could pass the only objective test we have for the value of ideas.
The United States has survived almost 225 years under the present constitution, and with the exception of some panics such as McCarthyism and some disgraceful episodes of totalitarian contempt for the rule of law, almost all in connection with American Indigenous people, the idea of the United States as a nation under law, and the trust in popular wisdom it implies, have proved remarkably durable. But we have always seen westerners who appear not to understand the basic premises of the enlightenment thought that gave life to modern democracy, and who think that we can always afford this one little episode of intolerance.
Such people pose a real risk to any modern democracy, because they undermine the basis for believing in the ideas behind it. Put simply, we can no more defeat ideas by force than we can win a game of baseball by using snipers to pick of the other team. Book banning, jailing writers or preachers, shutting down web sites for propagating ‘wrong” ideas does not “win” a conflict of ideas: it forfeits the competition at the outset.
The belief in freedom of thought involves moral courage, in the sense that it requires those who hold it to put their most cherished beliefs to the test. But it also requires physical courage: the courage to wait for the bad consequences of evil ideas to manifest, and then to deal with the consequences rather than the ideas. This does not, of course, mean permitting speech as an instrument of conspiracy or fraud, but it does mean permitting ideas that we know can lead to bad things: the idea, for example, that only the “fit” ought to reproduce, or that the classification system of Linnaeus can extend to ethnic groups in the human species, or that we can dictate our economic system scientifically if the government holds title to all major productive assets, or that the Creator wants certain people to dominate others. All of these ideas have caused terrible harms, but knowing the ends they lead to offers us the best possible way of making them less dangerous in the future.
— John Spragge · Mar 13, 04:44 AM · #
What if the religious doctrine in question is manifestly wicked and treasonable? What if it is clearly intolerable to any sane citizen? What if it proclaims that all unbelievers everywhere should come (violently, if necessary) under the rule of theocratic law, and that all unbelievers’ political authorities should be assailed by treacherous warfare and terror?
I am old enough to remember when very similar questions were being asked about American Communists and the workings of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. I am also old enough remember when questions like that were asked by the left about members of the tea parties. I am also old enough to remember when the left was trying to set up a religious test for judgeships in our legal system. That is a wicked, two-edged sword that you are wielding.
And when it comes to that, Christians believe they owe a higher loyalty to God than state. It’s right there in Commandment #1. (I deeply regret that on my bicycle commute to work I never stopped to take a photo of the residential flag pole that for several months had a U.S. flag flying above a Christian flag. Clearly someone had his/her priorities confused.) Catholics in this country once came under suspicion that they owed a higher loyalty to the pope than to the government.
There are divided loyalties all around. There really is no way we can consistently and logically reconcile them. The best we can do is finesse the situation as guided by Amendment 1, and hope we never have to choose.
Which brings me to my next point. I was horrified to read the proposals about immigration and loyalty oaths that Jeff Singer pointed us to. I blame the left for bringing us to this state of affairs.
If it weren’t for militant, malicious ignorance on the part of the left, it would never come to this. At our airports, instead of putting our stupidity on display to the world, we’d have a reasonable level of ethnic and religious profiling — of the kind that the Muslim community here in Michigan once agreed would be reasonable. We wouldn’t have the left trying to tell us with a straight face that the Ground Zero Mosque wasn’t intended to be the culmination of a victory dance. We wouldn’t have the news media suppressing stories about Muslim violence against American soldiers far from the battlegrounds. Instead of having some of our top academics censoring Mohammed cartoons, we would be showing to the world that we can draw Mohammed cartoons all we want and respect Islam to the extent that is possible without compromising our liberal values. (This tawdry affair was just another example of how the left is not liberal.)
So thanks to the malicious, self-inflicted stupidity by which the members of the left compete with each other to shrink their brains to the smallest, most undifferentiated mass of cells when encountering anything Muslim, we have blowback in the form of these radical proposals that are antithetical to the best our country has ever stood for.
— The Reticulator · Mar 13, 05:52 AM · #
KK,
I’m always the guy linking to the website “What’s Wrong with the World” since it is the single best and most original conservative group website in extistence on the web right now. When you click on my name, you’ll know it is the real me if you end up at that website (and conversely, the “doppelganger” Singer always links to some other goofy website – he or she is actually quite clever in their choice of links at times).
Anyway, I’d be curious to know what you found so offensive in that post as I thought the ideas presented were well thought through and in a constructive spirit.
And by the way, anyone who seriously writes “Islam birthed Western math and science which Christians fought a single-minded and bloody holy war to purge them from “Christendom” doesn’t know their intellectual history AND doesn’t know the sequence of events in the Middle-East and Europe — first there was an aggressor (Muslims), then the losers got pissed off and decided to fight back and attempt to take what was once theirs (Christians). Also, don’t get me started on how well Jews have fared under Muslim rule:
http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Islamic-Antisemitism-Sacred-History/dp/1591025540
John Spragge,
I’m not sure exactly what you are trying to say in that long comment, but this jumped out at me as strange:
“This does not, of course, mean permitting speech as an instrument of conspiracy or fraud, but it does mean permitting ideas that we know can lead to bad things:”
I guess I’d want to know more about how you define “conspiracy” and “bad things” — for me, if there is someone who is suggesting in a book or on the street corner that it would be a good idea to kill all the property owners I’d want to lock him up. Just like I want to lock up the preachers who claim that Islam demands a holy war against the infidel and martyrdom awaits for the young men (and women) who go out and kill Americans.
— Jeff Singer · Mar 13, 06:17 AM · #
The Reticulator,
You and I and Mr. Cella are just going to have to agree to disagree about the first amendment and the possibility of weeding out traitors in our midst. Which is fine. Let’s say you are right and we are wrong about our interpretation of the Constitution and you win the argument — why the hostility to the proposals having to do with immigration? There is NOTHING in the Constitution that says we can’t limit immigration in any way we see fit as a people. Canada’s system basically auctions off their immigration slots or awards their visas to those with skills Canada needs, which means those immigrants with capital and/or skills wind up jumping to the front of the line in Canada. Why couldn’t the U.S. do the same? Why couldn’t we say we don’t want Muslim immigrants? Or immigrants from countries that are enemies with the U.S. (e.g. North Koreans)? Constitutionally — why can’t we restrict immigration to whoever we want?
— Jeff Singer · Mar 13, 06:27 AM · #
If you answer ideas you don’t like with violence, including jail, you forfeit the ability to use reason against them. If you can’t use reason to answer ideas you don’t like, you have to hope you can prevent them from getting to people they might influence. The Romans couldn’t do that in the age of parchment scrolls and wax tablets. You think you can accomplish that in the age of the web? Good luck. Besides that, don’t you think you have a reasoned, effective argument against killing rich people or waging holy war? Don’t you believe that argument? What makes you think you have to use violence?
As for the limits of free speech: the law allows speech as an expression of ideas, not as an instrument of violence. Free speech rights in pretty much every free country protect someone who advocates, say, a constitutional amendment to implement Sharia law (an advocacy, by the way, which most certainly does not qualify as treason under American law). Free speech traditions go much further, in fact: they protect the poisonous rhetoric of the Westboro Baptist Church They protect calls for holy war and theocracy, from the Dominion Theology in the Christian Church to the Salafists of Islam. If you don’t think any Christian advocates call for violence, look up the “Creator’s Rights Party”, on Google or the way-back machine. Free speech ends where it translates into direct facilitation of violence. Free speech allows anyone to advocate eliminating extreme wealth with punitive taxation. Free speech protections even extend to calls to purge the wickedness of wealth disparities with fire and the sword, whatever anyone might privately wish. It does not, however, permit the publication of a guide to bombing clubs where wealthy people gather, complete with building diagrams, hints for acquiring explosives, and so on. That falls into the realm of conspiracy, and both law and free speech tradition forbid it.
— John Spragge · Mar 13, 12:36 PM · #
John,
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. You say:
“Besides that, don’t you think you have a reasoned, effective argument against killing rich people or waging holy war?”
Of course I think I have reasoned, effective arguments — but I don’t think they’ll work on the guy who has already convinced himself those ideas have such currency that he needs to peddle them to others and hopes to spark a bloody revolution. First order, then sweet reason.
I think you lay out the law as it currently stands — which is a problem in my book (i.e. Alito’s dissent is more my cup of tea).
I’m just glad you and I both want to lock up the bomb guide people!
— Jeff Singer · Mar 13, 01:53 PM · #
How likely is anyone in this thread to get killed by a muslim? How about by a white christian? If you even remotely think the former is more plausible than the latter, you’re beyond saving.
Now, that speaks more to the ridiculous premium we place on terrorist acts than to the hearing, but its all the same ball of wax. I mean come the fuck on, 10 years since 9/11 and people are still bitching about needing profiling? After a while you just need to give up the ghost. So much of the things we do are feel good nonsense. Outside of centralizing airport security, the department of homeland security basically does what we already did (FEMA, immigration), under a new name. Bureaucratic shell games… just like this hearing.
Hate to burst your bubbles, but we aren’t locked in some epic cultural struggle that could lead to our demise. We’re simply a bunch of people traumatized because we saw/lived through a big tragedy.
— Console · Mar 13, 05:16 PM · #
Console,
“Hate to burst your bubbles, but we aren’t locked in some epic cultural struggle that could lead to our demise.”
Sure, I would agree with that. But that is true of a lot of public policy. That doesn’t mean that when there is a problem we put our heads in the sand and ignore it. I’m sure that the families and friends of Michael Grant Cahill, Libardo Eduardo Caraveo, Justin Michael DeCrow, John P. Gaffaney, Frederick Greene, Jason Dean Hunt, Amy Sue Krueger, Aaron Thomas Nemelka, Michael S. Pearson, Russell Gilbert Seager, Juanita L. Warman, and Francheska Velez (and her baby) wish the government took Islamic radicalism more seriously, rather than oh, I don’t know, let’s say diversity?
— Jeff Singer · Mar 13, 05:40 PM · #
white person anxiety
— Freddie · Mar 13, 09:16 PM · #
Singer,
The Christian website you cotton to advocates for blatant discrimination against Muslims. It dreams of eliminating immigration rights to Muslims. It encourages Constitutional amendments, if possible, to compel Muslims to take oaths renouncing parts of Islam. It would celebrate legal barriers to the construction of mosques and access to the Koran. In other words, it would happily gut the first amendment and the no religious test clause of the Constitution for the sake of “managing” Muslims.
These proposals are not examples of simply facing a problem, of keeping sensible heads out of sand, as you portray. These proposals spring completely from an embattled psyche preoccupied with a coming showdown. Doomsday-variety confrontation between Christianity and Islam is what that creepy website you plug is all about— it’s practically the mission statement. Claiming you agree with Console about the fiction of an “epic struggle” is bogus. That struggle— whether against Islam or secularism— is exactly what animates your mindset. At least cop to it.
— Nora · Mar 13, 09:43 PM · #
Nora,
The authors of the website, “What’s Wrong with the World”, who include some of the finest minds on the internet, properly describe the Islamic problem as a “threat”. If you read the proposals in the link carefully, you would understand that a “dommsday-variety confrontation between Christianity and Islam”, at least in this country, is EXACTLY what the authors want to avoid. And while you are over at the website again, you can re-read the mission statement and be reminded that the authors’ other enemy is not “secularism” but liberalism — an enemy I WOULD be more inclined to describe in “epic struggle” terms ;-)
By the way, it goes without saying that I don’t think you understand the current state of First Amendment jurisprudence and/or legal scholarship on the issue — the establishment clause has been stretched to mean something today (like other Amendments in the Bill of Rights) that a conservative like me doesn’t like, but even I don’t understand how singling out a destructive belief (i.e. someone who believes they have to kill infidels) has anything to do with the government establishing a religion or how it violates Article VI of the Constitution.
Crazy Fred,
Always fun when you drop by, although given that we are talking about a religious belief in this post I’m not sure what “white person anxiety” has to do with anything or how you have become a mind reader or why, if white folks are anxious about minorities in this country why you would be commenting here on the phenomenon. But that’s why you are crazy Fred ;-)
— Jeff Singer · Mar 13, 10:13 PM · #
A genuinely self confident society will have the moral courage to stake its existence on the free consent of its members, and the physical courage to rely solely on the laws against violent crime and conspiracy to protect it from the few anti-social individuals it can neither appeal to nor accommodate. Any government, including government by and for the people, can only endure if it has this kind of courage, because authority rests on consent, and neither direct violence or the use of violence to control information can obtain that consent or hold it for long. No order that rests on a denial of information can endure, and in the age of the Internet, such a social order has a shelf life measured in months.
— John Spragge · Mar 14, 01:11 AM · #
A genuinely self confident society
I’ve seen some genuinely self confident societies. It’s not a pretty sight.
— The Reticulator · Mar 14, 01:19 AM · #
Jeff Singer: You and I and Mr. Cella are just going to have to agree to disagree about the first amendment and the possibility of weeding out traitors in our midst.
There’s no rule that says we HAVE to disagree. You can always change your mind and agree with me.
Which is fine. Let’s say you are right and we are wrong about our interpretation of the Constitution and you win the argument — why the hostility to the proposals having to do with immigration? There is NOTHING in the Constitution that says we can’t limit immigration in any way we see fit as a people.
True that. But putting the national government in the business of deciding who is a Muslim and who is not will not be good. The government shouldn’t develop that kind of skill set. And it’s not as though we can do the same as Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin does in keeping non-Russian Orthodox people down and out of his country. We don’t have an American Orthodox Church to make those distinctions and decisions for our government. Good thing, too.
Why couldn’t we say we don’t want Muslim immigrants? Or immigrants from countries that are enemies with the U.S. (e.g. North Koreans)?
Back in the cold war days, almost until the end, I thought isolating the bad guys and minimizing contact with them was good. I’ve come to think I was wrong about that. I think such contacts as we did have were often good. We were right to execute spies, of course, and perhaps should have been more diligent in that task, but contacts back and forth between the Soviet Union and the outside world did a lot to bring down the evil empire. And those from the SU who came here may have helped us to do a little national self-examination; Alexander Solzhenitsyn did much to help me do my part of that.
So while we should be careful not to prop up the government of North Korea (as any idiot/Democrat would have done with the Soviet Union, had he been in Saint Ronald’s place) I don’t know why we’d want to keep the people of North Korea out of the U.S. Sure, we should kick people out who don’t obey our laws and who won’t learn enough English to deal with the government. And it would be constitutional to prohibit immigration from North Korea. But how does the government decide who is a Muslim? Ask immigrants to curse Allah? Loyalty oaths, here we come.
One area of concern is enclaves of Muslims in the U.S. who have no contact with non-Muslims (and vice versa). That is not healthy. This topic needs much more discussion.
But if you succeed in enacting your proposals, you may save our country from Muslim aggression, but we’ll have turned into a country not worth saving. If you get your way, be sure to thank lefties for being stupid and narrow-minded enough to let it come to that. I hope I won’t be around to see it.
— The Reticulator · Mar 14, 02:01 AM · #
Heads up, my transubstantiationalists and glam-fans. Gary Glitter is being honored by the Vatican this spring for a lifetime of achievement.
— Jeff Singer · Mar 14, 12:49 PM · #
Hey KK,
Evil doppelganger Singer just popped up again. How do you know? Click on his name — as usual, he can be a hoot when he is on top of his game.
The Ret,
As always, a pleasure debating you! The question of who or who is not a Muslim is actually relatively simple, at least with respect to the basics of immigration. As an initial screen we simply say no more immigrants from Muslim majority countries. Obviously big net will capture Copts in Egypt, Chaldean Christians in Iraq, etc. and to a certain extent will be too broad and unfair — but that’s O.K. Nothing about immigration policy has to be “fair” to anyone or careful to admit every worthy person. We are trying to keep the crazies out AND those we worry might not be ready to assimilate to American culture and civilization.
So this first screen does most the work for us, but we’ll still be left with converts and immigrants from other countries (e.g. Turks who live in Germany). Maybe this is where you and I can find some common ground and figure out how we can let folks from this group in under a sane immigration policy that takes into consideration the kinds of criteria that Canada looks at, rather than worry about loyalty oaths. But becoming a citizen does require an immigrant to swear loyalty to the Constitution and the laws of this country, so why don’t you object to our current process?
— Jeff Singer · Mar 14, 01:32 PM · #
@Reticulator: I define a genuinely self-confident society as one with the moral and physical courage to embrace the risks of freedom. To put it another way, I consider a society genuinely self-confident when it contains a critical mass of individual persons with the courage, moral and physical, to demand freedom for themselves, and the plain common sense to see that demanding freedom for yourself necessarily means claiming it for others. You don’t consider that a pretty sight? Fine, I’ll let that classic French conservative, Jean Anouilh, answer for me, with a quote that seems particularly and depressingly apposite in this situation: “Is there anything uglier than a frightened man?”
I would observe that Matt, in his original post, clearly has the issue pegged: Islamophobia clearly has nothing to do with any threat Muslims pose to Americans. If concerns about actual physical danger drove American immigration policies, you’d ban people with drivers’ licenses from immigrating: car crashes have killed more Americans than Islamists (and communists and national socialists, put together). Some combination of cultural anxieties seems a pretty good bet for explaining the recent uptick in fears expressed about Muslim immigration and Islam in the United States generally.
— John Spragge · Mar 15, 05:07 AM · #
John Spragge: it contains a critical mass of individual persons with the courage, moral and physical, to demand freedom for themselves, and the plain common sense to see that demanding freedom for yourself necessarily means claiming it for others. You don’t consider that a pretty sight?
Actually, that’s a pretty enough sight. It’s the other side of the “Power corrupts” coin. But I don’t know why you want to put the label “confident” on it. There are people who are willing to claim freedom for others who are not at all confident that it will all end well. Whittaker Chambers thought he was on the side of freedom for himself and others, which was admirable, but was quite pessimistic about the good guys winning in the end.
One type of confident society was the one that thought it should bear the white man’s burden around the world. That kind of imperialism had its good points, I suppose, but it was not a pretty sight to everyone involved. I suppose you could say that deep down, hidden from consciousness, that society was beset by racial insecurities. But you can play that “deep down hidden” game forever.
As for actual physical danger driving policies, in the late 1930s
you would have pointed out that car crashes killed more Americans than Germans, Italians, and Japanese people combined. That wouldn’t have meant we weren’t facing great physical danger from fascism and its ilk.
— The Reticulator · Mar 15, 06:15 PM · #
Islamophobia
Speaking of which, could we say that Islamophobia and Theodextrophobia (irrational fear of the religious right, e.g. as expressed in the comments that accompany “Speaking Precisely About the Religious Right”) are mutually reinforcing phobias? Reaction to one tends to reinforce the other?
— The Reticulator · Mar 15, 11:04 PM · #
Yet another reminder that Islam is very, very different than Christianity and King’s hearings are necessary:
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/262229/why-they-celebrate-murdering-children-andrew-c-mccarthy
— Jeff Singer · Mar 16, 06:01 PM · #
Oh No, people with different beliefs are scary, how shall I ever cope without a large police state to protect me from the heathens!
— Console · Mar 17, 04:34 AM · #