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Stop all Muslim immigration, says Crouch
After some throat clearing about America’s historical bigotry to show that he’s still a good liberal, Stanley Crouch, writing in the New York Daily News, says that this is war, and that in war borders are shut. Perhaps only a small minority of Muslims are actual terrorists, he continues, but it only takes nineteen of them to carry out a September 11th, and there are many more than nineteen—there are thousands—“who would gleefully bring off any version of Sept. 11 if they could.” Meanwhile, “the American Muslim community has been of virtually no help at all in our war against urban terrorism.” Crouch therefore calls for a moratorium on immigration from anywhere in the Islamic world. While he fails to discuss what ought to be done about the Muslims already here, he does point out that American Muslims have nothing to fear from a clampdown on Muslim immigration and arrests of Muslim terrorists. “What American Muslims need to understand … is that this is not a Muslim country, or else they would have probably been slaughtered in the thousands after Sept. 11.” Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 27, 2003 07:08 AM | Send Comments
It’s a question of elementary prudence. The imprudent say that liberty and open borders and tolerance are higher values than safety, and leave it at that. Of course, there are real enemies who simply masquerade as imprudent persons. They believe that Islam should triumph, or at least the idea of an “us” that should be protected should be extirpated. Now that the Japanese internment has taken its place in leftist, i.e. mainstream history as a sort of domestic holocaust rather than a reasonable exercise in prudence, we are disabled from protecting ourselves from enemies on a collective basis. In the transnational state where all our citizens, enemies are merely criminals, if not simply agitators for political and economic rights. Posted by: Bill on October 28, 2003 2:47 PMBill wrote: “In the transnational state where all our citizens, enemies are merely criminals …” That’s an original insight. Among other things, it provides a framework for understanding the Clinton-era policy of treating terrorist attacks as discrete “crimes,” to be combatted by gathering evidence on the perpetrator, arresting him, and trying him. Of course, this enervating, demoralizing policy was never challenged by the Republicans, who were AWOL on national security and foreign policy from ‘89 to ‘01. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on October 28, 2003 3:43 PM |