What, realistically, can we do about Muslims in the West?

VFR’s formerly hard-leftist, Dylan-quoting, American-English reader has a question for us:

WHAT’S REAL AND WHAT IS NOT

Ok, VFR readers. There’s been lots good articles/blogs/e-mail comments in VFR and Jihad Watch and several other websites and newspapers analysing the Muslim menace. The Muhammed cartoon controversy has spurred on some incredibly insightful writing about Muslims and Islam. But now is the time for practical action. How can we seriously change immigration policy in Western countires so as to significantly reduce the amount of Muslims coming to the West, both legally and illegally? Plus how can we deal with the high Muslim birthrates in the Western Muslim communities? No idealistic solutions, please. Theory time, important as it is, is over. Can Western Islamic immigration be reduced or not. That’s my 64,000 cartoons question. Can something really be done? Or is it all just hot wind on the way to a Muslim majority? And no pie in the sky fantasies please. I want realiseable policies. And electable politicians who will agree to carry them out. Any ideas?

LA replies:

The reader tells me he’s asking both about the policies that should be adopted, and about how we politically get those policies adopted.

My first thought is that there is an evolution going on in mainstream opinion toward grasping the nature of the Muslim threat and adopting a policy to reflect that understanding, namely a policy to exclude most Muslims from the U.S., and that we can help that evolution along, but that the speed of that evolution is ultimately not dependent on us.

For example, I’m not aware of any members of Congress who would remotely consider a cut-off of all Muslim immigration. Since current U.S. immigration law only deals with immigrants by country, not by ethnicity and religion (which is the way it’s been since the 1965 Immigration Act), to identify prospective immigrants by religion and exclude Muslims as Muslims would be a radical change in the law. I support such a change and I think we should argue for it and promote it. I simply don’t think that there would be any support for it in the Congress at this time.

This doesn’t mean that very significant changes in immigration law are not possible in the near-to-medium term future. I think a proposal to screen and interview all prospective immigrants for radical (i.e., orthodox Islamic) beliefs would have a chance at passage. Anyone who supports the imposition of the sharia law in the United States (which Muslims are commanded to do by their religion, though many Muslims, possibly the majority, are either passive or ignorant about these issues) should be excluded. This would require an unprecedented degree of screening, but I think the level of support for it may be there both in America and Europe.

Similarly, I would support the removal of all Muslim legal resident aliens from the U.S, but I can’t conceive of there being political support for it at this time. However, as in the above instance, there may be support for screening resident aliens for pro jihad, pro-sharia beliefs and excluding them. The next step is stripping the citizenship of naturalized Muslim U.S. citizens who believe in jihad and sharia. As I’ve discussed before, I think there would be a perfectly legal and constitutional basis for this, since any sharia-supporting Muslim who swore allegiance to the United States was lying. I doubt there would be enough political support for this at the present time, however. Another step would be either closing radical mosques, or placing them under such disabilities that they die out on their own.

So, these are the reforms that I believe are in the ballpark of political reality at this time: (1) Screening out potential immigrants with pro-jihad, pro-sharia beliefs; (2) Stripping resident alien status from and deporting persons with pro-jihad, pro-sharia beliefs; (3) closing and/or putting continual pressure on radical mosques. We want much more. But this would be a serious beginning.

Reader Alex writes:

None of your suggestions would be effective or even workable.

1) The screening interview would have a limited impact, but only initially. In short order the Muslims would learn to “play the game” if you will. The prospective Muslim immigrants would learn to give the proper responses regardless of their true intentions.

2) Stripping them of citizenship for lying would be well nigh impossible to win in court. One would have to prove that at the time of the oath (and in their hearts then) they held sharia above the Constitution. You may be able to prove that, let’s say, now they hold Sharia above, but that does not mean they held it then AND at the oath moment. Totally unworkable, a lot of time, money, and effort for the most meager of results.

3) Most assuredly one could pass laws to have mosques under constant surveillance. But all you would do is drive them underground where they could prove more dangerous.

3-a) A suggestion would be to infiltrate them with agents. This has proven effective in crime fighting. But the Mafia is still with us. So no miracles here either, so containment, no eradication.

And remember, time is not on our side. In Eurabia the day is not so distant when Muslims will win seats in Parliaments and be in the chambers of power. What chances then to pass meaningful legislation? To act we must act now, but I see no collective will to do so .

I fear that the light you see at the end of this tunnel is nothing more than a burglar’s torch.

LA replies:

The screening process is not just based on what the Muslim says about himself. There would be a presumption on our part that people coming from certain backgrounds have pro-sharia beliefs, which they would have to overcome. Thus the entire “tilt” of our immigration procedures would change. Also, knowing that they they have to get through this gauntlet would discourage many from even trying. On revoking citizenship, that wouldn’t be based just on proof of lying, but on the substantive fact that these people are followers of certain beliefs that are incompatible with U.S. citizenship, and on that basis the citizenship, which they did not have by birth but by legal procedure, would be revoked. The point of screening and surveillance of mosques is not primarily to gain information, but weaken these jihadist communities and discourage them so that they will not want to live here any more. The point is to make America like Mecca (from which Muhammad fled) instead of Medina (to which he fled). Finally, I think the pure negativity of the reader’s responses is not helpful. We are trying to find a way forward from this terrible problem. The logic of the reader’s criticism of my proposals is that the only thing to do is the total ending of all immigration of all Muslims from whatever country they come from, and the removal of all Muslim immigrants from the U.S. Those things are not possible at this point. If we insist on the impossible, people will conclude that no solution at all is possible, and end up surrendering to continued Muslim immigration.

Another reader replies:

Your reader is, alas, too cynical. He worries about how the Muslims may “game” the system but seems to forget that our side can game this system as well.

Keep in mind that the real enemy is not the Muslim. It is the liberal. The liberal represents the primary barrier preventing us from removing the Muslims from Western land. What is needed is a steady stream of proposals (modest at first, like your screening process) coupled with denunciations of liberals as subversives and traitors when they interfere with the implementation of these modest proposals.

The proposals don’t have to be correct or workable. They just need to be frequent and constructed in a way that “triggers” the liberal into openly opposing them. This establishes a pattern of their traitorous behavior and this behavior should be made known throughout the United States (Note: I know that the blogosphere already does this, but it needs to be done at the Republican Party level.)

Along with a steady stream of proposals there need to be more terrorist attacks, preferably terrorist attacks in places where liberals normally live. Unless liberals actually feel threatened by the people they love so much, they will have no incentive to remove them. Therefore, a concerted effort should be made to move as many threatening people into liberal areas as possible. How about a new Hamas or Hezbollah-run “cultural center” across the street from the United Nations? How about more Palestinian “student exchange” programs at New York’s major universities? [LA note: We already have lots of Palestinian students in major American universities, particularly Columbia, and that is not leading to a turnaround in liberal views so far, but only making things worse.] How about a federally-subsidized Middle Eastern refugee housing program somewhere in Manhattan? Any of these programs can be justified at any point where liberal ideology edits reality. They just need to import sizable numbers of hostile people.

To reiterate, I do support baby-step measures in getting rid of the Muslims and keeping them out. I don’t support cynical defeatism of the variety your reader suggests. However, we must also wage all-out war on liberals. We must treat them like the pro-jihadis they really are.

Mark

Alex writes back:

Let me explain. My point is that when you start taking away citizenship based on un-American beliefs (and not just actions), where does it stop, it’s the old “slippery slope” analogy. Today it’s Sharia, tomorrow it’s Communists, next it’s people who belong to unions, or hold (or are perceived to hold) whatever beliefs are un-popular with the entrenched power elite. For surely someone in power will define what is un-American.

Can we trust those persons not to misuse such power, whether deliberately or not?

Let’s turn the thing on its head and say that citizenship will be not just denied but withdrawn from those who do not believe in Sharia as that is now considered un-American. The term is too ambiguous, too subject to winds of change. In other words a can of worms best left unopened. Not Castro or the USSR took away citizenship because someone was anti-revolution!

Mark writes:

The slippery slope argument used by your reader Alex is utter nonsense and people need to stop making it. Colleges keep churning out these Philosophy 101 types who run around thinking they are so clever because they can reduce every argument to an absurdity. It is a very poor and destructive habit of thought.

Want to know where to stop the slide along a slippery slope? At the point of a distinction. The idea is to differentiate between objects and to craft policies based on that differentiation. A national policy designed to operate against Muslims and only Muslims (or foreigners or any other group) will stay limited to operating against Muslims unless explicitly changed. There is no necessary connection between getting rid of them based on their Sharia belief and getting rid of any randomly chosen Other based on some randomly chosen anti-American belief. None whatsoever.

History is replete with examples of why the slippery slope is a false argument.

1) The Holocaust. According to “slippery slope” theory, all of Germany should’ve ended up in the ovens. After all, if you pick out Jews, “where will it end?” Surely the Nazis were jumping out of bushes nabbing everybody they found in an orgy of mass national suicide. Alas, not the case. The Nazis carefully crafted a policy that operated against those they did not like while leaving everyone else largely untouched. Does anyone deny this? Do they claim that the Jews suffering was shared by all?

[LA note: I don’t think this is a good example. The Nazis had plans to reduce the Slavs to slaves, work them to death the way they did the Jews. They also had plans, if they conquered Britain, to submit the entire male population to slave labor.]

2) Dhimmitude. According to “slippery slope” theory, all Muslims should’ve ended up dhimmis. After all, if you pick out the people of the Book, “where will it end?” Surely poor Al-Habibi, with his radical theories of limiting the successors of the Caliphate to the best-qualified people, would end up in that humiliating position. Alas, not the case. The Muslims, like the Nazis, were very good at making sure their agenda was on course. Does anyone deny this?

3) The Democratic Party. Has anyone noticed how the Democratic Party never seems to worry about slippery slopes (or its cousin, the “law of unintended consequences”)? Why? Surely, any power liberal bureaucracies secure for the benefit of themselves, their sycophants and their constituents could be used against them by an opposing party. Might the Republicans gain an advantage when all of this liberal machinery is put in their hands? Yet, liberals never stop continually seeking to expand this power, despite the supposed “wise counsel” of slippery slopers. What do the Democrats know that others don’t? What the Nazis and Muslims knew: distinctions matter.

The reader seems enamored by the famous Martin Niemoeller quote, supposedly a warning about the slippery slope:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Yet, any reader should notice that the gist of Niemoeller is not some generic warning about political ideologies voraciously and zealously gobbling up innocence. It is, rather, a statement that related types should stick together for mutual protection. After all, what’s the real difference between a communist, a socialist and a trade unionist, groups that seemed disproportionately controlled or dominated by Jews? The quote could be re-written by replacing “communist” with “leftist”, “socialist” with “liberal”, “trade unionist” with “democrat”, and it would no more warn against smiting Muslims, Zoroastrians or space aliens then the original quote warned against the slippery slope.

Furthermore, what if you really, really wanted to go after communists, socialists and trade unionists, and whomever was associated with them? Then what good is Niemoeller?

Our civilization is at a crossroads. We are attacked by an enemy from without while being undermined by enemy from within. We don’t have the luxury to talk about “ambiguous terms” or what is “subject to the winds of change.” It’s time to make our distinctions, to draw a line in the sand and to decide what we’re going to do when someone crosses it. We should do this before the fifth column and the alien Other decide for us.

A reader writes:

As a comment about “what to do about the Muslim influx into the U.S.”, it is my opinion that we will not be able to have an effective response unless/until we declare war, and the war will have to be declared not at “terrorism” but at Islamofascism. After that happens, it might be possible to begin to discuss and even pass measures which are appropriate in wartime and which will deal with this population. So far, all of the assumptions have been that we individually screen visitors, students, resident aliens, etc as we would in peacetime and as if they have a right to be here. Instead, we need to have blanket measures of excluding large groups of persons, not every one of which has been proven to be a potential terrorist. We also need to be able to deport large numbers of non-citizens. Only warfare will create the situation in which our own U.S. relevant history of legislative and policy wartime measures, which already exist, can effectively deal with those security issues. In short, we are almost certain to be unable to move ahead as long as the nature of the war and the enemy is misidentified. That is the issue which must be addressed, and immediately.

I sympathize with President Bush in his initial misformulation of the situation. However, several years have passed, and it is time to use the insights which these years have brought to us regarding the nature of our enemies. Islam is not a religion of peace, and it is over time that we say so and act on our knowledge of our true enemy.

LA replies:

Yes, “war on Islamofascism” is an improvement over “war on terrorism,” but I still think it doesn’t work. For one thing, who are the people who call themselves Islamofascists? There aren’t any. This is a name made up by Westerners who are hung up by the thought of naming all Muslims as the problem. In fact, earlier today I sent an e-mail to Michelle Malkin making the same point about the term “Islamists.”

Furthermore, what do we mean by Islamofascist (or “Islamist”)? A Muslim who believes in the imposition of sharia? But that is simply a devout Muslim who believes what his religion commands him to believe. Belief in Sharia predates fascism by at least 1,100 years, as the Islamic jurisprudence, still unchanged and authoritative today, took shape in the 9th century, and fascism didn’t appear until the 20th. Also, what does the ideology of Mussolini have to do with people who kidnap people and saw their heads off?

However, in the interests of political realism, I recognize that simply identifying all believing Muslims as the enemy is not going to sell at this point in time. So how do we describe and label the enemy? Perhaps as people who believe in political Islam, that is, in the imposition of Islam on the whole society, sharia, the jizyah tax on non-believers, the new worldwide Caliphate, and so on. Of course, these beliefs are identical with the beliefs of Islam itself, but we’re looking for a fig leaf here that people can live with.

But we’re still not out of the woods. How do we determine who believes in political Islam? We couldn’t just go by what a person tells us, we’d have to look at the whole picture, a person’s whole background. This possibly implies that we would have to start with the rebuttable presumption that each Muslim is a follower of political Islam. But, as the reader Alex has argued, if we must presume guilt, we might as well cut to the chase and name all Muslims as our enemies and exclude them all. But that contradicts our very purpose in this discussion, which is to try to find a narrower way of describing the enemy that is politically realistic and has a chance of being accepted by Americans, an approach that doesn’t categorize all Muslims as the enemy.

Another reader, Richard, thinks that by proposing a collective tailoring of speech in order to arrive at an approach toward Muslims that has a realistic chance in the short term of being adopted, I am losing my vocation, which is to speak the truth as plainly as possible:

If I am understanding you correctly, your regard for (tailoring speech to) political realism is concerning. First, there are far too many commentators limiting their speech in this way, and we have too few who are boldy stating the truth. As I said before, in so doing you are giving permission to many who, although perhaps constitutionally able to handle the truth, for whatever reason have not arrived there themselves. Secondly, I think it’s Western leadership that is obfuscating the issue. I get the feeling that the American people generally are quite ready to be liberated from the incongruity between what they observe and what they have been trained to say and think. If Bush were not constantly taking pains to lull people to sleep with his baseless reassurances, general opinion would naturally have moved toward a more realistic understanding.by now. As long as we have dhimmi/liberal leaders, change will have to be grassroots. If, for example, Muslim riots sprang up in the U.S., I have no doubt our government would be primarily concerned with “vigilatism” by normal, patriotic Americans who would spring to action. Maybe it would only take another terrorist attack, but eventually public outrage would make nonsense statements politically untenable.

In the meantime, if you keep speaking the truth unapologetically (with what seems to me a freakish equanimity), you are doing your part. The furthest any authority on this issue should go on this issue is to say “devout Muslims,” since this still leaves the central truth that Islam itself is the problem. But then again, it avoids the truth that the more Muslims gather in a free society, the more culturally assertive they become, making devout many who would be inclined otherwise.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 14, 2006 01:40 AM | Send