My Keloland colleague Dr. David Newquist has two recent posts with which I am largely in agreement. His September 11 post begins this way:
If you list the identifying values of America as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, you will list the very qualities of life that the Islamists want to eradicate: life, liberty, freedom of and from religion, equality, justice for all, and the basic right to an individual identity. As we can recall from the Cold War, our country would never allow any organization to operate in America with the expressed purpose of destroying America. But mosques have been established in this country for exactly that purpose.
I disagree with Professor Newquist's second sentence as a matter of fact: the U.S. Supreme Court has long extended full First Amendment protection to communists, Nazis, and others with "the express purpose of destroying America." But I note that that was largely because we judged those parties to be no threat. David makes a plausible case that militant Islam is different.
I also note a piece in the Washington Post that tries to deny some obvious facts about terrorism. Alan B. Krueger, Bendheim Professor of economics and public policy at Princeton, does some fast but clumsy footwork in his "5 myths about Terrorism." The kicker is Myth #4, which is a tour de force of snide rhetoric.
Terrorism is mainly perpetrated by Muslims. Wrong. No religion has a monopoly on terrorism. Every major religious faith has had followers involved in terrorism.
Notice the fallacious reasoning there: because there are some non-Muslim terrorists, terrorism isn't mainly perpetrated by Muslims. Yeah, and because there is the occasional black sheep, sheep aren't mainly white. Close your eyes whenever passing a ranch or watching the news, and you can believe both things. And consider this gem:
Although radical Islamic terrorists are the worry du jour because of 9/11 and Iraq, the data show pretty clearly that the predominant religion of a country is not a good predictor of whether its people will become involved in terrorism.
Well, yeah, England isn't yet a Muslim country, but that isn't the point is it? The big terrorist acts of recent years and months in England were committed by Muslims, weren't they?
It's true as he notes that Hinduism has produced a small but significant number of terrorists, but those tend to be theater-specific: they operate in war zones like Sri Lanka and Kashmir. It is also true that America has produced some homegrown terrorists like Timothy McVeigh. But those are blessedly few, and they tend to be isolated clusters of nut cases without an ideology to draw others to them or organizations to continue their awful work. Moreover, apart from Ireland, it's hard to find Christian terrorists, and the terrorists there were clearly motivated by nationalism rather than religion (as is the case in Sri Lanka). And when was the last time a Buddhist blew anyone out of his socks in the name of Jizo (depicted above)?
The obvious truth, obvious to anyone who is not trying to deceive himself or others, is that contemporary terrorism about the world is not just "mainly" but overwhelming a phenomenon of militant Islam. Were Muslims world wide to suddenly behave like Buddhists, terrorism would all but disappear from the news. If Professor Krueger really believes what he is writing, and if he is typical of Princeton faculty, their students should all decamp and enroll at Northern. They would save tens of thousands, and even get a good education.
Recent Comments