It is okay to have debates ad nauseum about protecting civil liberties, but when you are faced with the wrath of an extremist religious cult that is pulling off cold, calculated, murderous attacks all over the world, what will you do to protect your country and your neighbors?

Singing kumbaya, conjuring up new conspiracy theories, and making fun of government efforts to secure the homeland are all excellent endeavors. But they won’t protect you or your family from Osama’s wrath. Gandhi wrote a letter to Hitler but was not able to stop him from proceeding with WWII. Your articles and faux liberalism won’t stop Osama either.

If you are a Muslim or liberal and are offended by this, I have a simple question for you: what are you doing to help the situation? Publicly denounce Wahhabis, start a protest movement within Islam that says that the religion needs to overthrow the extremist element that is holding the religion and world hostage. If you wish to hold to the label of Muslim, then be willing to be identified with its excesses as well as its good points. Renounce the label or reform it, before it destroys our society.

The good of the many cannot be sacrificed to protect the good of the few.

By the way, this is a South Asia-related forum. Anyone track the news item about bombs that ripped through courts in three towns in UP in North India? Apparently the Muslim terrorists were pissed at the lawyers who after 20 years of having to live with terrorism, have stopped defending terrorists in courts in those cities:

http://in.news.yahoo.com/071123/210/6nm7q.html

Rednecks are uneducated, 80 IQ inbreds who get promoted beyond their means, creating trouble for the rest of us.

Don’t forget that Rednecks are also associated with being from the rural areas of the Southern part of the U.S.

Any label that makes a derogatory presumptions about a subset of population (for example..the Muslim population) is offensive.

And to think that the LAPD (remember Rodney King?) is executing the project. Time to double my year-end gift to the ACLU.

Given the long history of Your Black Muslim Bakery, it’s not entirely bad to keep tabs on those folks.

The profiling argument has been made a thousand times before about Timothy McVeigh, Charles Manson, and a host of other white ‘terrorists’; No one profiles Christians/military folks, even though both groups have a history of extemist ideas and violent actions. There is no ‘outreach’ by the government or tracking of churchgoers. While we can cite the British model for its efficiency, we can also look at our current system (no fly lists, ‘extraordinary rendition’ and all that), and see that clearly something is severely fucked here. Denying civil rights, circumventing the law (wiretapping without warrant, detainment without due process, etc.) and tracking people based on ethnicity or religion are not going to help ‘outreach’ to the targeted communities. To draw a distinction between “homeland” and “Muslims” is essentially akin to declaring them Enemies of the Party (sorry, reading Kundera and the theme resonates). To make this distinction absolute is to increase the divide, and to encourage the ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ feeling, in which case, you might as well do.

And now I’m craving falafel. Perfect.

Uh, are you saying that because the French did horrible things to Algerians in Algeria, the French of today have a moral responsibility not to cavil when the Algerians do the same to them? Good luck convincing any flesh-and-blood human with such moral absolutism. If moral systems are theories justifying group and individual survival strategies, as human history indicates they are, then the Algerians may surely be moral in their desire to give back the same treatment they got, but the French are in such circumstances moral in their desire not to let it happen. And like it or not, when two moral systems are so violently contradictory, the one with the more power gets to decide which one prevails.

A moral system in reality is a little bit closer to a deal. For it to be acceptable to both sides, it has to be win-win if to unequal extents. Arguments about universal human rights, past colonial crimes etc confer soft power to the militarily weaker side as well as a sense of feel-good justice to the stronger one, but only so when its survival is not at sake. Liberalism and charity work only when the liberal and charitable do not have to lose their children, their employment or their retirement savings to liberalism (the tighter the situation the less the inclination to altruism– e.g., look at the difference between protests against affirmative action in India and the US). A bargain or an equilibrium needs to be reached, and polarizing arguments like yours do not help that.

None of this is to imply that the French Muslims actually want retribution for colonization or that the survival of the indigenous French is really at stake– both are clearly untrue–just as Mexican immigrants today aren’t really seeking to declare Aztlan independent. My point is more about the self-righteousness of your argument.