Free market anarchist. Like to get on my soapbox and get things going. Love to play bluegrass music for an audience or in a jam session. Like people fine one to one. Don't like 'em so much in groups. Love animals, wildlife, nature.
The U.S. Senate is considering the unthinkable: changing detention laws to imprison people — including Americans living in the United States itself — indefinitely and without charge.
The Defense Authorization bill — a "must-pass" piece of legislation — is headed to the Senate floor with troubling provisions that would give the President — and all future presidents — the authority to indefinitely imprison people, without charge or trial, both abroad and inside the United States.
The media are mistakenly characterizing the Occupy Wall Street movement as unemployed Millennials with a legitimate gripe against Wall Street consistent with the Tea Party, or as a rag-tag group of unemployed stoners with no coherent message, not to be taken too seriously. After spending hours interviewing protesters in Oakland, California, both characterizations are way off base. If either scenario were apt, these folks would be marching on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and storming Congress. Instead, they're taking on Wall Street and storming the homes of the wealthy and the buildings of large corporations.
It's Mourning in America, friends. Wake up to the fetid smell of Marxism taking over Main Street, intent on crushing Wall Street.
Each person interviewed in Oakland had the same story to tell, and if you listen carefully to the video from the main stream press, it's this: capitalism is the root of all evil.
According to the Occupiers, Big Business has corrupted our government, corporations exploit workers, the rich control everything, the top 1% own somewhere between 30% and 60% of all wealth, the disparity between the rich and the remaining 99% is growing and the property-owning bourgeoisie is responsible for that. The workers need to take control of the means of production and mount a revolution to overthrow capitalism by expropriating property from the bourgeoisie. The workers need to rise up (fist pump), redistribute capital more equitably and establish a Marxist paradise -- slaying the neo-liberalism dragon and enthroning the worker, all in the name of "economic justice."
We can pretend this isn't the case by sticking our heads in the sand, but facts are facts. When thousands say they want to overthrow capitalism and redistribute property, take them at their word, especially when their chants, signs, words, actions, websites and blogs all support that. And when they are as highly-organized, highly-funded, highly-networked, highly-mobilized and highly-motivated as the Wall Street Occupiers are, then we need to be afraid, be very afraid.
How grassroots can this movement be when a simple scroll through the internet reveals that Big Labor and Big Community Organization are openly supporting it, organizing it, taking donations for it and drafting petitions for it? Some of those organizations are MoveOn, SEIU, AFL-CIO, National Nurses United, Working Families Party, Van Jones' Rebuild the Dream, Adbusters, US Day of Rage, Take the Square, October 2011, We are the 99%, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, CREDO and MoveOn's very own Avaaz.org -- the international progenitor of the Arab Spring.
A cornucopia of America's pop culture glitterati have thrust themselves into the midst of the Occupation with calls for revolution from Danny Glover; shouts of solidarity from Van Jones; cheers from Al Gore that OWSers are "pointing out the flaws in our system"; and professions from Michael Moore (whose latest agitprop was presciently entitled "Capitalism: A Love Story") that "There's a shared feeling among people down there that this economic system that we have is unfair."
All of the people interviewed at Occupy Oakland spoke with one voice: we must get rid of the system. And they didn't hold back when probed: the system we must dismantle is capitalism.
It's no coincidence that three of the most progressive members of Congress have thrown their support behind the Occupation. Congressman Keith Ellison cast the issue as one of class warfare -- pitting the "overwhelming majority of Americans" against the "super wealthy." Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky marched-shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow travelers at Occupy Chicago. And, in contrast with her hateful rants about the Tea Party, Nancy Pelosi invoked G-d and blessed the Occupiers while prognosticating that they are going "to be effective."
The most revealing endorsement for the Occupation came from the White House itself, as President Obama expressed sympathy for the protesters who demonstrated a "broad-based frustration about how our financial system [capitalism] works." But the Occupation Revolution cannot come as any surprise to Obama given that he has been fomenting class warfare, redistribution and fundamental change since he happened upon the political scene.
Emails from MoveOn.org have consistently focused on demands for income equality and forcing corporations and the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes. The Bay of Rage website unabashedly explains that they are "an anti-capitalist initiative" that will "function during this period of austerity" as a "clearing house" for information and action. At the bottom of the home page, the stakes are clearly laid out: "austerity or civil war."
Still don't believe me? From the Bay of Rage website:
This Friday, Oct 14th, the 5th day of Occupy Oakland, an anti-capitalist bloc led the first march out of Oscar Grant Plaza (Frank Ogawa Plaza). A diverse crowd of at least 200 chanted "Fuck the police, we don't need 'em. All we want is total freedom", "Burn the Banks", and " 1, 2, 3, 4 - organize for social war" throughout the demonstration.
From MoveOr.org emails:
They're called "the 99%," because they stand for all of us left behind by the massive concentration of wealth among the richest 1%. The protesters' unrelenting campaign against the corporate takeover of our democracy is being fought in the best traditions of nonviolent resistance.
The signs, placards, and chants focus on standing up for what the protesters are calling "the 99%" of us who are suffering while Wall Street bankers grow richer by the day.
Peruse the sites: references to the Arab Spring, calls for an American Fall (pun intended with all seriousness) and envy for uprisings in Egypt, Greece and London are ubiquitous, as are demands for revolution, resistance and the abolition of capitalism.
Marxist rhetoric plays like a broken record: bourgeoisie, oppressed workers, inequality, redistribution, capitalism and solidarity. Fortunately, MoveOn is there to define for us the "oppressed":
"The 99% protesters represent all of us who are being left behind: union workers, public servants, the poor, the unemployed, seniors, the disabled, young people graduating off a cliff to no jobs."
Does this list truly represent 99% of the US population? If 1% includes millionaires and billionaires, wouldn't the 99% have to include all of those mid-level executives, professionals and small business owners, etc.? Yes. But for purposes of this Marxist Revolution, if you have money in the bank or own property -- be it a hot dog stand or beauty salon -- then you are part of the bourgeoisie. The 99% have lumped bourgeois property owners (who really make up the vast majority of the middle) together with the 1% of millionaires and billionaires. To any rational mind this doesn't make sense, but it doesn't matter. The property, hard work and success of Main Street and the American Dream have been targeted by the so-called 99%.
And just when "social justice" and "capitalist pig" have become part of the American vernacular, we have to acquaint ourselves with new buzz words parroted by Marxist retreads form the 60s and their "useful idiot" Occupiers: "economic justice" is the latest moniker for economic parity among all of G-d's creatures and "neo-liberalism" is the latest in a string of dirty words blaming corporations for just about everything.
None of this is being done in secret. It's all out in the open. We just choose to look the other way.
America has to wake up to this new reality: the Cold War battle between communism and capitalism is back, only this time it's on our front porch. It went underground in the 70s, got an education, put on a suit, bought a house and had a couple of kids. Then it used the schools to educate new foot soldiers and manipulated the pop culture to indoctrinate the next generation of fellow travelers who seek to create a new world order in the image of old world Marxism. Bill Ayers and his allieshave been very busy -- and successful. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, this bona fide fifth column has patiently been marking time, waiting for the right moment to pounce on an oblivious, comfortable middle class, re-cast it as the wealthy ruling class, and take it down with a series of fatal bites to the jugular. Gramscitold Marxists generations ago that they had to take over education and the culture to bring about the revolution. The smart ones listened and acted.
TV personalities like Geraldo Rivera can label this description of the Occupation as "harsh, paranoid or delusional," but I base my conclusions on the up-close-and-personal interviews I conducted at Occupy Oakland.
Pretending this is something different than it is, is a dangerous game. In his Iron Curtain speech, Churchill lamented: "Last time I saw it all coming and I cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention."
And in Elie Wiesel's Night, the townspeople were as incredulous as Geraldo in heeding the warnings of Moshe the Beadle, who, left for dead in a Nazi massacre, miraculously found his way home. Although Moshe tried to warn his landsmen about the atrocities he witnessed and knew were destined for them all, "the people not only refused to believe his tales, they refused to listen. Some even insinuated that he only wanted their pity, that he was imagining things. Others flatly said that he had gone mad." Geraldo, America, are you listening?
Think of the suffering and treasure that might have been spared if the comfortable masses had taken seriously the warnings of Churchill or Europe's real Moshes.
I am no Churchill but I admonish my fellow countrymen: don't shrug this off as bunch of unsettled kids. Don't wait for the Iron Curtain of oppression to fall while you go about your daily life, business as usual. It's anything but.
Take a moment to surf the net, attend a MoveOn meeting or talk to a few occupiers. "There's something happening here." "There's battle lines being drawn." "Young people speaking their minds". "A thousand people in the street." We better stop and ask "hey, what's that sound, everybody look what's going down."
It's your country and the Marxists aren't coming -- they're here.
"Working men of all countries, unite!" Marx, 1847
"People of the world unite!" Mao, 1970
"It's time for us to unite. It's time for them to listen. People of the world, rise up on October 15th!" www.15october.net, 2011
Sally Zelikovsky is a former attorney, turned mother of three. She is the Founder of Bay Area Patriots and Coordinator of the San Francisco Tea Party.
Local government officials are training active duty military soldiers to run communities, re-igniting fears that troops will be used to deal with civil unrest in the event of a total economic collapse or other national emergency in a newly militarized America.
“The 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division met with City Manager Mary Corriveau, Mayor Jeff Graham and other City officials gaining insight about city infrastructure,” reports ABC 50.
“Government 101 is a new program that Fort Drum has established to learn from local officials about what it takes to run a community efficiently.”
The 10th Mountain Division is a light infantry division of the United States Army based at Fort Drum, New York that specializes in fighting under harsh terrain and weather conditions. The unit was deployed to Afghanistan in 2006 for one year and then to Iraq in April 2008.
The troops are being prepared for “A sitution where in essence they will become the local government,” said Corriveau.
The program is ostensibly aimed at preparing troops to govern occupied areas of Afghanistan, but as we highlighted over the last two years, the real purpose behind the training could hit a lot closer to home.
A similar program that was announced back in September 2008 involving the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team was geared around training troops who had recently returned from Afghanistan to conduct “homeland patrols” which began on October 1st of that year.
According to an Army Times report, part of the troops’ mission was to deal with “civil unrest and crowd control” by using non-lethal weapons against the American people. After the announcement caused controversy, the Army Times was forced to issue a clarification, claiming that the non-lethal weapons training was intended for use overseas, but the part about “civil unrest and crowd control,” a complete violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, was not retracted.
In November 2008, Northcom announced that over the course of the following three years, an additional 4,700 troops would be assigned for domestic homeland security missions.
The very next month, the Armed Forces Press Service initiated a propaganda campaign designed to convince the American people that deploying the 3rd Infantry Division in the United States in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act was a good thing, as fully uniformed soldiers were photographed helping to save car wreck victims, in another effort at incrementally conditioning Americans to accept troops on the streets as normal, despite the fact that it is the hallmark of corrupt dictatorships and empires in terminal decline like the former Soviet Union.
Under the pretext of “helping” local communities short of police in difficult economic times, U.S. troops are now occupying America as the country sinks into a state of de facto martial law.
The military are now being called upon to undertake roles normally designated to police as Americans are incrementally acclimated to accept the presence of troops on the streets as an everyday occurrence.
With the government preparing to seize Americans’ private pensions as the economy further deteriorates, innumerable forecasters are predicting riots and mass civil unrest once the vanishing middle class finally rises from its slumber and realizes that their entire way of life is under immediate threat.
Unless we can communicate the fact that having troops patrol the streets is not normal and in reality is a warning siren for a country in dire straights, those same troops will soon be firing non-lethal weapons at angry American citizens – or worse.
As Gerald Celente often warns, once Americans have lost everything, they will begin to lose it – rioting in massive numbers and mirroring the growing civil unrest we are already seeing in Europe as people rise up en masse in a backlash against austerity measures and governments raising the age of retirement and seizing pensions.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show. Watson has been interviewed by many publications and radio shows, including Vanity Fair and Coast to Coast AM, America’s most listened to late night talk show.
State should have power to block individual computers from connecting to world wide web, claims Charney
A new proposal by a top Microsoft executive would open the door for government licensing to access the Internet, with authorities being empowered to block individual computers from connecting to the world wide web under the pretext of preventing malware attacks.
Speaking to the ISSE 2010 computer security conference in Berlin yesterday, Scott Charney, Microsoft vice president of Trustworthy Computing, said that cybersecurity should mirror public health safety laws, with infected PC’s being “quarantined” by government decree and prevented from accessing the Internet.
“If a device is known to be a danger to the internet, the user should be notified and the device should be cleaned before it is allowed unfettered access to the internet, minimizing the risk of the infected device contaminating other devices,” Charney said.
Charney said the system would be a “global collective defense” run by corporations and government and would “track and control” people’s computers similar to how government health bodies track diseases.
Invoking the threat of malware attacks as a means of dissuading or blocking people from using the Internet is becoming a common theme – but it’s one tainted with political overtones.
Under the new proposals, not only would the government cite the threat of malware to prevent people from visiting Drudge, they would be blocked from the entire world wide web, creating a dangerous precedent by giving government the power to dictate whether people can use the Internet and effectively opening the door for a licensing system to be introduced.
Similar to how vehicle inspections are mandatory for cars in some states before they can be driven, are we entering a phase where you will have to obtain a PC health check before a government IP czar will issue you with a license, or an Internet ID card, allowing you to access the web?
Of course, the only way companies or the government could know when your system becomes infected with malware is to have some kind of mandatory software or firewall installed on every PC which sends data to a centralized hub, greasing the skids for warrantless surveillance and other invasions of privacy.
Microsoft has been at the forefront of a bid to introduce Internet licensing as a means of controlling how people access and use the world wide web, an effort that has intensified over the course of the past year.
During this year’s Economic Summit in Davos, Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, said that the Internet needed to be policed by means of introducing licenses similar to drivers licenses – in other words government permission to use the web.
“We need a kind of World Health Organization for the Internet,” he said, mirroring Charney’s rhetoric about controlling cyberspace in a public health context.
“If you want to drive a car you have to have a license to say that you are capable of driving a car, the car has to pass a test to say it is fit to drive and you have to have insurance.”
“Don’t be surprised if it becomes reality in the near future,” wrote ZD Net’s Doug Hanchard on the introduction of Internet licensing . “Every device connected to the Internet will have a permanent license plate and without it, the network won’t allow you to log in.”
Just days after Mundie’s call for Internet licensing, Time Magazine jumped on the bandwagon, publishing an article by Barbara Kiviat, one of Mundie’s fellow attendees at the elitist confab, in which she wrote that the Internet was too lawless and needed “the people in charge” to start policing it with licensing measures.
Shortly after Time Magazine started peddling the proposal, the New York Times soon followed suit with a blog entitled Driver’s Licenses for the Internet?, which merely parroted Kiviat’s talking points.
Of course there’s a very good reason for Time Magazine and the New York Times to be pushing for measures that would undoubtedly lead to a chilling effect on free speech which would in turn eviscerate the blogosphere.
Any proposal which allows the government to get a foot in the door on dictating who can and can’t use the Internet should be vigorously opposed because such a system would be wide open for abuse and pave the way for full licensing and top down control of the world wide web.
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show. Watson has been interviewed by many publications and radio shows, including Vanity Fair and Coast to Coast AM, America’s most listened to late night talk show.
If you ever fell victim to the prejudice that people today are smarter and more intellectually sophisticated than the people of the 1st or 13th centuries, you need only ask your friends and neighbors about the terrifying word "anarchy" to prove to yourself that our generations are just as stupid and foolish as any others. Even mentioning the word with a straight face is bound to put your acquaintances on edge, which is remarkable in itself. But, once they recover their senses from hearing the word pronounced out loud without a clap of thunder following on its heels, they will usually offer an argument against anarchism that rivals in its sheer stupidity any arguments that the flat-Earthers ever gave in antiquity.
It usually goes something like this: Human nature is so intrinsically evil and depraved that, without cops walking the streets, judges locking up potheads, and politicians buying hookers and crack in Washington, the entire world would devolve into a horrifying bloodbath. Murder and rape would run rampant as soon as the "criminals," (that is, all of us, as per our shared evil nature), got word that the police were no longer in the business of shooting, beating and incarcerating them. Virtually everyone and everything would be killed or destroyed in the ensuing mayhem. Cannibalism would probably even reappear for the barbaric survivors of the initial anarchic bloodbath. That’s right, cannibalism.
So, as you can clearly see, the fragile fabric of society is held together ultimately by the simple police officer, whom we all take for granted, and whose life is spent deterring the innumerable "criminals" out there from butchering one another, like you and me. Without police officers, given human nature’s intrinsic depravity, life would indeed be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."
The sheer stupidity of arguments along the lines that human nature is so totally depraved that society would devolve into cruel chaos in the absence of police officers is almost difficult to fathom. One can forgive the flat-Earthers of yesterday for not being gifted enough in astronomy and mathematics to determine that the giant hunk of rock they stood on is spherical, but how can one forgive the people of today for thinking that that guy wearing blue polyester with mustard in his mustache in the corner of the deli is the very linchpin of human society? How can one forgive an intellectual error as large as the one that presumes that you and I would probably fight each other to the death if it wasn’t for that woman with a mullet and a radar gun under the highway overpass? How will future generations be able to comprehend an intellectual error as large as the one that holds that our very lives and our entire civilization hang oh-so tenuously from a 56-inch braided duty belt?
If our lives and fortunes were indeed dependent upon protection from a handful of people swaddled in hideous blue polyester, mankind would have long ago lost them. If human nature were truly as depraved as these arguments would have us believe, then the chubby blue line would long ago have been annihilated by its vastly numerically superior criminal adversaries. No "criminal" worth the name would be deterred from committing his favored atrocities by a small group of lightly-armed fat people, whose national reputation is tied inextricably to the donut. To even suggest that this 300 million-strong horde of savage, would-be criminals are kept at bay only by some irrational fear of blue polyester is so asinine that it makes the flat-Earthers look like geniuses by comparison.
This intellectual error is all the more inexcusable in America, where the population is armed to the teeth with high-powered rifles, pistols, and shotguns. If the American population were truly as depraved as this argument would have us believe all people are, then its bloodlust could hardly be contained by a few pudgy men and women carrying small caliber pistols. The thought is as laughable as would be an argument to the effect that the hardened and rifle-toting farmers of Mayberry were deterred from slaughtering one another by Andy Griffith and his slow-witted sidekick.
On another level, moreover, arguments to this effect are deeply insulting to people like you and me, for they insinuate that you and I are savage beasts that are only kept in check by those enlightened and portly souls who populate the local police force. Unlike those ultra-civilized "public servants," you and I would like nothing more than to cut each other’s throats, if only the peace-loving police officers of the world weren’t holding us back. The truth, as anyone with eyes in America should be able to tell you, is precisely the reverse, since police officers and soldiers are often the most depraved perpetrators of the very crimes they claim to "protect" Americans from. The police are people just like us, after all, even if their waists are often larger, and they are capable of the same brutality as any other people.
There are some intellectual errors that one can excuse, or at least understand. The people of antiquity could not see that the Earth was round, so one can understand that they did not grasp that seemingly obvious truth There are other intellectual errors, however, that are so idiotic and so self-evident that they smash to pieces any sense of superiority we might be foolish enough to entertain over other peoples. Such is the magnitude of the error of dismissing the sublime idea of free-market anarchism by assuming that the geniuses in blue keep us savages from killing each other.
October 5, 2010
Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.
The taming and domestication of religious faith is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.
A recent blizzard of liberal columns has framed the debate over American Islam as if it were no more than the most recent stage in the glorious history of our religious tolerance. This phrasing of the question has the (presumably intentional) effect of marginalizing doubts and of lumping any doubters with the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings, the anti-Semites, and other bigots and shellbacks. So I pause to take part in a thought experiment, and to ask myself: Am I in favor of the untrammeled "free exercise of religion"?
No, I am not. Take an example close at hand, the absurdly named Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. More usually known as the Mormon church, it can boast Glenn Beck as one of its recruits. He has recently won much cheap publicity for scheduling a rally on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington. But on the day on which the original rally occurred in 1963, the Mormon church had not yet gotten around to recognizing black people as fully human or as eligible for full membership. (Its leadership subsequently underwent a "revelation" allowing a change on this point, but not until after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.) This opportunism closely shadowed an earlier adjustment of Mormon dogma, abandoning its historic and violent attachment to polygamy. Without that doctrinal change, the state of Utah was firmly told that it could not be part of the Union. More recently, Gov. Mitt Romney had to assure voters that he did not regard the prophet, or head of the Mormon church, as having ultimate moral and spiritual authority on all matters. Nothing, he swore, could override the U.S. Constitution. Thus, to the extent that we view latter-day saints as acceptable, and agree to overlook their other quaint and weird beliefs, it is to the extent that we have decidedly limited them in the free exercise of their religion.
One could cite some other examples, such as those Christian sects that disapprove of the practice of medicine. Their adult members are generally allowed to die while uttering religious incantations and waving away the physician, but, in many states, if they apply this faith to their children—a crucial element in the "free exercise" of religion—they can be taken straight to court. Not only that, they can find themselves subject to general disapproval and condemnation.
It was probably the latter consideration that helped impel the majority of American Orthodox Jews to give up the practice of metzitzah b'peh, a radical form of male circumcision that is topped off, if you will forgive the expression, by the sucking of the infant's penis by the rabbi or mohel so as to remove any remaining blood or debris. A few tiny sects still cling to this disgusting ritual, which in New York a few years ago led to a small but deadly outbreak of herpes among recently circumcised babies. On that occasion, despite calls for a ban on the practice from many Jewish doctors, the vastly overrated Mayor Michael Bloomberg chose an election year to say that such "free exercise" should not be interfered with.
We talk now as if it was ridiculous ever to suspect Roman Catholics of anything but the highest motives, yet by the time John F. Kennedy was breaking the unspoken taboo on the election of a Catholic as president, the Vatican had just begun to consider making public atonement for centuries of Jew-hatred and a more recent sympathy for fascism. Even today, many lay Catholics are appalled at the Vatican's protection of men who are sought for questioning in one of the gravest of all crimes: the organized rape of children. It is generally agreed that the church's behavior and autonomy need to be modified to take account both of American law and American moral outrage. So much for the naive invocation of "free exercise."
One could easily go on. The Church of Scientology, the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon, and the Ku Klux Klan are all faith-based organizations and are all entitled to the protections of the First Amendment. But they are also all subject to a complex of statutes governing tax-exemption, fraud, racism, and violence, to the point where "free exercise" in the third case has—by means of federal law enforcement and stern public disapproval—been reduced to a vestige of its former self.
Now to Islam. It is, first, a religion that makes very large claims for itself, purporting to be the last and final word of God and expressing an ambition to become the world's only religion. Some of its adherents follow or advocate the practice of plural marriage, forced marriage, female circumcision, compulsory veiling of women, and censorship of non-Muslim magazines and media. Islam's teachings generally exhibit suspicion of the very idea of church-state separation. Other teachings, depending on context, can be held to exhibit a very strong dislike of other religions, as well as of heretical forms of Islam. Muslims in America, including members of the armed forces, have already been found willing to respond to orders issued by foreign terrorist organizations. Most disturbingly, no authority within the faith appears to have the power to rule decisively that such practices, or such teachings, or such actions, are definitely and utterly in conflict with the precepts of the religion itself.
Reactions from even "moderate" Muslims to criticism are not uniformly reassuring. "Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s," Imam Abdullah Antepli, Muslim chaplain at Duke University, told the New York Times. Yes, we all recall the Jewish suicide bombers of that period, as we recall the Jewish yells for holy war, the Jewish demands for the veiling of women and the stoning of homosexuals, and the Jewish burning of newspapers that published cartoons they did not like. What is needed from the supporters of this very confident faith is more self-criticism and less self-pity and self-righteousness.
Those who wish that there would be no mosques in America have already lost the argument: Globalization, no less than the promise of American liberty, mandates that the United States will have a Muslim population of some size. The only question, then, is what kind, or rather kinds, of Islam it will follow. There's an excellent chance of a healthy pluralist outcome, but it's very unlikely that this can happen unless, as with their predecessors on these shores, Muslims are compelled to abandon certain presumptions that are exclusive to themselves. The taming and domestication of religion is one of the unceasing chores of civilization. Those who pretend that we can skip this stage in the present case are deluding themselves and asking for trouble not just in the future but in the immediate present.
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