on her blog. This is hardly the first time that she’s obsessed over a non-issue (she has gone after Tim Pawlenty and Mitch Daniels in the past over similar non-issues). The precise problems with Islam, and how they manifest themselves among Muslims at large and the West alike is a sensitive, complex subject that requires finesse to unpack. Geller is hardly the person to do that, and her unfounded witch-hunt against various GOP Presidential candidates is merely the latest manifestation of her inability to do anything but sensationalize the topic she’s covering.

in that, outside of perhaps a few parts of MI (Dearborn? Detroit?), there really is no significant or news-grabbing attempt to reshape the US into a Sharia-compliant country. This is a concern for Europe, but it is not at all clear that it will manifest itself in like manner in the US. Therefore, straw-grasping and bad reportage becomes the order of the day (even from intelligent, informed people like Spencer), and things are blown out of proportion or even outright misrepresented. Case in point: the Murfreesburo mosque has been characterized by many anti-jihadists as some sort of attempt by Muslims to set up an enclave of terrorism and oppression in TN, when in reality it is just a story of a select few locals in a community getting upset that a minority group is exercising its 1st Am rights.

that it was considered relevant given the issues that we’re having, and will continue to have in the future, with Islam in the public sphere and abroad. A well-educated populace

“Christian” history tends to be covered in broader “Western” history classes; ditto a little bit of Judaism. Neither religion is nearly as intertwined with government as Islam has been throughout its history, and a course on the history of Christianity in se (rather than as part of a “Western history” course) would really be more focused on the Councils of the early church, Orthodox/Catholic split, the Reformation/Counter-Reformation, spread to the orient and the New World, and other things not directly related to civic participation. I do see it as useful for private religious schools to have such a course, but (for once) I find the curriculum designers to be in the right on this issue.

I read Jihadwatch on a regular basis. I’m not convinced that it’s much more relevant than the American Communist Party’s political strategy, or that of any white supremacist group in the US. In the same way that protecting a white supremacists right to discriminate or a CPUSA member’s right to association does not count as a “win” for them in any significant way, most of what anti-jihadists seem to construe as “creeping Sharia” seems to me to be more in keeping with our adherence to historical norms, more than a deviation from same towards Sharia.

I would dispute the notion that European experiences with Muslim immigrants is directly transferable to the US: historically speaking, Europe has *never* had good experiences with its immigrants, whereas the US has been fantastically successful with same. It’s not just Muslim immigrants: Polish immigrants and African political refugees in the UK and Central Europe are treated pretty badly, while Mexican immigrants to the US (illegal and non) tend to get a kinder reception and have more opportunity to succeed. This is borne out both by my anecdotal experiences and the statistics that I’ve seen on the subject: immigrants to Western Euro countries (white, black, Christian and Muslim) tend to be seen in a more negative light by natives than similar populations are by US citizens, and immigrants tend to perform much more poorly in every category (education, employment, ratio of citizen/non-citizen) than immigrants to the US do. While trends in Europe are concerning, they are not directly transferable to the US. (And even if they were, we have more control over Islamic immigration an ocean away than Euros do when poor Muslims are as nearby as the Balkans and Anatolia.)

IMO, anti-jihadists are extrapolating far too much from Europe (a region with 1500 years of religious and racial hatreds and a nearby populace of Muslims) onto the US (which has always had much better stats and attitudes as regards immigrants). They have some really interesting and insightful things to say about Europe and our ME policy, and some of what they say about the US is sound, but they really have to strain when talking about concrete harms done in the US by native-born or immigrant Muslims, because we’re *not* in the same place as Europe. Therefore, you tend to get ignorance or misinterpretation of events that are really quite benign, or focus on loudmouths who don’t have much power. CAIR is annoying, but has as much power as self-effacing, politically-correct pols give it: in reality, it is not a particularly powerful lobbying or political force.

Public schools are horrible, but I was just trying to make a case for why it would be rational to teach “Islamic history” without having a similar class for Christian history. (IMO, Christian history is important for every Christian to have a proper handle of, but is not directly related to the general rationale for public schools to inculcate kiddies with the requisite education to participate in democracy (a task that they’re failing at beyond all reasonable expectations, but I digress).

it seems to me that political correctness is more the problem than Muslims: honestly, I don’t know many American Muslims who know much about CAIR at all, much less who actively support CAIR. (Again, the comparison between it and the CPUSA, many of whose membership were dumb kids or idealistic radicals as opposed to the subversives who populated its leadership, is an instructive one.) I also think that anyone who thinks that CAIR is more of a threat than Soviet subversives is really giving the Islamists too much credit: Iran and the rest of the ME (besides Israel) is dirt poor besides oil revenues, and its leaders are far more interested in using these funds to either satisfy their epicurean delights or to subdue/indoctrinate their native populations than they are in funneling these funds into improbable schemes to topple the American form of government. The Sauds and other leaders in the ME seem more interested in using their propaganda and lobbying to assauge Westerners who would rather not buy their gas, than in converting the US into a sharifate. (Not that they would tear up at that prospect; they simply know that it is beyond their modest means.)

Lastly, CAIR is “ascendant” in the same respect that Mormons are “ascendant”: as a small, niche group with newly-gained legitimacy, they have nowhere to go but up. This merely means that they haven’t reached their inflection point, not that their growth is unstoppable or that we can’t prevent it through common sense measures.

I do agree that these trends are concerning, but I also think that the things that we could do to make these threats go to almost zero are simple and common sense enough that we won’t have a problem before we get to the point where Sharia goes at a speed more ominous than “creeping”. I also think that some people underestimate the severity of Europe’s treatment of outsiders: even legitimate anti-Sharia organizations, like the English Defense League, have to work very, very hard to purge themselves of racists and fascists, and to be frank, there’s nothing in continental Europe’s far right that makes me think that a resurgence of same as a response to Sharia will bring about anything but tragedy.

BTW, my best friend is from Dearborn. I’ve been there, and it’s an… interesting place. (I wasn’t there pre-immigrant trends, admittedly, so I don’t have much of a baseline.)

I think that we agree that sometimes anti-jihadists can be hyperbolic, and that we should take their statements on Perry, et al with a grain of salt.