Full Reports (pdf):
Restrictions on Civil Liberties, Views of Islam, & Muslim Americans
U.S. War on Terror, U.S.Foreign Policy, and Anti-Americanism
[QUOTE=Squink]
Fear factor: 44 percent of Americans queried in Cornell national poll favor curtailing some liberties for Muslim Americans
Isn’t that racism - and hardly a great advertisement for ‘the land of the free’??
First of all, how can it be racism when Muslims aren’t a race? Or even an ethnic group? If you sat outside the mosque on Riverside Drive and watched people come out, I think you’d be surprised at how you have black, white, and everything in between there.
Some of this does bother me but the problem is that in Muslim lands there is, essentially, no separation of mosque and state. Political sermons and plots are hatched right in the mosques. Some monitoring of some of the most radical ones seems to make perfect sense. Their imams, if they are not American, should be deported like any other dangerous criminals; if they are American, they should be exposed in the press and face criticism from people inside and outside their faith much and Robertson and Falwell do.
[QUOTE=Mehitabel]
First of all, how can it be racism when Muslims aren’t a race? Or even an ethnic group?
Perhaps I should have written religious persecution then - I chose the word ‘racism’ instead because I have noticed that many Americans seem to equate the word ‘Muslim’ with ‘Arab’ or ‘Middle Eastern’.
Even the American media are sloppy about differentiating between Muslims - they often use the word Muslim when they really mean Iraqi, Afghani etc.
“First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out–
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the communists
and I did not speak out–
because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out–
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me–
and there was no one left to speak out for me.”
Maybe they’ll make a mistake, which has happened enough times in the past. Maybe the political climate will swing, and someone who disagrees with your opinions will be in the White House and decide that claiming you’re a terrorist in order to detain you indefinitely is a good thing to do. Do you really have such faith in the government of the US that you’re ready to give it, in practice, unlimited powers, even though the actual persons wielding those powers change? Why couldn’t another Hitler turn up in your country?
Hitler came out of the carnage of the 1929 Stock Market crash and the weak Versailles government in place in Germany at the time, and also, because it wasn’t properly defeated, allowed a sentiment of revenge to swell up in the German populace, all of which was exploited by Hitler. So no, the next one won’t come to the United States, the Middle East, well, thats a different story, there is a possibility.
Political Correctness sometimes gets in the way of things, oh wait, they did ban Cat Stevens, seem to be going in the right direction.
You miss the point. Right now, sans warrants, the military pops fuckers left and right over in Iraq and Afghanistan. (And they were in on taking out that gaggle of terrs over in Yemen), not to mention ‘quiet’ operations in Columbia and Philippines and wherever else these days.
Do you sit and worry that you are next? An armed Predator drone is circling over your house, waiting to zap you! An USMC sniper is waiting for you to poke your head out the front door, and whammo! Of course not. So why are you worried that some SEALs are going to snatch you up?
And innocent civilians. But of course, that doesn’t worry you at all, does it?
And hostile militants. Friendly fire’s the only worthwhile casualties. Brutus is mostly right, problem is, those US killed by their own are only a minority of total kills.
That’s hardly an acceptable degree of accuracy, is it now? No the point is well made, these powers are not used with sufficient precision.
No, but just because you tend to get a little bit more warning before someone goes war on you. American agents turned up in my own home country not long ago, snatched away two people with full legal rights to stay and left with them. Where? Why? No-one knows, probably not even those two. No-one has to tell them, no-one has to give them a chance to defend themselves, no-one has to tell anybody any reasons or justification.
What’s to stop me from being next? Maybe a charity organization I give to supports terrorists without my knowledge, or maybe someone thinks I give to a charity organization that they think supports terrorists. There goes me.
Come on. You cannot not see the point of maintaining habeas corpus. Do you think laying out the Bill of Rights was a waste of time, because the government won’t do anything bad anyway, and if they do, it won’t be to you? Would you worry if another country was the biggest kid on the block and gave itself these powers? Say, China, or the Soviet Union, or North Korea, or Iraq. What if one of those were the sole superpower and decided to go the US route and give itself international rights to detain anybody anywhere for no reason while conferring no rights?
I already asked this question pages ago.
Oh, goody, another so-called principle. How one can turn from chortling over the CIA revamping entire countries or denying people civil rights within its own borders to claiming to be an enemy of the government playing social engineer is beyond me. Claiming for yourself the right to detain anyone in the world without charges, access to lawyers, or even public notification of what you’ve done: that’s like, some sort of anti-Heisenbergian magic that has no effect on society?
Probably because you are making illogical comparisons.
Yep, and just like Operation Phoenix they are capturing and killing quite a few innocents and quite a few bystanders whilst doing it. I don’t trust their motives, I don’t trust the intelligence, and I sure as hell don’t trust the leaders to be actually targeting the right people.
You’re confusing movement with progress. There have been more terrorist attacks worldwide in the years since 9-11 than in the three years proceeding 9-11. Just cause the US hasn’t been attacked on as massive a scale means nothing - the world is less safe than 4 years ago. Just because America exists in a false sense of security and lives in constant low-level panic occasionally boosted by vague threat alerts means nothing - tell the Aussies or the Iraqis they are better off now.
I don’t worry about that now, or even tomorrow, but if the steady erosion of civil rights means that in 10 years, that might be the exact situation we are in. It’s a slippery slope, mate - it goes slowly at first, but gets worse and worse the further down the slide you go. And I absolutely don’t trust the fuckers running the show right now to understand that.
Brutus: since you refuse to answer questions and have complained that the Pit is not the place for a serious discussion about this matter, I opened this Great Debates thread. Feel free to pop in with your view.
They’re banning photography in the NY fucking subways for christsakes!
“Terrorists could possibly take pictures of vital subway infrastructure” :rolleyes:
How can any sane person defend these measures?
I don’t think you’ll get an answer, considering Brutus’ posting history. He might surprise us all though. And the moon might be made of green cheese.
Generally when you have him cornered like a rat on the run, he’ll STFU rather than concede a point.
I suspect that’s the case here.