War Between America and Islam? Questioning Islamophobia Again

I have made it clear in other notes that I think we need some honesty about the intentions of global Islam. It seems that this encouragement seems to be received by some that I am part of the "hate Islam" crowd. I am note sure where that crowd is, but I have no desire to be part of it. G. K. Chesterton wrote in his biography of St. Francis that he went to Syria, determining that it was better to make converts out of Muslims than to conquer them. I share that sentiment. They need the good news of Jesus Christ. They need to replace their love for the Quran with a love for the Bible. They need to move from their Allah to the Triune God. Is this offensive? I would think that any Christian would agree.

Steve Chapman, in his September 26, 2010 article, says that there is no question that feelings on both sides are running higher than usual. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, says the Pew Research Center, 59 percent of Americans had a favorable view of Islam, but today, the figure is 30 percent. A spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations blamed the recent slashing of a Muslim cab driver in New York on "hate rhetoric."    

But all these events get attention for the same reason that airplane crashes get attention: They are unusual. Considering the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and considering the U.S. invasion of two Islamic countries, for Chapman, the surprise is not that feelings between Muslims and non-Muslims in this country are so bitter and angry. It's that they are so amicable. 

He points out that the "ground zero mosque" has elicited a great deal of opposition -- but, for the most part, restrained opposition. A Fox News poll found that while 64 percent of Americans do not want the facility at that location, 61 percent -- including most Republicans -- say the group has the right to build it there.     

Chapman says that most people don't perceive all Muslims as a lurking danger. Asked whether Islam is more likely than other religions "to encourage violence," 35 percent of Americans said yes -- but 42 percent said no. 

Further, the American Muslim community is not a seething swamp of violent militancy. There are estimated to be at least 1.3 million Muslims in this country -- plenty to furnish an unending stream of suicide bombers, if the motivation existed. But it doesn't. If there is anything striking about the home front of the global war on terrorism, it's the extreme rarity of domestic jihadists. A 2007 survey by Pew found that only 5 percent have a favorable view of al-Qaida -- a number that drops to 3 percent among foreign-born Muslims. Far from praying daily for the rise of Islamic extremism, 61 percent said they were worried about it. Mr. Chapman does not mention it, but I wonder about the other 39 percent. That would about 507,000 Muslims have no concern about the rise of extremism. Although the reason for lack of concern may be benign, it still puzzles me. 

Chapman goes on to point out that unlike the alienated Muslim populations of Europe, American Muslims do not feel estranged from society. "Most say their communities are excellent or good places to live," Pew discovered. Most also believe women are better off in the United States than in Muslim countries.

 
Their overall satisfaction with the state of the country is no different, according to Pew, from the overall satisfaction of everyone else. They do not sound like a violent cult plotting to impose Taliban-style Shariah law on the infidels who surround them. They sound strangely like ... Americans. Which is what they are. For the most part, Muslims have achieved integration and acceptance. Only a quarter of them say they have ever suffered discrimination. Most have many non-Muslim friends.

Chapman suggests that these statistics may be the result of the fact that non-Muslims do not regard them with fear and loathing. Hate crimes against Muslims do not support the charge that Americans are frothing Islamophobes. In 2008, there were only 105 anti-Muslim incidents, compared with 1,013 against Jews.

 
What we see in action here is the powerful influence of deeply rooted ideas about assimilation, tolerance and freedom. Americans generally see Muslims as just one more ingredient in the national melting pot. Muslims mostly identify with our way of life.

 
The tensions and conflicts in evidence in our public debates do exist, but they give a misleading picture of modern American society. The reality is the one proclaimed by the Founders: E pluribus unum. Out of many, one. 

Pondering Economics: Peasant Mentality

Victor Davis Hanson, in his article of September 24, 2010, has written what I think is an excellent article concerning economic life. He entitled the article "A Nation of Peasants?" He begins by saying that traditional peasant societies believe in only a limited good. The more your neighbor earns, the less someone else gets. Profits are seen as a sort of theft. They must be either hidden or redistributed. Envy rather than admiration of success reigns. In contrast, Western civilization began with a very different ancient Greek idea of an autonomous citizen, not an indentured serf or subsistence peasant. The small, independent landowner -- if left to his own talents and if his success was protected by, and from, government -- would create new sources of wealth for everyone. The resulting greater bounty for the poor soon trumped their old jealousy of the better off. Citizens of ancient Greece and Italy soon proved more prosperous and free than either the tribal folk to the north and west, or the imperial subjects to the south and east. The success of later Western civilization in general, and America in particular, is testament to this legacy of the freedom of the individual in the widest political and economic sense.

He goes on to say that the political class and the citizens are forgetting these basic truths lately, though Mao Zedong's redistributive failures in China, or present-day bankrupt Greece, should warn us about what happens when government tries to enforce an equality of result rather than of opportunity.

Even after the failure of statism at the end of the Cold War, the disasters of socialism in Venezuela and Cuba, and the recent financial meltdowns in the European Union, for some reason America is returning to a peasant mentality of a limited good that redistributes wealth rather than creates it. Candidate Obama's "spread the wealth" slip to Joe the Plumber simply was upgraded to President Obama's "I do think at a certain point you've made enough money."

The more his administration castigates insurers, businesses and doctors; raises taxes on the upper income brackets; and creates more regulations, the more those who create wealth are sitting out, neither hiring nor lending. The result is that traditional self-interested profit-makers are locking up trillions of dollars in unspent cash rather than using it to take risks and either lose money due to new red tape or see much of their profit largely confiscated through higher taxes.

No wonder that in such a climate of fear and suspicion, unemployment remains near 10 percent. Deficits chronically exceed $1 trillion per annum. And now the poverty rate has hit a historic high. We are all getting poorer in hopes that a few don't get richer.

The public is seldom told that 1 percent of taxpayers already pay 40 percent of the income taxes collected, while 40 percent of income earners are exempt from federal income tax -- or that present entitlements like Medicare and Social Security are financially unsustainable. Instead, they hear more often that those who managed to scheme to make above $250,000 per year have obligations to the rest of us to give back about 60 percent of what they earn in higher health care and income taxes -- together with payroll and rising state income taxes, and along with increased capital gains and inheritance taxes.

That limited-good mind-set expects that businesses will agree that they now make enough money and so have no need to pursue any more profits at the expense of others. Therefore, they will gladly still hire the unemployed and buy new equipment -- as they pay higher health care or income taxes to a government that knows far better how to redistribute their income to the more needy or deserving.

This peasant approach to commerce also assumes that businesses either cannot understand administration signals or can do nothing about them. So who cares that in the Chrysler bankruptcy settlement, quite arbitrarily the government put the unions in front of the legally entitled lenders?

Health insurers should not mind that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius just warned them to keep their profits down and their mouths shut -- or face exclusion from health care markets.

I suppose that no corporation should worry that the government arbitrarily announced -- without benefit a law or court ruling -- that it wanted BP to put up $20 billion in cleanup costs for the Gulf spill.

What optimistic Americans used to call a rising tide that lifts all boats is now once again derided as trickle-down economics. In other words, a newly peasant-minded America is willing to become collectively poorer so that some will not become wealthier.

The present economy suggests that it is surely getting its wish.

Here are some other books by this author:

How The Obama Administration Threatens Our National Security (Encounter Broadsides)

tax cuts for wealthy?

As Cal Thomas, in a September 16 article, points ot, in arguing against extending the Bush-era tax cuts for "the wealthy," President Obama claims the government cannot afford to "borrow" the estimated $700 billion he says it will "cost government." For Thomas, the question is, What about the cost of tax increases for those earning the money? For Thomas, it is funny how the president does not mind borrowing money that has put us on a trajectory for a national debt exceeding $13 trillion.

The question ought not be why people making more than $250,000 a year ($125,000 if one is married and filing separately) should be allowed to keep more of the money they earn. The question is: why should people be required to surrender more of the money they earn to dysfunctional government, which misspends so much of it on unnecessary, outdated and failed programs?

The President tacitly assumes that the total amount of money the government now spends is appropriate, and therefore it should take more of the money the people earn, and especially, of course, those over $250,000. I would suggest that before we go down the road, the President defend this level of government spending. 

Blaming Tax Cuts for Financial Meltdown? Another Disagreement with Obama

Larry Kidlow, in an article on 9/11/2010, said that in his speech in Cleveland last week, Obama blamed the Bush tax cuts for the financial meltdown and severe recession. Such ideas, even when presented by a sitting President, need to be named for the stupidity they represent. It is quite likely that the academia and the media will pick up on it accept the narrative, since it is from this President. It is quite wrong. As Kudlow points out, in 2003, the reductions of marginal tax rates led to more than 8 million new jobs in the next four and a half years. Unemployment dropped to 4.6%. Most economists agree that the 2007-2008 financial meltdown was a housing bubble and credit event. It had nothing to do with cutting taxes.

Pastor Burning Koran and Jim Wallis

A pastor in Florida says he will burn the Koran on 9/11. I suppose most of us recognize that he has the right to do on his property what he wants to do, including buy a Koran and burn it. We also recognize that this is free speech, and he has the right to express himself in this way. Those who burn the flag of the United States are making a statement, and so is this pastor.

Yet, such observations do not exhaust the story. In fact, I find it rather unsatisfying if we stop there. Those who question the wisdom, propriety, and Christian character of the act of this pastor and church also have freedom of speech. As a Christian community, we have a responsibility to care for the witness of the churches who seek to minister in this nation and around the world. This pastor is harming the witness that the churches seek to undertake for Jesus Christ in this world. Fortunately, the Christian community will universally condemn him. In fact, he figured out a way to put Jim Wallis and Sarah Palin on the same page. I am sure that this will not happen often, but he figured out a way.

I will say that Jim Wallis figured out a way to comment on this in what I consider a stupid way. He identifies the "extremists" who invoke their distorted view of the Muslim faith with the "extremists" of the pastor and church who burn the Koran. My disagreement with him is that the Muslim extremists to which he refers will kill people who disagree with them. In fact, as the approach of 9/11 reminds us, they already have done so. They are also killing other Muslims. Muslim extremists, if they kill several thousand Americans again in an attack in America, will be cheered by millions of Muslims around the world. This pastor and church will burn a book. They will not kill. They will continue to receive, justly, condemnation from every facet of the Christian community. It is this type of leveling and equating between the Christian and Muslim communities that continues to aggravate the dangers people face. In fact, it will actually discourage genuine moderates within the Muslim community from coming forward.

I am not one to pray for rain, but on 9/11, it would be helpful if it rained over this pastor and church.

Looming Depression?

Kevin McCullough, in an article dated September 5, 2010, noted that this week President Obama claimed that the nation saw job growth of 67,000 jobs in August. Even if this number was real it would be a pitifully tiny percent of the 14,885,000 who are both on unemployment (1 in 10 Americans) as well as those 23,768,000 who are underemployed (working but not earning enough for basic needs - 1 in 5 families).

The bigger problem for the president however is that the number is not real. The fact is the nation saw 114,000 people added to the unemployment lines in August and the net jobs lost for the month sat at 54,000. In all the "summer of recovery"--as both President Obama and Vice President Biden pronounced it--saw 238,000 more jobs disappear. Telling the nation that his plans have taken the economy in the right direction, and implying that the nation is seeing a recovery in the area of employment is either willfully dishonest, or painfully, even treacherously naive. At the rate of this "recovery" another 317,333 workers could be sitting on the sidelines before the end of the year.

Additionally we are now on track to see the single largest collection of tax increases ever proposed take the Obama economy even further into the tank. In less than 120 days President Obama's plan to add a collective 18.6% to the federal tax burden will continue the economic downward spiral into record breaking depression-era territory. And remember he repeatedly said--on the campaign trail--that he should be elected expressly to prevent the nation's economy from complete deterioration.

Instead unemployment that was growing in the transition from Bush to Obama has exploded to double what it was under Bush. Even worse this means that while 14,885,000 Americans are claiming unemployment assistance, some 23,768,000 families are presently struggling through work that they have but are unable to meet their basic needs.

And about the time we are belting out Auld Lang Syne this holiday season, President Obama will raise all five income levels of tax categories between 3-5%.

Ironically the President will be raising the rate on the category that is home to seventy-five percent of all small businesses in America by the largest increase.

None of this takes into effect the additional costs that will be incurred by taxpayers when the full implementation of President Obama's control of one-sixth of the economy through the manipulation of how we receive health care benefits kicks in. And not that it has great likelihood of passing this year, but if by some miracle it did, the Obama tax penalties that would be incurred by every citizen in the nation under the proposed "Cap & Trade" legislation would add even greater misery to the growing pile.

All of these pending tax increases will be put into effect against well more than 95% of American tax-payers.

For McCullough, all of this suggests that unless the nation changes course, the nation will experience the "Obama depression." None of us has any way of knowing whether this result occur, of course.