Should all American Muslims be expelled from the United States?

I had a brief exchange in the comments section of my blog early this morning.  (Still jet-lagged, I woke up far, far too soon.)

It concerns a topic that’s important enough, and urgent enough, that I want my response to be very visible and clear.  I don’t think that I’m acting inappropriately with regard to the person to whom I’m responding because (a) s/he wrote under a pseudonym (“Big Brutha”), so his or her real-life identity is still safe and secure, and because (b) s/he did, after all, “publish” the comment as a public comment on my blog.

First, “Big Brutha”:

Now, my hasty and sleepy reply:

Not all Communists or Nazis killed people, but Nazism and Communism advocated and taught the killing of people, and zealous Communists and Nazis supported such killing.

The same is not true of Islam.

As for the CAIR press conference in Anaheim last night, I know, like, and respect Dr. Muzammil Siddiqi, the prominent Harvard-educated imam who led it off. The idea of deporting him because of his religious beliefs is abhorrent to me, and thoroughly un-American.

You’re right that not every adherent of Japanese Shinto was a kamikaze pilot — and that’s one of the reasons that American policy was never to punish adherents of Japanese Shinto merely for their religious beliefs.

You’re right that not every Roman-era Judean was a zealot — and that’s one of the reasons why the harsh brutality of Rome toward all of the residents of Judea strikes normal people as so extreme and amoral.

You’re now talking about forcibly rounding people up into camps on the basis of their religion and expelling them from the United States. Inevitably, this would involve vast levels of militarization, midnight knocks on the door, and the hustling of men, women, and children off in army transports.

I would not be willing to continue living in such a nation. I would prefer to be arrested and sent into exile myself.

It’s appropriate that your posting name is “Big Brutha.”

I hope that what you’ve written here is the (understandable) expression of a passing rage or, perhaps, merely a poor joke.

As I’m putting this together, “Big Brutha” has answered me, as follows:

Brother Peterson,

Sadly, I am entirely serious in my suggestion. At a certain point ideologies, whatever their origin, have consequences. I believe it is problematic to argue that Islam is some how not in the same category as National Socialism or Soviet Communism simply because it espouses some good principles mingled in with some bad ones. I believe that there are a great many beautiful things about Islam and in Islamic culture and civilization. I have lived in Muslim countries almost non-stop since I completed my education. It is not as if I am ignorant of the history, the theology, and the culture. There is much that is noble in it. But that same can be said of the other ideologies I mentioned, no matter how distasteful people may find the comparison.

There were millions of adherents to these other ideologies as well and arguing that they were all unmitigated and unreasoning psychopaths is at least comparable. I do not find that true of any of the groups mentioned. There were many eminent scientists, learned teachers, artists and others intellectuals that were devout adherents to these ideologies.

You can say that Islam does not preach violence and I will agree that there are certainly strains that are more pacific than others but any one with a rudimentary knowledge of Islam’s history knows that it has always had expansionist tendencies which were often satisfied by conquest. (One can make the same argument of Christianity in the Middle Ages but it was largely on the defensive versus Islam except for the Crusades.) Byzantine history is one long saga of attempting to stave off the endless advance of the Abbasid Caliphate, the Seljuks, and later the Ottomans, all of whom marched to war against the Greek Orthodox infidel.

As to the methodologies by which such a thing would be accomplished: I agree, it would be a level of coercion that one does not wish to think of. But the alternative is what? Wait while various adherents of this faith by ones and by twos lose their minds to the decidedly less pacific strains/versions of Wahhabism, Salafism, or whatever particular belief set Daesh/ISIS accepts as normative? How long do we wait? Until all of them have a change of heart for the better? I do not believe the Constitution obligates me to wish my fellow citizens to continue dying because they desire to uphold the notion of freedom of religion. What is the end game? I do not have the right to allow my own preferences for religious pluralism to dictate the continued deaths of my fellow citizens.

What would you advocate? Because continued patience and understanding may be wonderful at the individual level but is doing nothing to lessen the body count of those who are victims to this particular ideology.

I am not insensitive to Muslims as individuals. But as a group I have seen them kill and kill and kill in this century. Again, I realize that it is clear that some of what has occurred might be construed as a natural response to some policies of the United States and other nations in their dealings with various Islamic countries. That makes my argument more sound and salient I think, rather than less. There is something that causes some Muslims to believe that Western Civilization must be destroyed by force of arms. I grant you, that there are many things I don’t much care for about it myself. But there are countries where Muslims can have Sharia with all of its trappings. There are countries where Muslims do not have to feel like they are mistreated or second class citizens. There are countries where their ideologies are embraced already. What good is it to have them living in the United States, for example, or France where the mores of society induce them to kill innocent people out of some kind of frustration/anger/disillusionment? Let them go to or return to places that accept their ideology already rather than have them mixed in among us and seething with anger.

I know they are not all murderous. But the problem is that we don’t know which ones are. And the percentages that nominally support these kinds of actions are uncomfortably large even if they are not majorities. If I filled a glass with water and then added poison as even a tiny percent would you be willing to drink it? Even if it wouldn’t necessarily cause death but maybe only sickness? That is what this is for the body politic.

I don’t have time to reply to him, and probably won’t until late tonight, at the very earliest.  I have to say, however, that I’m horrified, although I understand the frustration, pain, and anger from which such a position emerges.

I would not continue to live in the kind of country envisioned by “Big Brutha.”

As part of my response, I might mention a few of the Muslims who would need to be rounded up and deported, if “Big Brutha’s” idea were to be implemented.  Some examples of the type of the people I would be citing:

Fazlur Khan, structural engineer who designed the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Center

Khaled Hosseini, physician and author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns

Congressmen Keith Ellison (D-MN) and André Carson (D-IN)

Ismail Poonawala, my dissertation advisor at UCLA

Farooq Kathwari, CEO of Ethan Allen [Furniture] Global

Fareed Zakariah, well-known author and political commentator

Mehmet Oz, physician and television personality

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, basketball legend

Reza Aslan, best-selling author

Rima Fakih, Miss USA for 2010

Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health

Iman, supermodel and wife of David Bowie

Shahid Khan, owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars

Ahmed Zewail, Linus Pauling Professor of Chemistry at Caltech and 1999 Nobel Laureate

Jawed Karim, the co-founder of YouTube

Ayub Omayya, internationally renowned neurosurgeon

Sherman Jackson, of the University of Michigan

Ahmet Ertugün, songwriter and founder of Atlantic Records

I’m uncomfortably reminded of Ferdinand and Isabella, who, when they completed the Spanish Reconquista with the taking of Granada in 1492, effectively drove all of Spain’s Muslims and Jews either out of Spain altogether or into hiding.  They launched the Inquisition in order to ensure that the Iberian Peninsula was thoroughly cleansed.  They drove out many of Spain’s best farmers and many of its intelligentsia.

Opening his doors to Jewish refugees, the Ottoman Turkish sultan Bayezid II commented from Istanbul that “They tell me that Ferdinand of Spain is a wise man, but he is a fool. For he takes his treasure and sends it all to me.”

I’m also uncomfortably reminded of the infamous Missouri Executive Order Number 44, issued by Governor Lilburn W. Boggs on 27 October 1838:  “The Mormons must be treated as enemies,” it reads, “and must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public peace — their outrages are beyond all description.”

I would forcibly resist my own government if it ever sought to create anything remotely like KZ-Mauthausen or Cambodia’s “reeducation camps,” or engaged in mass deportation on the basis of religious affiliation.

I hate to think that my country could ever become the kind of place in which acts of heroism like this one would be necessary.  But, if they came for the Muslims in my valley, I would be a Muslim.

“Rebellion to tyrants,” read Thomas Jefferson’s personal seal, “is obedience to God.”