Islam is indeed different from most if not all other religions. Islam comes wrapped in a complete birth-to-grave package including a hierachial system of governance, a civil and criminal code, and a court system to enforce laws and adjudicate disputes.

A Muslim cannot buy into the American Dream without disassociating from a major part of their Islamic culture. That’s very difficult to do if one will retain any contact with other Muslims who treat such apostates as traitors, even to the point of killing them (as commaned by the Koran). Stop thinking of Islam as a religion and more as a political ideology, a binary (us and them) totalitarian political ideology at that.

I suppose there are many, many former or normative Muslims who can adapt and assimilate into Western scoierty quite easily but that would be in spite of their Islamic heritage and not because of it.

Folks, much of what’s said about muslims today was said about Irish Catholics in the 19c (and in the South, into the mid-20c as well). There is a problem with a minority of muslims, who are resenters. Most muslims who seek to come to the US do so for the same reason that Irish Catholics, and hasidim, and sikhs, and quakers and congregationalists and the pilgrims did before them: to worship as they choose and to build businesses, families and communities without being persecuted or harassed. Deport the resenter radicals, sure, but keep bringing in the strivers.

Umm, have read about the history of Catholicism? Up until the time the new Italian republic stormed the Vatican late in the last century, the above applied that religion also. I mean, even as late as the 1960s, many Americans were wary of voting for JFK since as a Catholic, he would “obviously” be taking his orders from the Pope.

P.

There simply is no substitute for strong barriers against islamic immigration and proselytization. Islam is a Jim Jones cult gone hugely huge. Finding a constitutionally legitimate way to set the barriers is an American problem.

I wish it were otherwise.

It’s coming to a town near you…just not right away. We have to wait for the re-runs

What does this mean? What evidence do you have that religious minorities, rather their Know Nothing persecutors, have ever been a major source of strife and sedition in this country? Nb. the Rosenbergs and the other communist first-generation jews from eastern Europe weren’t religious.

Let’s not repeat the idiocy of the European approach, which oscillates between a lift-the-drawbridge hysteria and shambolic co-optation measures in the best corporatist, ie fascist/state-dontrolled, fashion.

The Europeans simply don’t get it: the formula is attract strivers, give them opportunities, and then get the hell out of the way.

“Striver” is defined here as one who seeks to build a peaceful, prosperous, law-abiding community, not tear down the larger society. Bring us more strivers, muslims as well as any other faith. Let Europe have the resenters– and those native-born Americans who resent strivers of any sort.

We should be encouraging certain muslims– namely, persecuted, perhaps also well-educated kurds, shi’a, iranians etc– to come to this country and repeat the happy example of the dozens of other religious minorities who’ve planted a stake here and prospered before them.

The quakers, congregationalists, catholics, mennonites, mormons (emigrating so to speak from New York to the great desert territories of the far west), Irish and German catholics, hasidim, chaldeans, sikhs, and shi’a muslims and bosnian muslims came to this country desiring two things above all:

1) the freedom to raise their families and preserve their faith and norms in peace, unmolested by the state or the majority; and

2) economic opportunities to apply their entrepreneurial talents and work ethic toward building a base of wealth that would sustain their independent communities.

Note the mutually-reinforcing nature of 1) and 2). There’s nothing more American than this intersection of personal freedom and economic opportunity. These religious minority immigrants are not outside the mainstream; they represent the essence of this nation’s promise.

Actually, asylum seekers in the US are immediately eligible for welfare services. And US states can’t discriminate against out-of-state or even foreign asylum seekers. One reason for the rapid move of 2,000 Somali immigrants from the Atlanta area to Lewiston, Maine in about 2 years (around 2002) despite a dearth of jobs in Lewiston, a depressed mill city of just 36,000 people: a more generous welfare system in Maine.