What??

Submitted by J.S. (Canada), Nov 25, 2006 at 19:56

Octavio,

I do not believe I ever suggested that you were making "racist" comments. Your (our?) enemies will make such claims. I do not believe it's "racist" to defend certain values...this includes the rule of law, the right to free speech, the right to due process, the right of being "secular" if one so chooses -- that's, in my opinion, about the separation of church and state, etc, etc. If this is "racism" -- then the Bill of Rights (or as they call it in Canada, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms) is racist!!

Anyway, I too believe borders need to be secured, security concerns need to be addressed, and I don't think throwing open the doors to every "refugee" is a wise decision -- now, I suppose, that's an expression of a certain degree of xenophobia (again, the Snopes comment about "them dang foreigners" comes to mind -- as something like a joke. The difference is that Snopes hated all and sundry that "differed." Snopes was a full-blown xenophobic -- that's the sort of xenophobia that's expressed by the evil Ultra Right (I've read about a case of a Muslim fellow eating an ice cream on a patio of a restaurant, and suddenly being attacked and beaten -- he was sent to hospital...now that's ugly, vicious and one can only hope that the individuals who attacked him are sent to jail for a long time.)

Finally, I also recently read something about how individual Muslims can be perfectly well integrated into western societies (they're not the problem) -- it's more the higher strata instituionalized variety (the Imams, certain radical mosque leaders, people at CAIR, certain professors -- these are the ones who seem to be enemies of the West and cause a great deal of the problems.) (I think that Britain, for example, should have deported Hamza and others like him years and years ago. Now, it seems almost too late...France, for example, or I hear that the third largest city in Sweden is now 40 percent Muslim...for these cases, I'm at a loss...(they're write-offs.)...

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".