Response to Fareed Zakaria

It is the responsibility of conservatives to police the right in its excesses, just as the liberals unfailingly fail to police the excesses in their own side. And it was depressing, because what it indicates is that the Republican leaders are afraid of Rush Limbaugh.

Interview with Wajahat Ali | FPIF. Basically, the reason they’re taking place now is that this is an unprecedented time in American history for the mainstreaming of Islamophobic sentiment and rhetoric. What was once allowed to operate on the fringes and by fringe actors has been co-opted by mainstream political actors and parties to capitalize on people’s fears, panic, and hysteria. You see this pattern in American history. When there is a moment of panic and fear around an economic downturn, politicians and people in cottage industries turn on minorities. It has happened with Jews and with African Americans in…

Political Islam is here to stay — US must accept and adjust – CSMonitor.com. 2. Political Islam is not hostile to the West, but to its policies. Many Westerners assume that Muslims “hate our freedoms,” but reliable surveys paint a different picture. Drawing sweeping inferences from sound bites or selective “alarming” data isn’t valid, because political Islam is less a monolithic ideology than an outgrowth of each nation’s society. Years of regular polling in the Islamic world suggest that the majority of Muslims hold in high regard core American values such as religious tolerance, meritocracy, individual liberty, freedom of the…