44% of americans prmote limiting the rights of muslims in the US... WTF?

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/200 ... ties_x.htm

theres the full story.

Sheesh. This harkens back to WWII and the Japanese internment camps on the west coast. Paranoid. I'm willing to bet 80% of Muslim Americans are proud to be American and would not want to live anywhere else. I'm willing to bet the other 19.999% don't like the US but really don't care. The final...miniscule amount...is much less worse than the constant crime that already goes on in this country.

That's utterly disgusting. We'll give cable tv and crunchy peanut butter to convicted felons, but we're going to take away the born rights of a select group of American citizens? I'm ashamed of that 44%.

HEY! You are born to hate america! So you can't have your god given rights! [sarcasm]

It's a normal human reaction - distrust anyone different from your group, and assume that they may be a threat to you. It's pretty rotten, but it's normal. Best we can do is try to gradually change opinions. It's easier to hate another group if you don't know anyone in that group very well.

You know, I suspect that most of the people who took part in this survey didn't even pay attention to what it was asking. They probably carelessly heard "Muslims" and thought "foreigners". If you made it absolutely clear that you were talking about American citizens, you might've gotten quite different results.

Also, it also depends on what the researchers define as "curtailing civil liberties". Like one of the questions they asked was "Do you think the FBI should infiltrate Muslim organizations and charities to keep tabs on them?" Well we know for a fact that terrorist groups use charities as front organizations and recruit through mosques. Somebody who wasn't thinking carefully about the question might easily say "yes", without meaning to be racist or xenophobic. But if you asked them "Should the FBI infiltrate Muslim organizations just because they are Muslim, not because they seem to be behaving suspiciously in any other way?" you might get a different answer out of many of the same people.

i have to agree with Kea there.....i live near one of the biggest possible cells in the united states, and yet honestly i have no quams about going about my buisiness on a daily basis without worry, just because they are muslim doesnt mean that they are anti-US, they just have a different religion is all, as do I from the people around me....now if things started happening again that made the security go up again, i would start getting a little more paranoid, (i say more cause i am naturally slightly paranoid) but things are quiet and i aint exactly worried over things like that in the country right now

WA

i was wondering that meself.

I think the headline "44% favor removing civil liberties" is misleading..

Most of the items in the survey seemed to be more about racially-based policing strategies.

If they asked 'Should Muslims have freedom of speech/freedom of religion/etc restricted' I doubt you'd even get ten percent.

Saying that people who, by some external attributes like race, are statistically likely to be involved in terrorism ought to be checked up on isn't as bad as saying "Muslims are evil. Kill them."

i am reminded of a referendum they passed out here, once, under the power of the worst provincial political party ive ever been alive to witness (i think i've only witnessed two or three, but that is besides the point)

it was a referendum on the rights of the first nations people

thats right, asking the majority how they should deal with a minority.
not only that, but it was the most crypic and misleading survey i've ever seen. like "Do you think first nations people should have rights, and that all babies born in the year 2003 should be killed? yes or no"

they also mentioned that any additional comments would disqualify the ballot... i dont know a single person who actually cast a legitimate ballot


so, the moral of this story... yeah, i dont know if i trust that.
if its true, though, im going to be very dissapointed in the state of the world (ie, america). I do remember hearing about hostility towards eastern europeans increasing after september 11th, but thats... to be expected from society, i suppose
and then theres the fact that most oriental restaraunts reported a great loss in business when Sars was running rampant through... the media

It is worth noting that it's always been ok to vilify Muslims in American media. In much the same way that east Asians were never really people in mass media before WW II (and the Japanese internment); if someone needs mindless villians for a B movie hero to butcher, the odds are that these evil minions will include (or be) swarthy Arab types. When the US government was demonizing someone for cheap political gain over the last 30 years, it often happened that the demon was the head of an Arab state (which us Americans think includes Iran). Black glassing some muslim country or the other is regularly proposed, sometimes in songs that actually charted (like Bomb Iran, to the tune of Barbara Ann).

Being exposed to enough of that can prejudice a population after a while.

The thing of it is, villification of one minority or another has always been accepted. In WWII we were throwing Japanese people in internment camps. And predjudices agains Germans were rampant, even though many Germans were the people hiding from Hitler because of their heritage and/or (you didn't have to be orthodox to be persecuted) beliefs. Most Muslims are completely happy to exist peacefully with the rest of the nation, and those that act violently should be treated as criminals. Nothing more, nothing less.

The media will commonly assert various "outrageous" claims, in order to boost sales. Think of this as the fatal flaw of the first amendment - in a capitalist society, demand dictates what will be printed, not objective truth - and it's a well known phenomenon that lies sell better than truth.

In this situation, the emotions of the readers are being carefully manipulted along lines of fear response (fear of the "racist" stigma) in order to sell newspapers.

I want to make it perfectly clear that I do not categorically agree with the following statement, but the facts are real and the argument is a logical one. Please read on.

***

Think this over:

The FBI had racial profiling policies in place before 9/11 in order to track Muslim-Americans. If any were red flagged as potential terrorists, they were red flagged and carfully watched. But nothing more. More than 2/3 of the 9/11 hijackers were red flagged.

If there had been policies in place that allowed curtailing of civil liberties based on suspicious activity, the attacks on the pentagon and WTC might have been avoided. All the government would have to have done was to arrest the hijackers on suspicion - no warrents, no evidence, no accountability - and hold them indefinitly on the premis that they would always be a threat. The red tape we had in place allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen.

All of the highjackers were Muslim. 9/11 could never have happened if all Muslim Americans, or even Muslims of foreign descent, had been expelled from the country or otherwise dealt with after the first world trade center bombing. If all non-Christians had been categorically expelled at the same time, the Oklahoma City Bombing and the Columbine Shootings (the perpetrators in each case were vehemently anti-christian) could never have taken place.

***

Please feel free to pick this idea apart. But admit, first, that the argument
is logical, and that regardless of the other repercussions, it would work. Again, I support no such action.

[edited for grammer]

Hey, I hear that a lot of black people are criminals. We should throw them all in prison or something; that way they couldn't commit any crimes.

Honestly, do you have any idea how dangerous your reasoning is? What happens if you're identified as potentially belonging to a dangerous group? Would you be happy to be deported or imprisoned?

I believe the military has a term: acceptable losses. The thousands who died in the attacks on the Pentagon and WTC were acceptable losses; as were those who died in Columbine and those who died in the Oklahoma City Bombing. Acceptable compared to using your solution, that is.

Idealistically, there would have to be a huge, huge, huge, huge amount of potential lives lost before a solution this radical and this...wrong would be considered.

Speaking practically, just look at the numbers. Hundreds or thousands dead, versus millions jailed unjustly. I'd rather the former, personally. Also, there'd be no place to keep them. The jails are full already.

And another thing...
You couldn't do this to a certain group until after they had proven themselves capable of a terrorist attack. Yet, you say that this should have been done before the attack to prevent it.

And another thing: Every single group has done something really bad at one point or another. We'd end up with everybody besides those in power being persecuted.

Anyways, it's a bad idea all around.