Some have taken a study published by Cornell University regarding Americans attitudes towards Muslims and are holding it up as a harbinger of future public policy. They quote a sentence from the second paragraph of the summary which reads:
In all, about 44 percent said they believe that some curtailment of civil liberties is necessary for Muslim Americans.
Now what's interesting about this is that this particular sentence belies what is stated previously in the paragraph. When we read the whole thing, we find that
- About 27 percent of respondents said that all Muslim Americans should
be required to register their location with the federal government
- 26 percent said they think that mosques should be closely monitored by U.S. law enforcement agencies
- 29 percent agreed that undercover law enforcement agents
should infiltrate Muslim civic and volunteer organizations, in order to
keep tabs on their activities and fund raising
- About 22 percent said the federal government should profile citizens as
potential threats based on the fact that they are Muslim or have Middle
Eastern heritage.
So based on the above, the reality is that 27% of the people polled believe that the civil rights of Muslim American should be curtailed. While this is disturbing, not only is this not a majority, it is far less than the 44% claimed in the subsequent sentence so it is not even "almost half the population".
Now these same folks seem to believe that just the fact of this poll is
- indicative of why the President won re-election
- indicative of a movement towards "Naziism" by the Administration.
The wording of the Cornell report reflects more about the authors political leanings than it says about the results of the survey
To the preparers of this report, infiltrating "civic and volunteer
organizations...to keep watch on their activities and fundraising" is a
violation of civil rights. I don't think the Supreme Court would agree.
And given that Islamist "terrorist" organizations have recruited from
Mosques and raised money through charities, it does not seem
unreasonable to do this. In fact, the much ballyhooed 9-11 Commission
report cited the lack of infiltration of terrorist organizations as a
defecit in Intelligence gathering. And given that this commission and
it's report was vigorously embraced by the Democrats in Congress, it
hardly stands as an example of a strictly "partisan" concern.
The Preparers of this report also seem to believe that monitoring the Internet is an invasion of Muslim civil rights, disregarding, I suppose that people all over the world use the 'net, not just Muslims. And given that "terrorist" organizations use the internet to communicate, and further given that there is no Constitutional "expectation of privacy" in the public forum that is the net, there certainly are not civil liberties at stake here either.
Recall that Presidential Candidate John Kerry repeatedly stated that he preferred to
treat terrorism as a law enforcement issue and said on many occasions
that he would beef up intelligence to shut down terrorist
organizations; measures that would have necessarily included some of the above. I recall that he also championed the Patriot Act (before he was against it). I further can not recall one instance of Sen. Kerry ever
meeting with any Muslim group during the campaign whereas there were a
number of examples of President Bush doing so both prior to and during
the campaign.
We also find in this report that
- 24 percent of Democratic respondents agreed that Muslim Americans should be required to register their whereabouts; and
- 17 percent of independents agreed that Muslim Americans should be required to register their whereabouts
People who characterize themselves as Democrats rarely vote Republican, so we can infer that a good percentage of the above mentioned 24% voted for Kerry. Exit polls also showed that Bush and Kerry split the Independent vote so it's likely that and equal number of the 17% referred to above also voted for Kerry.
Now even if we give some weight to the disturbing report that "27 percent of respondents said that all Muslim Americans should
be required to register their location with the federal government" what evidence is there that this will translate into public policy?
None. Nada. Zip.
In fact I would argue that if the President were of a mind to curtail the Civil Rights of Muslims the perfect time would have been right after the 9-11 attacks. Instead, the President made a show of not blaming Muslims living in America.
I would argue that if the President were of a mind to declare martial law and seize power from the other branches of Government (a' la' Hitler) and wage war openly against Islam, the perfect time would have been right after the 9-11 attacks and he would likely have encountered little resistence.
But he didn't and has made no move to do it now.
To say now that this survey, which purports much less than it claims is a precurser to totalitarianism is to my mind, hyperbolie.
And what's worse, the Democratic party has suffered defeat after defeat at the polls because rhetoric like this causes Americans to simply not take them seriously on serious issues.
The Democratic party has suffered, very possibly, irrepairable damage during the previous election cycle as it was seen as embracing rhetoric that is simply at complete odds with what Americans perceive as the truth of the matter. And you can say that they are uninformed, but pointing back to this very report, it turns out the more informed people are, the leary they are of Muslims and their institutions.
The survey also showed a correlation between television news-viewing
habits, a respondent's fear level and attitudes toward restrictions on
civil liberties for all Americans. Respondents who paid a lot of
attention to television news were more likely to favor restrictions on
civil liberties, such as greater power for the government to monitor
the Internet. Respondents who paid less attention to television news
were less likely to support such measures. "The more attention paid to
television news, the more you fear terrorism, and you are more likely
to favor restrictions on civil liberties," says Nisbet.
"Civil liberties" as defined by the preparers of this report, mind you.
So the facts as presented by this report, I submit, are not something that the Left should be advancing because it indicates that those who are advocating the most liberal interpretation of Civil Liberties are also the one who are least informed.
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