First They Came For The Jews
The normally insightful JihadWatch writes:
It sounds terrible: restricting their civil liberties. Until you read into the story and find that they’re talking about registration, profiling, and monitoring of mosques and Islamic organizations. Horrors! Registration may inconvenience some people, but after all, a lot of people were inconvenienced on 9/11; as with all these measures, if one is not doing anything seditious, one is unlikely to have anything to fear. Profiling? Unless you think our law enforcement tax dollars are well spent making sure that the FBI investigates an equal number of Methodist grandmothers and Muslim imams for terrorist ties, it’s just common sense. And monitoring mosques? This is something the American Muslim community should welcome, and aid in — if they really accept and value the free society in which they live.
I, myself, being a student of history, would fear being dragged to a internment camp, blacklisted, being subjected to 10 years of harassment by the FBI, being detained without access to a lawyer, or sent to Guantanamo bay for torture by Uncle Sam.
As to profiling, I’m all for it, as long as we include special forces vets, (actually, make that all vets), the Japanese, Brits, Californians, and hmmm, maybe this profiling thing isn’t such a great plan.
As I’ve pointed out in the past, we lack key abilities like translation. Until we can translate all the messages we’re intercepting, why impose a regime of fear and control on Americans?
Finally, Germany has mandatory registration, and it’s done them no good in preventing their Universities from becoming breeding grounds for Muslim extremists. (See the 9/11 commission report.)
The difference between the German system and the one proposed for the US is firstly that Germany requires ALL citizens to register with their local government office; the survey asked specifically about a certain group. Also, the German government plays a far bigger role in citizen’s lives than US citizens would let the government here play in their lives.