With Merkel's Foes in Disarray, Germany Defies the Trump Trend

[masterpanthera_t]

(05-02-2017, 06:18 PM)Dill Wrote: And I want to acknowledge that we certainly agree discussion is needed.  Educating the populace—including ourselves—about Islam is very important at this moment in US history, though I would add that this education cannot just be about Islam. It has to be about the history of policy as well.

Here are our areas of apparent disagreement.

1. We assign different roles to religion as a guide to vetting, especially Islam. 

From this post, I don't really see much disagreement.  The main point of my posts was that an open discussion of the factors which create the viewpoints of populations must be characterized as well as possible.  I was not specifying what weight religion itself must have in this, except to mention that if it plays a part among other things, then it must be accounted for in the discussions which eventually lead to policy decisions.  This would (at the surface IMO), show differently for different parts of the world (within and without the Islamic part).
 

Quote:I would make the same analogy to Islam. People from certain regions or with certain backgrounds certainly need to be vetted, but tracts purporting to help us understand monolithic concepts like “Islam” or “Sharia” are not much help.  Nevertheless, it is the intent of some groups in the US to make Islam the central criterion of defining Middle Eastern terrorism—a thing which has to be understood to grasp terrorism rather than specific regional conflicts and their various histories. 

I think this falls in line with my previous paragraph.  I want to delineate what "Islam" or "Sharia" means in different parts of the world, what political factors play into them, etc, to create a more specific understanding of different parts of the world and their ability to seamlessly integrate into our core worldviews.  

Quote:This brings us to a second area of disagreement—the use of polls and “facts” about Islam. These produce a kind data which can be deployed in context-free fashion. A nose-count of who thinks homosexuality is an abomination or whether adulterers should be stoned supposedly gives us adequate clue to what any random Muslim thinks, or even what Muslims in aggregate think.  Consider this—in Qatar (the most liberal of the Gulf states) two things are important about the death penalty for adultery: The first is that it be written into their laws, the second is that it never actually be carried out.  In no other place that I have lived have “unwritten” laws had such force. This presupposes a rather different concept of and stance toward laws than we commonly find in “The West.”  I can think of similar examples applying to the UAE, especially Dubai.  So what would you make of a poll in which 60% of Qataris  agree that adultery should be punished with death, but the poll does not add that since the institution of government in the 19th century no one ever has been stoned in that country? Qatar also has the death penalty for murder, but your chances of execution for that crime are arguably greater in Texas than in Qatar. The execution rate in Texas is comparable to China or Saudi Arabia.

My point has been that once we delve into the details of the endeavor, it will contextualize how we view different factors that prime various populations to their views.  If we are able to properly contextualize these "polls" then it only informs us more on what the significance of those is, and therefore prevents us from "broad brush"ing over the significant details.  Again, I think your point arrives at the same thing I've been calling for all along.  Specifically about the poll that you mentioned, I would delve into how Qataris think today, how they value "western values" and whether they're able to supersede those values over their cultural viewpoints, but this is not a science that I am an expert on, so I would leave the experts to this, all the while wanting as a citizen, a clear explanation of how conclusions were reached.

Quote:From your post, it is not clear exactly what role polls would play in vetting immigrants. Would we poll a country and then make policy based upon a poll?  Also, who is interpreting the polls—Steve Bannon or Elizabeth Warren? Would you agree with me that some of those wielding polls in contemporary debates about Islam do not care much about adding contextualizing information to those polls? Their goal is not to educate but to increase hostility towards Muslims. 

Is it possible that we already have the tools for excluding dangerous terrorists, but some would enlarge the toolbox to include an entire religion?

I think my previous paragraph clarifies a lot of this.  Contextualizing is the key word here, and clearly agendas will play a role in the objective and unbiased execution of the contextualizing.  Now I'm not sure who would fit the bill here, but possibly some well vetted panel of academics?  

Quote:I like the idea of “clarifying our values.” When people brag about the US, as I pointed out in an earlier post, they do not point to the Trail of Tears or the Chinese Exclusion Act or the internment of Japanese Americans to affirm American values.  Even conservatives are eager liberals in this respect, touting “FREEDOM” in everything from choice of religion to  consumer goods. For liberals, of course, the history of the US is a conflict between those who would exclude Catholics and Jews and Italians and Russians and Native Americans and African Americans and those who would add them to the melting pot—a battle between those who would stereotype exclude based upon race, religion and ethnicity and those who would exclude intolerance. 


In each of the aforementioned exclusions, concerns about American culture and even Anglos as a "race" were at the forefront of the discussion.  It is supposed that even a small number of the offending population can "pollute" or otherwise threaten the whole.  While we are educating Americans about Islam, we ought to be educating them out their own history as well, and which policies choices have brought us to the current state of "American values" and which have been rejected.

Agreed.  This would be part of the clarification of our "values".  My interest in something less than pluralism is more from the point of view of certain core values not being compromised, for example all of our values on "freedom", not necessarily "culture" insofar as "culture" of immigrants does not conflict with our core values.