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Originally Posted by 3SoldierDad
We need to seriously rethink our approach to America's Muslim community.
Some thoughts...
- Outlawing certain Moslem practices and teachings
- Regulation / Outlawing of inciteful speech and communication
- Registration and wiretapping of all Moslem Mosques and Schools
- Active racial and religious profiling
- Active system of deporations of Political Islamists
- Creation of a system of loyalty tests
- Creation of large and active means of human monitoring and informing
- Monitoring Moslem schools' and Mosques' interpretation of Koran as relating to jihad, infidels, Jews, and Christians
- A massive revision of domestic law for treating terrorism revised toward military law and the laws of treason.
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I respect that you're advocating facing down a serious threat and your sense of vigilance, but on several of these proposals I'm worried that you're talking about killing democracy to save it. Loyalty tests? Martial law? Monitoring religious opinions?
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Ben Franklin
I'm not saying we don't need to be more vigilant. Certainly we need to improve our capability for domestic surveillance (both technical and human) in terms of making it more responsive and just generally larger. I think we need to seriously consider breaking off the counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism sections of the FBI into a domestic intelligence agency like Britain's MI5 (the stand up of DHS has been a debacle). Certainly there also needs to be better immigration and naturalization scrutiny.
In the 1960s and 70s we had problems with the Klan and neo-Nazi organizations. In the 1980s parts of the country (I grew up in Miami) faced a Wild West of drug running organized crime. In the 1990s we faced a problem with radical militia and white supremacist type groups. In all these cases (though to be fair they were smaller, less serious threats) we were able to beat them back without fundamentally compromising our core values.
With the utmost respect, we need to be smart and vigilant. We don't need to tear our society apart in a panic.