Some more responses to your points about Islam/terrorism:

You wrote:

Yes, but we had this thing called the Enlightenment. When was the last witch burning in western culture? Meanwhile, in Islam, women are buried up to their necks and stoned to death for ‘adultery.’ Sorry, but the moral equivalence doesn’t work.

This was precisely my point. We had the Enlightenment and the Reformation, all of which led to less of a focus on literalist and fundamentalist readings of our foundational theological texts, whereas Islam, in the last few centuries, has unfortunately gone in the opposite direction. So I’m not sure what you mean in suggesting I’m drawing a “moral equivalence.” My only point was that Christianity used to wage its own version of jihad, i.e., the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, as you point out, etc., and the people who participated in these things thought they were doing it because that’s what their religion required, so it’s not something inherent about Christianity or Islam that makes one “bad” while the other is “good.” They’re both capable of inspiring acts and cultures we’d consider “good” and acts and cultures we’d consider “evil.” The issue, therefore, is not with the faith per se, but rather, with how most practitioners of these faiths interpret and practice them today, and then, how to get them to stop doing so in a manner that is hateful and destructive. And here, I completely agree with you that many Muslim beliefs that are completely mainstream today, as my original article on this issue demonstrated, are problematic and totally inconsistent with life in pluralistic, non-theocratic nations. My point, however, is that our own approach to the problem — interfering in and bombing Muslim societies — hasn’t helped and has made the problem of Islamic extremism worse. (You can also check out Kady M.’s post on this issue.)

You wrote:

Well, if Europe would stop paying Muslims to sit around all day in their own neighborhoods doing nothing, they wouldn’t have Muslim ghettos. The Muslim situation in Europe is largely an indirect result of the European social welfare system. In America, you eventually have to go to work, which is why we DON’T have things like Muslim No-Go Zones.

Yes, agreed. Europe’s social welfare system is silly because it doesn’t provide an adequate incentive for people to work. A system like that can only function where you have a very high level of trust and assimilation, where you live in a society where being on the dole is seen as unseemly and people do it only in desperate straits. But as soon as you start admitting immigrants who don’t share your cultural norms and basic foundations about what’s right and wrong, that kind of generous social welfare system collapses of its own weight. You can get admitted to some of these nations and become dependent on public welfare from Day 1. This is part of why I’m saying that we should have an immigration policy that admits only skilled and educated people, with employment lined up … because though we don’t have Europe’s generous social welfare system, we do have more than our own share of programs that would-be-parasites can take advantage of, if they’re so inclined, and even if they don’t take advantage of such programs and simply persist in living in poverty, that’s ultimately a drain on our society, because it results in ghettos, pockets of dysfunction, crime, low education, the abuse of emergency medical services to substitute for basic healthcare, homeless people and panhandlers making our streets unsafe and unpleasant…. This is part of why assimilation of immigrants is crucial.

If an immigrant’s culture tells them expressly NOT to assimilate, what are you supposed to do about it? Seriously man, do you know anything at all about what Islam really is?

Um … well … I’m not sure how to answer that second question. As I’ve told you, I’ve read the Qu’ran in full, and I’ve done quite a bit of reading about religion and history, and particularly about philosophy in the classical Islamic world (simply because philosophy is an interest of mine). So, yes, I’d say I have some idea of what Islam is, though there’s no one answer to what Islam “really” is, of course.

As for your first question of what to do when an immigrant’s culture tells them expressly NOT to assimilate, this is a big, important issue, but it’s one that goes way beyond immigrants or Muslim immigrants. We have groups in our midst — Hassidic Jews, Amish, Mennonites, other hardcore Evangelicals who insist on homeschooling their kids or sending them to parochial schools to keep them away from our larger culture, certain black and white nationalists/separatists, etc. — who are operating under an express directive NOT to assimilate, and I think this is a huge problem. We used to have a nation that was a “melting pot,” where everyone was expected to become “American.” Now we have a multicultural “salad bowl,” where all the ingredients just stay there unassimilated, until they start to reek and smell up the whole salad. We need to get back to forcing an American identity on people. This means making some tough, potentially unpopular decisions, however. For instance, I believe we need to pass legislation like they have in France or Belgium, where you’re not allowed to walk around wearing veils in public. I believe we need integrated schools so that you don’t get these underfunded, 99% black schools where these kids don’t learn anything other than how to feel resentment against the rest of society and then end up being a drain on the rest of us for the remainder of their lives. I also believe in not allowing people to take their kids out of public schools (if you want to have your kids indoctrinated in the religion or other belief system of your choice after school, that’s your business, of course). I’m sure you don’t like some aspects of that heavy-handed approach, but that’s what I believe we need if we want to function as a single nation with a unitary American culture … because if you focus myopically on “freedom” and let people do whatever they like in the way they live and bring up their kids, the result is the turmoil we have today, where we have these large groups of people in this country who hate America and want to do everything to run it down. And, as I said, we also need to focus on admitting immigrants who are skilled and educated and have work lined up, because if you fall into those categories, you’re much more likely to know English (or to have the background necessary to learn it more quickly), and you’re much more likely to find yourself in a workplace where you’re surrounded by Americans with whom you have to communicate and with whom you’ll end up making friends and integrating, etc.

You don’t have to agree with all the details of what I’m suggesting, but that’s the basic direction I think we need to go in if we want to function as one society again.

But I’d be curious to know your solution. You’ve criticized my approach to the Muslim issue, but you haven’t offered any alternative. If your idea is to stick with the bomb-’em-into-oblivion approach (there are about 1.8 billion Muslims out there, so that’s a whole lot of bombs you’ll need to drop for the sake of mass genocide) or the nation-building approach, I think history has shown these just don’t work, and result in achieving the exact opposite of what we’re hoping for.