So this afternoon I get this e-mail from someone named Elizabeth…

Hi

America has always been a melting pot, but in the post-9/11 world the environment can be downright hostile. Recent mosque protests and congressional hearings on American Muslims are all unfortunate examples of a rising tide of fear. This climate of suspicion towards our fellow Americans compromises the great values that our country was founded upon. We’ve put together a 2 minute film in response that I believe you and the readers of The Hayride will be interested in sharing, watching, and discussing:

http://myfellowamerican.us

The site also has many other cool features including the ability to share your own stories and even taking the “My Fellow American” pledge. I would love it if you could post or tweet about this and share the video. If you can, please let me know. I am here if you have any questions. Thank you so much.

And the link goes to this video…

It’s a pretty slick piece of work. The whole site is.

I don’t know if the folks behind that site – it’s an outfit called Unity Productions Foundation, which has made a bunch of films presenting Islam as a happy, peaceful and tolerant religion – have an answer for something like this…

Or maybe something like this, from Dearborn, Michigan last year…

Or perhaps something like this…

Or this…

At the end of the day, there’s probably a bit of truth to both sides. Are most Muslims in America normal folks who don’t subscribe to the type of crap that goes on in Dearborn or these two pieces of slime from “Revolution Muslim?” Without question.

But here’s the problem: so long as there is a decent-sized population within the Muslim community in this country who refuse to confront the purveyors of “political Islam” within their midst – or worse, adhere to the concepts inherent in “political Islam,” it’s not enough just to make happy propaganda films or to whine about how Muslims are discriminated against. And when Islamist groups like CAIR carry that torch and act as though they’re some sort of civil-rights organization, at the same time leader after leader is identified as having major ties to Hamas or Hizbollah or the Muslim Brotherhood or other hard-core Islamic supremacist outfits, whether violent in nature or not, it’s destructive naivete for the rest of us to just blithely accept the idea that we don’t have a Muslim problem.

We have a Muslim problem. That’s the plain truth.

You can have a Muslim problem without having a problem with most Muslims. We had a German problem between 1941 and 1945 (we had one longer than that, but work with me here) despite the fact that most Germans were perfectly decent people. But the loudest and most prominent Germans promoted a murderous, psychopathic ideology that didn’t just look a lot like what the Islamist movement looks like but actually had lots of ties to that movement at the time. So we had a problem, and it was only solved when we burned them out of their homes, put millions of them down like rabid dogs and occupied their country for decades. And Germans in America, which at the time (and maybe even to this day) constituted the largest minority ethnic group in the country, were watched like hawks and treated with something less friendly than kid gloves.

We also had a Japanese problem at the time, even though most Japanese people and particularly most Japanese Americans were absolutely blameless with respect to that problem. But tactically, our problem with the Japanese was made manifest by a sneak attack on American soil and then flowered into a near-constant issue with suicide attacks by an militarily inferior enemy. And we couldn’t solve that problem without dropping not one but two nuclear bombs on the Japanese.

And we had a communist problem, too. It’s a reasonable statement to say we still have one. We managed to overcome our communist problem without killing the vast numbers of communists necessary to overcome our German or Japanese problems. But it took an extraordinary vigilance on the part of our citizenry, including a cultural determination that we would not tolerate the open advocacy of communism within our own public sphere, and a robust effort to promote an anti-communist agenda around the world in order to defeat the communists. And that included messy elements like the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joe McCarthy’s activities – which to this day are still villified by the American Left as examples of intolerance/bigotry/xenophobia/whatever. That those activities uncovered communist infiltrators like the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss, and that the opening of the Venona files indicated a staggering amount of fifth-column communist activity, hasn’t seemed to make it through our historical filter.

After 9-11, it’s difficult not to recognize that we have a Muslim problem. Perhaps it’s not of the size and intensity of the German, Japanese or communist problems we had. Then again, there are more Muslims in the world than Germans, Japanese or even communists, and the kinds of Muslims who cause problems do make up a pretty sizable percentage of the population at large. What’s more, the rhetoric coming out of the problematic Muslims is just as threatening as it was from the Germans, Japanese or communists. And they really do believe it.

So while it’s important that we try to recognize the Muslims who are actually on our side – call them Westernized Muslims, secular Muslims, whatever – we also have to recognize that we’re embroiled in a civilizational conflict with those Muslims who aren’t interested in blending into American society, or that of the rest of the West.

And that’s why these happy videos which make those of us concerned about the Muslim problem out to be bigots or racists or fascists or what have you are so damn offensive. Let’s see more examples like this, and then we can work on the terrible injustices visited on American Muslims…