I left this at a liberal blog tied to a post in which it was pointed out that some conservatives are now joining Geert Wilders in categorizing Islam as a totalitarian political ideology motivating organized terrorism and revolutionary war (Jihad) all over the world.
Jindal - Islam should be denied First Amendment freedom-of-religion protection in America
Those conservatives are right, just as anyone would be who said Leninism or even more broadly Marxism is a totalitarian political ideology that not only in the past but even today motivates terrorism and revolutionary war, though not as much as it used to.
And all of that is true though most Marxists and most Muslims at all times have personally had no part in such violence, though vast numbers were perfectly and even enthusiastically in sympathy with it and supported it in one way or another.
As for the First Amendment, it really doesn’t matter that much that Islam is also a religion, and there is not as much point in absurdly quarreling about that as some people seem to think.
Ideologies, books, meetings, pamphlets, ideas, political parties, and all that sort of thing have been banned before now and are still banned in Europe for fear of the damage that could be produced by the hatred they encourage and the violence they might actually inspire.
And there are people in America who have urged in the past (mostly on the right) or do today (mostly on the left) prosecution, for example, of what they call hate speech and even a legal ban on organizations devoted to the spread of hate.
As far as the First Amendment goes, it is an obstacle to such bans whether or not the expressions or organizations whose ban is sought are religious.
And again so far as the First Amendment goes, pretty much nobody, left or right, is in the least interested in the federal government, or any government, fully and absolutely complying with its breathtakingly casual and careless strictures.
While its sweeping language made sense to Americans before the Civil War, when it was understood that the powers to control or suppress speech and the press, to establish religion, and to suppress religion that the First Amendment denied the federal government were in fact reserved to and vigorously exercised by the states, things are quite otherwise now.
And though nothing relevant in the text of the constitution has changed in all this time, only the most annoying conservatives refuse to accept convenient and useful lies about what the Amendment actually means, at once imposing the Amendment on the states and lying about its import, now this way and now that, to suit our different modern political preferences.
And with that in mind I wrote the below.
Despite the First Amendment, there are federal crimes one commits by speaking, writing, broadcasting, etc.
Some have to do with breaches of government secrecy, but not all.
And some forms of speech that are not criminal PC people want to criminalize under the rubric “hate speech.”
In Europe that has sometimes involved suppression of entire books like Mein Kampf.
Liberals would be the last to deny that there are and have been ideologies of hate and movements of hate that have aimed at and achieved horrific real world political goals, most notably the near extermination of the Jews of Europe by the Nazis.
Not only is Mein Kampf banned, but it is illegal in Germany to form anew under any name a Nazi Party.
I don’t know many PC people who think that ban should be lifted.
It is not only not impossible that such an ideology of hate could assume the guise of a religion, it is actually the case.
The original ideology of the Black Muslims, for example, as well as its current mutation in the teachings of the Nation of Islam, are such pure and toxic distillations of hate.
Imagine something as horrific as The Turner Diaries presented as a sacred text, read from at “religious services,” taught to children in religion classes, and preached on Sundays over the radio and on cable TV.
If we in America are going to suppress hate speech and, one supposes, hate literature, will we end up criminalizing meetings of the American Nazi Party where extermination of Jews is urged in all seriousness as a political goal?
The Koran itself is as toxic as Mein Kampf or The Turner Diaries.
Sure, not every word or every passage.
You can say the same for Mein Kampf.
See where this is going?
I am not urging suppression of any of these forms of speech in America, but we really ought not to blink the fact that there is a lot of hate speech out there, a lot of it informs the ideologies of actual political movements, and a lot of it wears the guise of religion.
Oddly, the most vicious of the hate-religions now preached in the US is not Islam but the filth spread by the Nation of Islam.
But Black Muslims are not much given to terrorism or Jihad urged by their fake religion, though the hatred they spread has a lot to do with American politics of race and American mob racial violence.
The real Muslims, on the other hand, regularly produce exactly that sort of violence, all over the world.
They see themselves as heroic and righteous defenders of true religion and God.
Hitler and his devoted followers saw themselves as heroic and righteous defenders of the German Volk.
Hell, everyone is a hero in his own mind.
Remember Abimael Guzman?
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