MSNBC goes Islamophobe. Well, nearly.

MSNBC says the two bombers who died in the airport attacks had earlier put a tail on a nuclear scientist in Belgium and at one time had hoped to figure out how to make a radiological weapon, a so-called "dirty bomb."

Think Chernobyl.

Or Mayak.

That, of course, is the kind of thing that makes Muslim terrorism a much greater threat than ordinary crime or, indeed, the danger of accidental death in car or plane crashes, tub drownings, etc.

Idly watching the station while blogging, I note they just ran a story in a Moroccan/Iraqi/Syrian neighborhood of Brussels, saying the people there won't talk to journos and don't want to appear on TV because this is one of the areas where police have been conducting raids, hunting Muslim terrorists in the aftemaths of the last few attacks in France and Belgium.

Hey, if I lived there I would be more than merely annoyed at the behavior and attitude of the newsies, all too willing to direct suspicion onto the whole population of immigrants from Muslim lands and still raising as urgent and legitimate questions how authorities can step up surveillance of these whole areas in order to prevent future terrorist attacks.

Making these people, all of them, that scary is doing the work of the Trump and Cruz campaigns.

Remember Cruz's repeated urging of increased police patrols in and surveillance of American Muslim neighborhoods?

And don't even start with the false analogy of specially heavy policing in high crime neighborhoods.

So far as I know, in and around Pittsburgh, Muslim immigration has just brought us some pretty good Middle Eastern restaurants.

None of which is to deny the entirely valid point so often, and clearly not irrelevantly, made that the actual sacred texts and sacred history of Islam make it uniquely violence-prone.

Fundamentalist Christianity has a hard time avoiding pacifism.

Ditto Buddhism, and Hinduism comes close.

Fundamentalist Islam has a hard time avoiding Jihadism, and Muslim neighborhoods in the West in fact create and provide support for Muslim Jihaders, potentially much more dangerous than any non-Muslim terrorists have been.

The statistical and ideological outlier, Anders Breivik, does not refute this notion; much less do American anti-abortion loonies who are far fewer in number and whose far more limited and focused violence is downright trivial by comparison.

I still agree that we would do well to avoid continued and certainly large scale Muslim immigration.

All the same, we are not at war with the entire Muslim population of the globe and carpet bombing or nuking ISIS controlled or other Muslim areas would be an unprecedented and inexcusable horror.

Amusingly, at 3:15 pm EDT, MSNBC is running a live interview with the principal leader of the Ahmadiyyah community in Belgium, who urges (!) constant surveillance of the nation's mosques (nearly none of them the mosques of Ahmadiyyah Muslims and most, perhaps all, mosques of orthodox Sunnis) in order to detect and immediately put a stop to the process of radicalization that is in fact happening in some parts of the city.

Ahmadiyyah's are generally not regarded as Muslims at all by other Muslims.