Posted on 04/04/2016 6:34:08 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
he face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.”
I was proud to be an American the day our president spoke those words. No, not our current president. That quote came from President George W. Bush exactly six days after the 9/11 attacks. At a time when many Americans were understandably concerned about radical Muslims doing further harm—with the visions of the Twin Towers collapsing and the Pentagon smoldering still fresh in their minds—President Bush chose that moment not to fan the flames of anger and fear, but to underscore the many contributions of Muslim-Americans.
“America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens,” the president said during a purposefully public visit to an Islamic Center in Washington, “and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country. Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads. And they need to be treated with respect. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect.”
In that emotionally super-charged time in our nation’s history, when it would have been easier to align himself with xenophobes looking for a reason to lash out at their Muslim neighbors, President Bush instead reminded all Americans that ours is a great nation because we share the same values of respect and dignity and human worth.
How do we juxtapose such leadership with the ill-conceived and incendiary campaign rhetoric of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz? The former seeks a temporary ban on all Muslims entering our country. The latter’s response to the Brussels attack is to increase patrols and surveillance in Muslim communities.
There is a sad and troubling irony here. By refusing to call them radical Islamic terrorists, our incumbent president is unwilling to make the distinction between the few Muslims who have wrapped their terror in the cloak of the second largest faith in the world from peaceful and law-abiding Muslims. And two men who hope to succeed him are incapable of making a similar distinction.
The reality is that these perspectives undermine serious efforts to combat this global scourge domestically. For presidential candidates to suggest that the broader Muslim community writ large poses a threat is both wrong and counterproductive. Law enforcement needs the cooperation of the Muslim community to identify potential terrorists within. We need stronger relationships with those communities and such self-serving rhetoric complicates law enforcement efforts to do so.
There is another problem with the proposed policies of Trump and Cruz: They are in violation of the U.S. Constitution. The political speak of Trump or Cruz can be reduced to a few simple disturbing sentences. All Muslims are potential terrorists, so ban entry to the United States. All residing in Muslim communities are potential terrorists, so we need increased police activity in those neighborhoods. This is hardly a constitutionally conservative approach to reducing the threat of a terrorist attack. They might instead emulate the constructive approach taken recently by New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, who is hiring more Muslim officers to build a bridge of trust and solidarity within the community.
A few days after President Bush spoke at the Islamic Center, he introduced me at a Joint Session of Congress as the director of a newly created office of Homeland Security, which ultimately led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. The men and women of the department were routinely faced with decisions balancing security with personal freedom. Our vision statement read: Preserving our freedoms, protecting America … We secure our homeland.
Our first responsibility was to preserve our civil liberties and we felt confident in our choices because we knew how strongly our commander-in-chief felt about safeguarding our democratic values. After 9/11, President Bush met daily for over three years with Attorney General Ashcroft, FBI Director Mueller and me. Never once did I leave that meeting with a mixed message. The president, a man of faith, reinforced his public message with frequent reminders that targeting individuals solely because of their religious beliefs was unacceptable. We all understood the importance of building and sustaining bridges of trust within the Muslim community.
Candidly, it’s difficult to know where Trump or Cruz stand today or will stand tomorrow. But it is troubling when candidates appear to believe the best way to safeguard America is to target all who share a particular religious belief.
In my 2009 book, The Test of our Times, I observed that there are probably haters in America, but fortunately they are a small fraction of our population. Of greater concern is that very few Americans are familiar with Muslim history, religion or culture. It is exactly that ignorance that first Trump and now Cruz are tapping into. Rather than embrace the approach of President Bush, who in the immediate aftermath of the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil chose to stand in solidarity with Muslim-Americans, Trump and Cruz exploit a baseless fear and anger directed at all Muslims for short-term political advantage. At least one Republican candidate, John Kasich, is unwilling to travel down that dangerous road.
We are an exceptional country, not a perfect one. At the heart of America is a much treasured value system cherished by us and admired around the world. If America is a unique product, then our constitutionally protected value system is our brand. The world holds us to a higher standard of conduct for which we should be both grateful and accountable. Banning those who embrace specific religious beliefs or increasing surveillance among those within our country, without warrant or probable cause is unacceptable, un-American, and an assault on the religious diversity protected by the first amendment.
America can only lead the global efforts against the scourge of radical Islam if it preserves its moral authority to do so. Our efforts will be limited and our brand diminished if we do any less.
Like most PA politicians, a man with an IQ of 115 who thinks he has an IQ of 140. The problem is that we are more familiar with the history of Islam then you, you freaking idiot. We have not forgotten how close we came to being overrun by the Moslem hordes, if not for Jan Sobieski. The battle of Islam against Western Christian civilization started in the early 7th century, and has rarely lapsed for more than a few generations to the present day.
This is a Christian and Jewish Nation. GET THESE MOSLEMS OUT OF HERE!
Tom Ridge who brought the former head of the East German Stasi, Markus Wolf, who was out of work, in to design the new Department of Homeland Security. When that didn’t seem draconian enough, Tom Ridge sought the insights of the former Soviet secret service ‘KGB’ General Yevgeni Primakov. Yes, that Tom Ridge.
He’s not just a deaf mute, he’s also blind.
Everyone gets a chance.
Even the Satanists.
But, when we find out that cutting throats and drinking blood is one of the fun features of your “religion”, it sorta loses its status as a serious belief system, ya know?
Modern Islam had its chance. What they showed is that as soon as they got a little cash and some mobility, they used it to go on a rampage unseen since the Nazi party and the Imperial Japanese army decided to see who was weak in their parts of the world.
It’s not a religion. It’s a psychotic political ideology which uses religion as an excuse for rabid behavior.
No reason to give it First Amendment respect. As Justice Jackson said, the Constitution is not a suicide pact.
“Of greater concern is that very few Americans are familiar with Muslim history, religion or culture.”
The history of Islam, in a nutshell: Muhammad, after wandering in the desert, suddenly comes up with a new faith that is mostly glomming off Judaism, and then begins preaching this about his hometown of Mecca. This angers the local bigwigs, who are used to people dropping into town to sacrifice their daughters to the moon in front of a meteorite, because without the pilgrimages, the income dries up. Muhammad’s wife manages to buy them off, but after she dies, they run him off. He flees to Medina, and uses low cunning to take control of the violent tribes there, and convert them to his new faith. He then returns to Mecca, crushes his opposition, and takes control, all the while continuing to proclaim the sanctity of the city and the big meteorite because he still wants the income from the pilgrimages. He then uses his position as ruler of two cities to order his fanatical followers to embark on a war of religious conquest to dominate the whole of Arabia. His successors the Caliphs continue to spread the war (and accumulate the loot) until they dominate the whole of the Maghreb, and some of Central Asia.
Once completely corrupted by wealth, his successors battle each other until the lands dominated by them are fragmented. Then the Turks come, and seize power, taking over Eastern Europe, all in the name of the profit...er, Prophet..... For many years, the Turks rule with an odd combination of indolence and brutality, before before disastrously accepting a bribe to enter WWI and losing all but Asia Minor. After the failure of the British and French to mold the Middle East in their own image, the Middle East is torn by strife for many years between different factions who can only agree that the Jews must be driven into the sea and that the nations that supported putting them there need to be destroyed.
After the coming of oil, large amounts of cash make their way to the region, increasing the military and political capabilities of Islamic warriors who intend to force their interpretation of the will of the Prophet on everyone it isn’t already imposed on. They will do this by any means necessary, which brings us to today, where 9/10 of them sit back and support the other portion, which launches terrorist attacks.
Tom Ridge is a clueless, politically correct RINO who really should be a Democrat.........and should quit being clueless and read the Koran and see all of its calls for violence and death to unbelievers.
I love it when those not part of a religion define that religion from a position of CLUELESS IGNORANCE!
Total bullshit
Another idiot who thinks as long as we say, “Islam is a religion of peace”, they’ll love us.
Ridge is the one who is clueless.
“That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.”
Islam sucks.
Everywhere in the world where there is Islam, there’s war, famine, violence and poverty.
Tom Ridge = useless dhimmi.
Islam is Cancer.
He's culpable, and he's kept a low profile for a very long while hoping we'll have forgotten. I haven't
And anyone who thinks "Islam is peace," and not "the peace of a common grave" is terribly ignorant of history.
Islam is at war with all that is not Islam.
Isn’t it wonderful that Tom Ridge knows more about Islam than thousands of jihadi Muslim clerics and their millions of followers?
Tom is part of the secret plan.
They are going to use the muzzies to kill us.
But they under estimate Christians.
Tom Ridge is a politician, nothing more. He has no useful or value-adding skills to bring to the debate.
I have a better plan. Just round them and fly them back to their desert tents.
******
“If I see Muslims I assume they are a grenade ready to go off.....”
21 posted on February 12, 2016 at 6:17:10 PM CST by PLMerite
Another elitist hack from the Uniparty telling us to ignore what we are seeing.
I wonder who’s writing him checks.
In the Kermit Gosnell trial, it came out that the day Tom Ridge became governor of Pennsylvania, inspections of abortion clinics ceased.
Pro-abortion REPUBLICANS murder babies, too.
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