American Muslims: Should police monitor them ?

When it comes to bigotry against Muslims, “the Republican Party is now the Trump Party,” said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com. After last week’s terrorist atrocities in Brussels, GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump predictably renewed his call for a halt to all Muslim immigration. But Sen. Ted Cruz, the “putatively noncrazy candidate,” went one better by pledging to “empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.” Cruz’s proposal is “idiotic,” said Peter Beinart in TheAtlantic.com. He cited a now abandoned New York Police Department program that sent undercover cops into Muslim communities and designated entire mosques as “terrorist enterprises.” Yet police later admitted that scheme “didn’t yield a single terrorism investigation.” American Muslims are “far more integrated than Muslims in Europe,” but that’ll change if they’re demonized.

“Cruz was not calling for a dragnet targeting all Muslims,” said Andrew McCarthy, an adviser on Cruz’s campaign, in NationalReview.com. Politically correct liberals won’t admit that some mosques and surrounding communities are now “hotbeds of Islamic supremacism.” Why shouldn’t police focus their attention on them? Keeping tabs on Muslim communities today is no different from Mafia-busting cops watching Italian neighborhoods in the 1980s, said David Marcus in TheFederalist.com. And the controversial NYPD program that monitored Muslims wasn’t as useless as critics made out. Its findings were critical in identifying a bookstore in Brooklyn as a “venue for radicalization”—information that helped thwart a 2004 plot to bomb the Herald Square subway station. Cruz is simply backing a commonsense “policy that recognizes the unique challenge terrorism presents.”

Treating all Muslims with suspicion is not common sense, said Michael Gerson in The Washington Post. Europe has a big problem with terrorism because its Muslim communities are so isolated and alienated. Most American Muslims are happy to be Americans, and are “often the first to recognize and report radicalization in their midst.” (See The Last Word, page 36.) Treating Muslims like dangerous aliens and occupying their neighborhoods “with a heavy-handed presence” would only breed resentment and lend credence to ISIS’s claim that it’s waging a religious war against the anti-Islamic West. Cruz and Trump “would grant the terrorists a victory without a battle.”