In Medina, Muslim religious police hassle Christians wearing crosses and arrest women not wearing masks. In Oakland, Muslim religious police have smashed up liquor stores, set one on fire, and kidnapped a store owner. While the 21st Amendment permits the sale of alcohol, the Koran apparently forbids it. A small sect of Oakland Muslims would rather live under Sharia law than Constitutional law, and they would rather their coreligionist fellow countrymen do so too. Who's next on their list? Sausage vendors? Girls in bikinis? The Muslim attackers are allegedly native-born Americans. The Muslim storeowner victims are immigrants. Presumably, the shopkeeps thought they left behind fundamentalist lunacy when they left their homelands behind. They didn't.

One of the best arguments against irrational and massive immigration are the immigrants that such a policy allows within our borders.

Just jail them. Perhaps they'll have a more material understanding of the importance of leaving others alone.

Wait a minute, more lawless behaviour by those practicing the religion of peace? Shocking!

It should be noted that every quote in the article other than by the owners of the stores that were attacked and vandalized concerns the "problem" of too many cheap liquor stores. No one, particularly from the City of West Oakland, seems to think bow-tied thugs vandalizing private property presents any cause for concern at all!

I hate to draw any historical comparisons, but I recall a time in a portion of north-central Europe (we won't name names!),..oh...around November 9, 1938, when a bunch of similarly immoral thugs torched churches and businesses, and the government, strangely enough, blamed the congregations and the shop owners for that damage and violence as well! I guess great minds think alike!

If I understand the circumstances correctly, the "Muslims" in question are members of the Nation of Islam. Isn't calling them "Muslims" a bit like calling Mormons "Christians"?

A central tenet of Islam (again, as I understand it) is that Muhammad was Allah's last prophet. The Nation of Islam, however, believes that Elijah Muhammad (b. 1897) was a prophet.

That's not to say that actual Muslims aren't capable of such violence. They most certainly are. But the violent streak in the Nation of Islam seems to have different historical roots than that of Arabian Islam.

The NOI has quite an unsavory legacy in the Bay Area. See Yusuf Bey's entry on Wikipedia, which refernces the same liquor store shenanigans. Forty years ago Norman Mailer correctly called them Black fascists.

The article doesn't identify the assailants as Nation of Islam, though they may be. The piece calls them "black Muslims," which is in some quarters used interchangably with "Nation of Islam." But the piece also claims: "black and Middle Eastern Muslims may pray at the same mosques on weekends," which obviously suggests that the reporter is either confused or talking about black Muslims in a way that is not synonymous with NOI.

Were they Middle Eastern Muslims, this still does not make the case against open immigration. In fact, it is open immigration which insures against such radicalism becoming state-sanctioned. By allowing many cultures into our country we make it untenable to have the cultural despotism of a single minority forced upon us since we can gang up to defeat it. In addition, there is a net economic plus which immigration brings. Therefore, we should support more liberal immigration policies.

I think in the local news coverage they wore dark suits with bowties. This almost certainly makes them NOI, African-American black muslims.

"By allowing many cultures into our country we make it untenable to have the cultural despotism of a single minority forced upon us since we can gang up to defeat it".

By allowing many cultures into our country, we won't have a single minority forced upon us. We will have many minorities forced upon us and we will have to gang up and defeat them all.

Your theory is confusing and unworkable.

Unless we expect that all legal immigrants entering this country will meld into our culture and become Americans, there can be no benefit to cultural diversity when all newcomers are on their own agendas.

They either accept our laws and our national customs or they don't belong here.

That goes for U.S. born converts and although we can't give them the boot, we should use all means necessary to discipline them.

Completely agreed, ASDF. America's immigration policy is both irrational and devastating.

"That goes for U.S. born converts and although we can't give them the boot, we should use all means necessary to discipline them."

Agreed again. I have a toilet in my bathroom just thirsting for Korans. ;)

To be clear we are talking about what laws are enacted, not whether laws are followed. Besides, you are making the assumption there is such a thing as a static American identity. Historically, there is no such thing. Despite the worst fears of the late 19th century anti-immigration laws, European (i.e. Catholic) immigrants caused American culture to adapt to them as much as they adapted to ours. Today we wouldn't feel any fear about Catholics coming to America, but Americans certainly did in 1900!

Besides, there has never been a monolithic "American culture." Right from the first days of the Republic there were English, Irish, Scot, Welsh, free-born African and Caribbean cultures many of which keep their identity to this day or mesh together to form Anglo-Americanism when other immigrant cultures loomed.

Besides, do you feel the prohibition vandalism wrought by good-ole American Christians in the early 20th century is somehow better than Muslims doing something similar? And in this case it is clear the vandals were born and raised here. I am afraid cultural despotism doesn't work whether it is enacted by the right to enforce an unrealistic notion of what was or the left to enforce an unrealistic notion of what should be!