To Invade, Or To Invite (Part II)

 
To invade, or to invite?  If the reader has not read the first half of this post, you can do so below.

The United States has committed grievous sins against the Muslim, specifically Arab, nations over the past two decades.  The only reason we need to consider inviting these people is because we've invaded these people.

The American government, media, and public have a disgusting relationship with this reality, bred through ignorance, evil, or an admixture of the two, which essentially denies our direct responsibility for military actions, whether overt or covert, which have led to the death of well over 1 million Muslims, the displacement and dispossession of millions more, and the undying hatred of tens of millions more.

In the first part of this post I attempted to illustrate a few (among many) examples of how invading Muslims leads to death, debt, and a surrendering of any pretense of moral virtue on our behalf.  Put simply: we borrow money our grand-kids will have to pay back in order to kill people who didn't attack us, and then we deny that we did any such thing.

The other side of this amoral coin is inviting.  Invading and inviting.  We kill people who did not harm us, we destroy their societies, then we invite their wretched and starving and bitter neighbors into our country.  And, just as we deny that we attacked them, we deny that they could possibly dislike us, or even have different values than us.

Muslim civilization is NOT the same as Western Civilization.  I'm starting small here.  Muslims from Muslim majority countries do NOT come from the same civilization as people from America and Europe do.  To deny the difference between civilizations is as intellectually idiotic as denying the difference between Barbecue and Sushi. 

Where most people start getting uncomfortable is when the question arises that asks if the differences between culture can be qualified.  In other words, if two cultures are different, can we then say that one is better than the other?

The purpose of this post is not to answer that question, but to illustrate the danger in denying that differences even exist, even if we refuse to assign different moral values to the different things in question.

Here is what Western Civilization is based on in brief:  rule of law, separation of church and state, limits on the power of the government, legal equality for all minorities.  The West does not do these things perfectly, because the West is run by people and people are not perfect.  

But Plato, one of the founders of Western thought, in the Platonic Ideals, tell us that we need to recognize that perfection is impossible while simultaneously recognizing that not trying to get just a little bit closer to perfection every day is to waste your life entirely.

The West is not perfect, but it has crawled slowly, painfully, bloodily, so bloodily, towards an ideal.  The Muslim world is, by and large, not on that trajectory.  There is no separation of religion and state in mainstream Islamic theology and politics.

Here we have police beating women for being dressed "immodestly".  This was filmed, of course, in New York....or not.

The state of women in the Islamic world is miserable.  The state of ethnic minorities in Muslim nations is deplorable.  The state of Jews in the Muslim world is...well, there aren't any.  But there are Muslims in Israel.  The state of gays in the Muslim world is to be seconds from death at any moment.  I could go on.

This does not mean that most Muslims are bad people.  They simply come from a different culture with different values.  The question at hand is: if we invite people from a very, very different culture into our country, will those people adopt our values, or will they act on the values from their home countries?

Tolerance is great, but tolerating in-tolerance is suicide, especially for minority groups.  Let me be super-blunt: if you are gay, or female, or Jewish, or Christian, or atheist (these groups account for about 98% of the U.S. population), you would be in mortal danger in most Muslims nations if you tried to live the life you take for granted in the United State.

This question, and this tension, is as old as the republic itself.  What types of people can the United States absorb and still be the United States?  Earlier waves of immigrants and refugees were eyed with suspicion, apathy, or outright hatred.

But for most of this country's history, immigrants were from cultures and countries far, far more similar to the United States than 21st century migrants, refugees, and immigrants from the Muslim world.

And, and this is no small point, immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Mexico were not coming from the very countries that the United States had been invading and destabilizing.

Vito Corleone came to Ellis Island fleeing Sicilian crime in Sicily, not American drone strikes in Sicily.  There's a difference.

We can take the moral leap of welcoming radically different people into our society as an act of mercy and altruism.  OR we can take a much smaller moral hop of STOP KILLING MUSLIMS AND DRIVING THEM OUT OF THEIR HOMES AND INTO OURS.