Over at the Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan warns against taking yesterday’s shooting at Fort Hood as cause for increased suspicion and vilification of the Muslim-American community:
Denial of these Islamist currents, even within the military, is dangerous and foolish. But equally, over-reacting to them is dangerous and foolish. The cycle of sectarian distrust and division can happen here as well as over there. Reducing all of us to these atavistic identities only exacerbates the problem and drags us further into the cycle of medieval religious conflict. And the task of threading our way through this political minefield is immense.
If I thought we couldn’t do it, I’d despair. But I believe we can, and have since this war broke out on September 11. We need to remember that we are not fighting for Christianity over Islam or even the West over Islam. We are fighting to retain an open democracy, where all religions can coexist, where religion is separate from politics, where toleration is a civic virtue. This requires attention to the real and dangerous Islamist threat—and in that respect [Bruce Bawer’s] and [Michelle Malkin’s] warnings against p.c. denial are perfectly valid and important. But it also requires insisting that our membership in society is based on a citizenship devoted to core ideas, not a citizenship based on raw religious or ethnic identity.
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