Let's face it, the vast majority of Muslims in America, confused human beings though they are (on this I know we can agree), do not commit any ACTS which are prosecutable.
Apparently, these past 13 years of reading Jihad Watch have failed to impress upon Wellington the uniqueness of this asymmetrical world war we are in. That rather revealing off-the-cuff remark of his reflects what I would call the State Dept. Counter-Terrorism Expert Analysis Protocol of the Eternal "Whack-a-Mo" Initiative. Which will only work to save us if the problem of Muslims following their global revival of Islam is not, in fact, systemic and metastasizing. Is Wellington so sure he'd like to bet that it isn't?
A long-time regular reader and commenter on Jihad Watch comments for over ten years, "Wellington" (and member of the "Rabbit Pack"), wrote nearly four years ago:
1) The Constitution protects the totalitarian ideology which is inimical to the Constitution AND those who believe in that ideology which is inimical to the Constitution but are among those believers who don't act upon those inimical beliefs.
2) The Constitution still protects the inimical belief system du jour even though those who fully act out their beliefs, i.e., do things inimical to the Constitution, will be prosecuted.
This was a part of his final comment in a back-and-forth exchange he had with me way back in 2013 in a Jihad Watch comments field, where our mutual disagreement revolved around my claim that it's not necessarily un-Constitutional to deport all Muslims from the U.S.
I never responded to that last comment of Wellington's, either because I became weary of the gently irritating tug-of-war the argument got mired in, or because I felt I had said my peace -- or perhaps I just didn't have the time or interest to pursue it.
At any rate, my readers can go back to that field and read the long exchange for themselves (and remember my nickname back then was "LemonLime").
For now, I'd point out one problem with Wellington's first point:
(1) ...The Constitution protects ... those who believe in that ideology which is inimical to the Constitution ...[who ]are among those believers who don't act upon those inimical beliefs.
One problem with this gingerly tweezing operation Wellington has enacted on the Constitution is that it ignores the problem of conspiracy and sedition. He may object that any activity indicating conspiracy and sedition would be "acting upon those inimical beliefs". Fair enough. But with the concrete problem of Islam, the question becomes complicated by a middle demographic between;
a) believers who don't act upon those inimical beliefs,
and
b) believers who do.
The middle demographic would be the following:
c) believers who do, but seem not to be doing.
Need it be added that a mountain of data indicates we have good reason to suppose their existence among Muslims worldwide (including increasingly in the West), but not enough evidence to pinpoint who and where they are, and exactly how systemic and seditiously organized they are?
Furthermore, the innumerable Muslims of this "middle demographic" seem not to be doing sedition inimical to the Constitution (and to the Republic for which it stands) only because our definition of "doing" is limited and doesn't take into account a panoply of Islamic behaviors that in fact encourage, sustain, enable, and perhaps at times mobilize the seditious agenda of the believers of category (b).
Understanding this "middle demographic" depends upon a literacy in the subject, Islam. It struck me as odd that in 2013, someone who is evidently as deeply studied in the subject of Islam as Wellington would construct, and doggedly defend, an argument that ignores altogether the full dimensions of the subsidiary problems of taqiyya that radiate out from and inform the main problem of Islam. To the person who has educated himself sufficiently in the matter, those subsidiary problems indicate that the "middle demographic" is a real concern, and distinguishes the problem of Muslims from that of our former problems of Communists and Nazis (even if there are some resemblances).
Wellington also said at that time:
...you continue to wrongly intermix at times horrible belief systems with persons. Again, actions against the Constitution are prosecutable. Beliefs against the Constitution are not.
Wellington misunderstood me on this (and he continued to misunderstand me over and over again for years). I don't care about beliefs against the Constitution unless they are part of an ongoing sedition that itself is part of a war against us that itself has already resulted in mass-murder of our people in the framework of a goal to destroy our society -- and which we have good reason (including not only successful attacks, but also countless plots already stopped by intelligence in the nick of time) to suppose will continue to result in worse attacks of mass-murder. When I suggest that the way to protect our society is to deport Muslims, I'm not going after their belief system per se; I'm going after the concrete effects of that belief system -- the human Muslim agents of that belief system -- that threaten our destruction.
The problem then returns to, Why all Muslims? Why not just the "jihadists"? And that brings us back to the "middle demographic" I discussed above -- middle between the type of group member who is ostensibly "not doing anything bad" and those who are caught red-handed with a lit fuse (or bloody machete) in their hands. Again, Islamoliteracy leads us to suspect that the former, seemingly benign majority isn't so peachy. Islamoliteracy leads us to suspect a type of warfare waged by Muslims that may be unique -- involving, from the perspective of our framework, a wide array of behaviors that seem to be non-military and a wide diversity of people who seem to be non-combatants (see my essay, The Multifarious Strategy of Jihad).
And this is really the crux of the matter. It was perhaps revealing, then, that Wellington in that same context had to go on to say this: