"This is not America"

I'm late in getting to this, but Nicholas Kristof's recent NYT column is one of the saner things written, to date, about this spasm of Islamophobic hysteria we seem to be enduring.

On New Republic editor Martin Peretz's recent suggestion that Muslims need not be accorded First Amendment rights because they don't respect life the way the rest of us do:

Thus a prominent American commentator, in a magazine long associated with tolerance, ponders whether Muslims should be afforded constitutional freedoms. Is it possible to imagine the same kind of casual slur tossed off about blacks or Jews? How do America’s nearly seven million American Muslims feel when their faith is denounced as barbaric?

This is one of those times that test our values, a bit like the shameful interning of Japanese-Americans during World War II, or the disgraceful refusal to accept Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe.