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“They should be hauled out of Congress and taken to Guantánamo!” a military veteran said of the few dozen elected officials — including Hillary Clinton and the only two Muslim members of Congress — identified in the film as having connections to terrorists. “Can’t we get a law passed so we can go in and get these people the hell out of our government?”

White and the filmmaker, Trevor Loudon, assured the group that there is “a new sheriff in town.”

Trump’s election has presented a “God-given opportunity,” Loudon said. “The fate of the Western world” now depends on how they use it.

Obama plans to herald the contributions of Muslims to American society while issuing a forceful counterpoint to the language favored by some Republican presidential candidates like Donald Trump, according to White House officials.

We've seen an alarming willingness on the part of some Republicans to try to marginalize law-abiding, patriotic Muslim Americans,"

Obama has visited mosques in the past, but never inside the United States, which is home to 2.75 million Muslims, according to the Pew Research Center

What are Sufis? This was a question many were asking after at least 305 Egyptians were massacred on Friday in the Sinai. They were killed in an assault by Islamist militants (likely from the local Islamic State affiliate, although the group has not yet made a claim of responsibility) on Al Rawdah mosque, which is commonly described as a “Sufi mosque.” The implication is that its congregants observed a more “mystical” version of Islam, one that, for example, venerates saints. While such a description is not necessarily inaccurate—it is common to refer to mosques by their apparent ideological or spiritual orientation—like most things related to Islam, it’s a bit more complicated. Many Sufis do not self-define as Sufis, since for them, this is just how Muslims practice—and have always practiced—Islam.

For most of Islamic history, Sufism wasn’t considered as something apart. That it is today has much to do with the rise of Islamism, which is generally perceived as anti-Sufi.

To describe Sufis as “tolerant” and “pluralistic” may also be true, but doing so presupposes that non-Sufi Muslims aren’t tolerant or pluralistic. On the other hand, describing Sufis as heterodox, permissive, or otherwise less interested in ritual or Islamic law is misleading.

The Ground Zero mosque controversy is actually a perfect illustration of the difficulty we have in our culture discussing controversial issues, because, if moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt is correct, people on opposite sides of the political spectrum analyze these issues using somewhat different criteria. 

Haidt has broken down five moral senses that contribute to moral reasoning: Harm, Fairness, Authority, Loyalty, and Purity. The degree to which we care about  those five areas determines the basic stances we take on morality. Note well, these don't dictate the content of our thinking, only the things we will take into consideration as we reason morally. Haidt has found that everyone factors Harm (e.g., "Whom does this hurt?")  and Fairness into their moral thinking, but only people who generally fall onto the conservative side of the American spectrum also factor in Authority, Loyalty, and Purity. (Interestingly, outside the West, nearly everybody else factors these things in as well, which is why, in a clever phrase, "Americans are WEIRD").

As Haidt explains in that Edge lecture and elsewhere, the three factors conservatives also bring into their moral reasoning all have to do with establishing and defending the kinds of morals that promote group cohesion. It should be easy to understand from an evolutionary point of view where these instincts came from. In the West, we have over the past couple of centuries centered our moral thinking around Kantian and Benthamite theories that, generally speaking, measure morality by universal categories -- ways of approaching morality that only concern themselves with Harm and Fairness, and exclude the other three. This, Haidt says, is how the people in our society who call themselves liberals (Haidt is one of them) see moral reasoning; they do not grasp that quite a few of their fellow Americans draw on other sources -- or if they do recognize this, they dismiss these sources as illegitimate. Unsurprisingly, conservatives do not accept that we should not care about Authority, Loyalty, and/or Purity (which is not simply about sexual matters, but about the degree to which one believes that some things are "sacred," and therefore not subject to justification through reason).

A bomb tore through a Shiite mosque in Peshawar, in northwestern Pakistan, on Friday, killing at least 57 people and wounding more than 100 in one of the worst terrorist attacks in Pakistan in several years.

Police officials said that at least one gunman on a motorcycle had killed two police guards before entering the mosque and detonating what appeared to be a suicide vest, while another official said there were two attackers.

Asked if they were able to identify the bodies, he said that in many cases the police had just brought severed body parts to the hospital.

When the Tide of Islamophobia Reached My Hometown Mosque

THE Islamic Society of North America’s headquarters sit atop a grassy hill overlooking Plainfield, Ind.

Anti-Muslim hatred in the United States has grown in recent years. The “Ground Zero Mosque” episode in 2010 and successive anti-mosque protests across the country signaled a simmering Islamophobia.

Over the course of just a few days Donald Trump has gone from saying that we might have to close down mosques and create a Muslim registry to saying that not only will we do this but we have to do it and anything less is an utter capitulation.

In other words, rapidly evolving from refusing to rule out a draconian policy to affirmatively endorsing it to being its leading advocate.

With his Muslim ID card and database, Wednesday he said he wouldn't rule out creating such a system. By the end of the day he was telling NBC News he would "absolutely" create such a system.

He previously said he would "strongly consider" shutting down some mosques in the U.S.

there's a country that has taken Trump's rhetoric one step further and actually put one of his proposed policies — shutting down mosques — into practice.

Both countries are roughly three-fourths Christian (Roman Catholicism dominates in Angola) and less than 1 percent Muslim.

Where the anti-mosque movement and escalating anti-Islam rhetoric is really resonating is with the Arab mainstream --- that vast middle ground which had hoped that the election of Barack Obama would mark a real change from the Bush administration but have grown increasingly disappointed.   The mosque issue has been covered heavily on Arab satellite TV stations such as al-Jazeera, and the images of angry Americans chanting slogans and waving signs against Islam have resonated much like the images of angry Arabs burning American flags and denouncing U.S. policy did with American viewers after 9/11.   The recent public opinion surveys showing widespread hostility towards Islam among Americans have also gotten a lot of attention. 

It's confirming the worst fears of too many mainstream Arabs and Muslims, and thus providing fodder for the extremists who hope to exploit that atmosphere. It's become a cliche to say so, but it's true:  by fueling the narrative of a clash of civilizations and an inevitable war between Islam and the West, this unfortunate trend is empowering extremists on all sides and weakening moderates.  That's exactly the dynamic which I warned about here and in my recent Foreign Affairs article, and it's one which counter-terrorism professionals and public diplomacy specialists alike understand needs to be broken before it's too late. 

A few weeks ago, terrorists laid siege to a mosque in the small town of Bir al-Abd that lies just off the east-west road spanning the northern Sinai Peninsula. They killed 305 people and wounded many others. The photos from the scene were macabre—the stuff of Baghdad or Karachi, not Egypt. Until the attack on the al-Rawdah Mosque on November 24, the deadliest terror incident in Egypt occurred in 1997, when a group called al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya killed 57 people—most of them Japanese and British tourists—at the Temple of Hatshepsut near Luxor. The recent bloodletting in the Sinai is believed to be the work of Wilayat Sina, the Sinai branch of the self-styled Islamic State, though no one has claimed responsibility.

perpetrators are adherents of a worldview that views violence as the principal means of purifying what they believe to be un-Islamic societies. It was not a coincidence that the attackers went after a mosque associated with Sufism—a mystical variant of traditional Islam that violent and nonviolent fundamentalists consider apostasy.

If democracy or democratic change were the remedy to the extremism of the Islamic State and other groups, then Tunisia—the oft-cited success of the Arab Spring—would not reportedly produce as many followers of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as it does.

Islam is the second largest religion in the world after Christianity, with about 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide.

7th century

Islam started in Mecca, in modern-day Saudi Arabia, during the time of the prophet Muhammad’s life.

Trump currently does surprisingly well from the Gulf Coast of Florida to the towns of upstate New York, and he won a resounding victory in the Nevada caucuses

it wasn't just Trump but his supporters who seemed to have come out of nowhere, suddenly expressing, in large numbers, ideas far more extreme than anything that has risen to such popularity in recent memory

CBS News exit poll found that 75 percent of Republican voters supported banning Muslims from the United States. A PPP poll found that a third of Trump voters support banning gays and lesbians from the country. Twenty percent said Lincoln shouldn't have freed the slaves.

Islamic State has moved hundreds of civilians from villages around the city to use as human shields,

United Nations said the militants may have killed nearly 200 people.

hit a Shiite mosque in northern Iraq, killing more than a dozen women and children.

The junior senator from Florida sold his soul in North Charleston, South Carolina, for a shot at winning over the supporters of Donald Trump. 

It began early in the night when Rubio said, “Barack Obama does not believe that America is a great global power. Barack Obama believes that America is a arrogant global power that needs to be cut down to size.”

His problem is that in a party in which more than 60 percent of the voters don’t think Obama loves America, disagreeing is not enough. So Rubio has begun suggesting that Obama is some kind of Manchurian (or perhaps Mauritanian) candidate, actively seeking to do America ill

But there is a growing group of people doing the unexpected. They’re called the Liberal Gun Club, just one of a number of left-leaning gun clubs now in operation,

The liberal view on most things is, I might not like it, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to ban it.”

When it comes to mass shootings, Lara Smith says she doesn’t think banning guns is the answer.

The Quran, like all foundational religious texts, is a tangle of ambiguities and mysteries, to which endless annotations can be, and are being, written.

So wide was the fame of the 11th-century Baghdad artist Ibn al-Bawwab (“son of the doorman”) that his signature was routinely forged

When a Mongol army laid waste to the city in 1258, his life was spared so that he could work for the new rulers,

Caldwell suggests that European elites have been so guilt-ridden about their past crimes, and so intent on avoiding anything that even resembled chauvinism or bigotry, that for decades they failed to put any sustained pressure on their steadily-growing immigrant populations to eschew religious extremism or phase out illiberal cultural practices. And worse, their efforts to marginalize what they considered (and still consider) the bigoted attitudes of their countrymen didn’t actually do away with anti-immigration anxieties: They just denied them a place in the political mainstream, which meant that they’ve manifested themselves instead in extreme and counterproductive outbursts (minaret bans, the political careers of Jean-Marie Le Pen and Geert Wilders, etc.).

It is notable that Europe's integration problem is worst not in first generation immigrants, but in their European born children, and I think one reason they are less successfully assimilated than their counterparts in the United States is the lack of a constitutional creed that successfully inculcates the idea that they're just as French or German or Spanish as anyone else. It's also true that American culture, disseminated largely through media, is many times more powerful than what a tiny country like Denmark can marshal to informally assimilate its immigrant population, and that the heterogeneity of our country means that no single minority group feels isolated in a land that a homogeneous majority dominates. Obviously this is a rough sketch of a diverse continent that inevitably glosses over nuances, but insofar as it holds true, it helps to explain my vexation with Mr. Douthat's reluctance to declare the constitutional understanding of American citizenship superior to the cultural understanding, even if there is some wisdom to be taken from the latter

The invocation of the European experience seems inapt to me.

Why do people tend to hear only one side of the story? A common explanation is that the digital age makes it easy to wall yourself off from inconvenient data, to spend your time in ideological “cocoons,” to hang out at blogs where you are part of a choir that gets preached to.

however big a role the Internet plays, it’s just amplifying something human: a tendency to latch onto evidence consistent with your worldview and ignore or downplay contrary evidence.

All the Abrahamic scriptures have all kinds of meanings — good and bad — and the question is which meanings will be activated and which will be inert. It all depends on what attitude believers bring to the text. So whenever we do things that influence the attitudes of believers, we shape the living meaning of their scriptures. In this sense, it’s actually within the power of non-Muslim Americans to help determine the meaning of the Koran. If we want its meaning to be as benign as possible, I recommend that we not talk about burning it. And if we want imams to fill mosques with messages of brotherly love, I recommend that we not tell them where they can and can’t build their mosques.

slam, or at least modern reinterpretations of it, is at the core of some of the Arabs’ deep troubles. The faith’s claim, promoted by many of its leading lights, to combine spiritual and earthly authority, with no separation of mosque and state, has stunted the development of independent political institutions.

But religious extremism is a conduit for misery, not its fundamental cause (see article). While Islamic democracies elsewhere (such as Indonesia—see article) are doing fine, in the Arab world the very fabric of the state is weak.

Economic stagnation bred dissatisfaction. Monarchs and presidents-for-life defended themselves with secret police and goons. The mosque became a source of public services and one of the few places where people could gather and hear speeches. Islam was radicalised and the angry men who loathed their rulers came to hate the Western states that backed them. Meanwhile a vast number of the young grew restless because of unemployment.

"Jesus is the Way" spray-painted across the front

defaced and left with a fake grenade in the driveway.

hour west of where the San Bernardino terror attack