My correspondent in Pakistan sent me the link to an anti-Semitic (anti-Black, anti-Muslim, etc.) hate page and asked “How do you deal with these white supremists?

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Nice people . . . .

We let them talk all they want.

The timbre of the surrounding culture is such that when they’re found out, individually, their business and social prospects may be minimized by natural normative social processes. They’re sickness — and that’s most American, not only Jews but most Christians as well, view it — is such that they’re liable to gravitate to their own intellectual kind.

If the group has any history in crime or violence, the police will monitor minimally through ex-con or probation relationships with individuals (not with the group), and if more attention is needed, the old joke about FBI COINTELPRO applies: “How do you get to meet an FBI agent?” — “Attend a KKK meeting!”

If the organization commits a crime, the whole law enforcement community will be up its ass pretty damn quick to make arrests on the crime and conspiracy to commit it.

If the organization has developed a criminal history, then even reformed, it’s probably infiltrated and tracked. The old “COINTELPRO” — a term that may be looked up — involved some dirty tricks bordering on entrapment but always inspiring mistrust and paranoia within the targeted group.

Oddly enough and relevant here, it’s unknown to what extent the still new Federal intelligence and security communities have going on with the Muslim Brotherhood in America (incidentally, there are no holds reading Chechnya’s Kavkaz Center or Al Qaeda’s Inspire feeds). On the surface, it appears that the Administration has hired and integrated into its departments key Brotherhood figures like Mohamed Elibiary — http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2013/09/muslim-brotherhood-supporter-gets-homeland-security-promotion.html — and given out promotions. I think the intent was to elevate, integrate, and surround with the greater polygot American culture the mentality involved. That too seems not to be going so well and the conservative right press harps on these Obama decisions quite a bit.

I’ve been convinced for a while that the Obama Administration has been playing a deeply deceptive politics abroad and at home, so it hasn’t endorsed the Saudis — and their being upset about that has been in the news this week — nor has it abandoned Israel, but we are worried about Iran’s steps toward failproof defense of its nuclear war making capability, which it may do by acquiring a civilian reactor too dangerous when active for destruction or dismantling. The workaround, since Russia wants to sell the Ayatollah on its part of the nuclear business, Chernobyl notwithstanding, has been to mess with the intellectual capacity in human talent and machinery involved in the pursuit of those aims. There Israel and the U.S. may diverge, for the Israelis feel that an endless policy of half measures will lead to their own destruction.

Back to other hate groups, Islamic Jihad in America, and “homeland security” — I think the aim of responsible government, such as it may be (some voters believe it absent and the country already “sold down the river”, a colloquial phrase having to do with shipping slaves from pleasant Kentucky to the markets of New Orleans) — is to treat political threat and violence engineered by Muslims no differently than it does Christian ideologues and any number of cults and gangs similarly involved with their own weird tribal politics and the posture taken against the rest of the world. If there’s a problem with that, it may be that the Muslim Brotherhood is latched to a major religion, has decades of organizational history behind it, and has a vision for mankind to rival the Nazis in its supremacist aspect.

Shimmer applies. If the scale and tempo of violence — any group or cause — American politicians and the government will ramp up the pressure to suppress that form of political exuberance. Apparently, an annual atrocity or two may not produce sufficient cause to, for example, revisit laws on sedition. The concern remains that what we do for one mob and its cause, we must do for all. For the most part, instead of criminalizing the politics, we wait for the politics to become criminal, and then we take apart the organizations.

In national religious politics: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2013/10/17/richardson-texas-imam-leaves-dallas-central-mosque-quietly/ The imam has been noted as one of the 500 most influential Muslims in the world, so there’s an intelligence story in there that I’m unlikely to pry apart. Maybe the crackdown on the Brotherhood in Egypt involved information that impugned the imam; maybe the Wahhabi thrust in the politics unseated the stance he represented, and he was forced from power; perhaps some other aspect in politics or state needs, including Erdogan’s interest in supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, call him back to Istanbul; perhaps he really did take an early and quiet retirement, all the better to avoid hoopla and the long crediting in speech in public of mentors and associates along the way.

The true topic is a combine of national mission — egalitarian secular democracy here — and national security, so whether white dudes in basements talking about The Jew over their beer or the leader of the largest mosque in Texas, we’re trying to look at them the same way, guaranty the freedom of the law abiding, including the most hateful of the law abiding or the most contemptuous of others, if that, and keep our radars hot, as it were, for criminal activity.

And that’s how we deal with all of that! 🙂

Whew.

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I credit the same correspondent with awakening me to the politics 101 phrase “behind the curtains,” and with that in mind and much impression garnered from years of blogging feel confident about President Obama’s dividing political surface from political real story.

I’m equally confident about the conservative right’s beyond-the-pale demonizing of the American President and note that not with an overabundance of respect for the office — that would be other than American too — but with numerous second looks into the rationale for moving figures like Elibiary into the Administration’s ranks.  The far right cries “Infiltration!”  I happen to think such moves make for closer looks and for a look at administrative integration as a potentially culturally transforming process.

What doesn’t work only teaches us more than we knew when we started.

Were it not for greed — and that may be a subject for other writing on this blog — the American political system would be a greater joy for working, but even so, it’s very good at what it does, and what it does, by and large, is produce an Awesome Discourse (a little more important than merely the Awesome Conversation, lol) sustaining a productive domestic tranquility.

In America, so far and far past the Civil War, we’re still much inclined to reach for our quills rather than our quivers when it comes to domestic politics.

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