Can the Muslims Conquer America?

There has been a lot of discussion in the blogs this week about this, and it has led me to understand something about the political atmosphere that had never actually sunk in before.

Let's start it with this exchange between Naomi Wolf and Melanie Morgan on Hardball the other day:

Wolf: It gets back to what I was saying earlier about the nature of lying. Let's not forget that they got us into this war on the basis of a series of lies.... This weaving out of lies was a pretext for an invasion that served their own political purposes. In the wake of the invasion, they were able to terrify the American people, subjugate the American people, drive through a series of laws that dismantled key checks and balances, allowed overreaching executive power, and completely eviscerated what the founders set in place, thus weakening America.

Morgan: Keep attacking, keep attacking Naomi, because you're going to look great in a burka. You're going to look super in a burka.

Some people thought that was a kind of strange response. I think it was a strange response, like Ms. Morgan was listening to a different conversation or something. A burka? Weren't we just talking about lying? How did she get to burkas from there?

To some people this makes sense, and I guess I'm slow but I'm just beginning to comprehend the magnitude of it. There was a recent statement by writer Roger Simon on the conservative site Pajamas Media, in a piece titled Gay marriage and the war on terror. Part of it:

I never cease to be amazed – and perhaps it is my own myopia – that my former colleagues on the Left can be blind to this situation. They act as if the threat is not real and is only a blip caused by a post 9/11 overreaction by George Bush, thus ignoring virtually all of Western history since the year 800, not to mention the overwhelming demographic changes of recent decades. (John Edwards – interestingly an opponent of gay marriage - recently called the “War on Terror” a bumper sticker. At least, he’s consistent.) The very people most threatened by the ideology of Islamism and the institution of Sharia law – gays, women, freethinkers - are often the very people least likely to defend themselves against it.

Again, this strikes me as bizarre thinking. Do these people actually think that Muslims are going to conquer America?

Well, yes, apparently that's what they're afraid of.

Glenn Greenwald is a well-respected blogger at Salon who perfectly summarized the situation:

Every now and then, it is worth noting that substantial portions of the right-wing political movement in the United States -- the Pajamas Media/right-wing-blogosphere/Fox News/Michelle Malkin/Rush-Limbaugh-listener strain -- actually believe that Islamists are going to take over the U.S. and impose sharia law on all of us. And then we will have to be Muslims and "our women" will be forced into burkas and there will be no more music or gay bars or churches or blogs. This is an actual fear that they have -- not a theoretical fear but one that is pressing, urgent, at the forefront of their worldview.

And their key political beliefs -- from Iraq to Iran to executive power and surveillance theories at home -- are animated by the belief that all of this is going to happen. The Republican presidential primary is, for much of the "base," a search for who will be the toughest and strongest in protecting us from the Islamic invasion -- a term that is not figurative or symbolic, but literal: the formidable effort by Islamic radicals to invade the U.S. and take over our institutions and dismantle our government and force us to submit to Islamic rule or else be killed.

I have never thought about this before, but of course that's what's going on. There are people who really think that this country is in actual danger of being conquered by Muslims.

I don't know how you're supposed to reason with that.