Glenn Beck Isn’t Threatening Muslims, He’s Giving Them A Pertinent Warning

by John Hawkins | December 6, 2006 4:44 pm

There are some libs out there attempting to deliberately misconstrue things that Glenn Beck has said about what could happen to Muslims in the wake of a terrorist attack. Here’s a representative quote from Beck[1]:

“All you Muslims who have sat on your frickin’ hands the whole time and have not been marching in the streets and have not been saying, ‘Hey, you know what? There are good Muslims and bad Muslims. We need to be the first ones in the recruitment office lining up to shoot the bad Muslims in the head.’ I’m telling you, with God as my witness… human beings are not strong enough, unfortunately, to restrain themselves from putting up razor wire and putting you on one side of it. When things—when people become hungry, when people see that their way of life is on the edge of being over, they will put razor wire up and just based on the way you look or just based on your religion, they will round you up. Is that wrong? Oh my gosh, it is Nazi, World War II wrong, but society has proved it time and time again: It will happen.”

Now here’s the reaction of Fair[2], a liberal media group, “Flirting With Fascism on CNN Headline News Host Glenn Beck threatens Muslims with concentration camps.”

Beck is not calling for Muslims to be put in concentration camps. To the contrary, he’s warning Muslims about something terrible that he thinks could happen to them in the future.

Is he right?

Well, I would say before 9/11, the level of hostility towards Muslims in this country was practically nil. But, today? There are a lot of Americans who are very distrustful of Muslims in general. That comes from not being able to make it through the day without hearing about Muslims somewhere in the world committing an atrocity in the name of Allah while the “moderate” Muslims in the US seldom seem to get all that worked up about terrorist attacks on “infidels.” This has led to a deep seated fear in a lot of Americans that a large percentage of Muslims in the US secretly sympathize with the terrorists.

Because of that, if there was, say, another massive terrorist attack, perhaps in multiple cities, that killed a lot of people, and there were American Muslims who played a role in the attack (which is not exactly a fanciful scenario in these days and times), I don’t like to think about the consequences of that for Muslims and the rest of us given a couple of quotes that come to mind:

“There are only two things that Congress does well: nothing and over-react,” and “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.”

Do I think we’d start putting Muslims in camps, like we did with the Japanese back in World War 2? I tend to doubt it, but could we see curbs on free speech, new domestic intelligence programs, and a level of hostility and suspicion towards Muslims amongst the general population in this country that would have been unthinkable pre-9/11? Yes, that seems possible. Pointing that out isn’t a wish for it to happen. To the contrary, it’s a warning about human nature and a situation that could plausibly happen in the future.

In fact, the scenario Beck is warning about is one of the reasons that moderate Muslims should speak up loudly against the terrorists, something that they unfortunately just don’t seem inclined to do very often at present, because if there is a nightmarish terrorist attack down the road, the Muslims who speak up today will have the credibility they need to assure that people pay attention to them when it matters.

Disregard this warning if you like, but when even the audiences of mamby pamby liberal talk show hosts like Jerry Klein[3] want to put Muslims in camps or make them identify themselves TODAY, just imagine what the sentiment might be in the aftermath of an attack worse than 9/11 if it were to turn out that some of the terrorists were American Muslims.