Muslim Americans are one of this country’s greatest strengths.

-Thank God, we have no real weaknesses then. If there are, as good as we get start building bomb shelters now for we are all doomed. Seriously folks, Newsweek is doing an entire issue of feel good PC liberal slanted Muslims are just like us only different propaganda. I have forced myself to read enough of this poorly researched drivel that I have decided not to recommend anyone buy it, read it or line a bird cage with it. I have a few things to say about this article. I realize you are all shocked but humor me.

By Lisa Miller
Newsweek
July 30, 2007 issue – Fareed Siddiq is a successful businessman and a father of two. He lives in Chagrin Falls, Ohio—a 19th-century mill town built on a river and known for its scenic waterfalls and dams—in a five-bedroom house he recently paid for, in cash, with his savings. Prominent in local civic and religious organizations, including the Red Cross and the chamber of commerce, Siddiq was invited to the InterContinental Hotel in downtown Cleveland earlier this month along with about 400 other business leaders to hear President George W. Bush speak.
He was moved to ask his president a question: “What,” he asked, hauling his 6-foot-5, 245-pound frame to the microphone, “are we doing with public diplomacy to change the hearts and minds of a billion and a half Muslims around the world?” What should he tell his friends and relatives in Pakistan about why he continues to live in the United States?
-Educated, and economically well off. Nice choice for a spokesman (1 point). Letting Muslims in the same room with the president (-10) Reinforcing the belief there are 1.5 billion minions (–100) They really should have tossed the BS flag there but let’s continue.

“Great question,” answered the president. “I’m confident your answer is, ‘I love living in America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, the country where you can come and ask the president a question and a country where—’ Are you a Muslim?”
“Yes,” answered Siddiq.
-Too rehearsed (–10)

“Where you can worship your religion freely. It’s a great country where you can do that.”
It was a good answer, says Siddiq, but not enough for him—not when he, a financial adviser at a major investment bank, is afraid to use the bathroom on flights because he doesn’t want to frighten his fellow passengers as he walks down the aisle. He thinks anti-Muslim sentiment in the country is getting worse, not better. “I’m not so much worried about myself,” he adds. “It’s the young people I’m concerned with. Those are the people we need to try—not only as Muslims but as Americans—to make them feel part of America. If you alienate the Muslim young people from America, that is dangerous.”
-A 6-foot-5, 245 man afraid of public perception and he claims to be a leader of men? (-1000) that comment passed the bar on stupid responses. He scores on his concern for the children +10 for the awwwwwwwww so sweet factor) Score ten more points for patriotism and quickly lose 15 for the implied threat. Final score (-975)

Nearly six years after 9/11, the story of Muslims in America is one of overwhelming success. The National Intelligence Estimate released last week warned that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda continue to have their sights set on an attack within the United States. The report also notes a growing radicalism among Muslims in the West. But at a press briefing, intelligence officials were particularly concerned about the threat of homegrown terror cells within Europe’s Muslim communities. America, the officials said, has so far provided relatively infertile ground for the growing and grooming of Muslim extremists. “Most Muslims in America think of themselves as Americans,” says Charlie Allen, intelligence chief at the Homeland Security Department.
-I can’t score this paragraph because it is has no base line in logic. American Muslims are happy and successful but evil foreign Muslims are gonna get us. The earlier mentioned happy American Muslims are not unhappy with their success and they are also going to get us but they can not be turned and are really peaceful despite themselves, everyone relax. Keep in mind the warning about major attacks planned over the summer.

In fact, Muslim Americans represent the most affluent, integrated, politically engaged Muslim community in the Western world. According to a major survey done by the Pew Research Center and released last spring, Muslims in America earn about the same as their neighbors, and their educational levels are about the same. An overwhelming number—71 percent—agree that in America, you can “get ahead with hard work.” In stark contrast, Muslims in France, Germany and England are about 20 percent more likely to live in poverty.
-I’m done with the scores as this went into negative numbers and I see no hope of salvage. I am starting to believe the Saudi’s own PEW. Muslims are the equals of their neighbors-really? I should not admit this but I mix with the Muslims in and around Tampa all the time. Consider it my way of watching them and NO, they do not know who I am. I know all the stupid PC things to say to keep them smiling and they eat it up. If they are my equal it is only financially not mentally, I find them so grossly arrogant and ready to believe anyone who talks to them is a dhimmi they are relatively easy to manipulate. I also do not trust polls I never have.

The alleged terror plots uncovered since 9/11 are a sign that this success cannot be taken for granted. Ire among Muslim Americans at U.S. policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories is at a peak, and thanks to satellite news channels like Al-Jazeera and the Internet, that dissatisfaction can spread like fire. As the Muslim community expands and becomes more established, tensions within the community are also growing—between young and old, immigrant and native-born. Across the country, second- and third-generation Muslims are visibly grappling with how to be Muslim and American at once, while their parents look on with pride—and, like Siddiq, concern.
-Ok, so while we have only good American Patriotic Muslims we need to worry because of foreign press? I am confused is the reporter implying our good natured Muslims are watching and reading evil anti American Islamic propaganda. Why would they do that? They are all rich happy American’s-right? Oh, I should have kept reading the last line explained everything, the 3rd generation are not as smart as the first two and may-just may go bad. What about generations 4-8?

There are 2.35 million Muslims in America according to Pew, though many estimates put that number much higher, and 65 percent of them are foreign-born. These Muslims began coming here in large waves after 1965, when U.S. law changed to allow increased immigration from countries beyond Western Europe. Over the past four decades they have come from South Asia (Pakistan, India and most recently Bangladesh), the Arab world (the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Egypt), as well as Europe and Africa. They came for education and advancement, but also to follow family, and—as in the case of the 35,000 Somalis who began arriving in the 1990s—to flee war and oppression in their home countries. The pull of the American dream remains strong. “The U.S. is founded on the idea that we’re all connected to a set of ideas, not a set of histories,” says Keith Ellison, the Democrat from Minnesota who is Congress’s first Muslim. “For all our criticisms, the idea of America is an amazing thing—a society organized around a set of principles instead of around racial or cultural identity.”
-I got it a bunch of them have invaded and more are on the way, thanks for the warning. I also get American Congressmen who thinks our history is bullshit. If any of you voted for him, you should stay out of the rain as staring up blindly could drown your dumb ass.

Most of the Muslims who were born here are African-American converts and descendants of converts. But a fast-growing number are the children of immigrants, and this last group is extremely young; nearly half are between 18 and 29. In this melting pot, no one group is significantly bigger or more powerful than any of the others—it is, Muslim Americans like to say, the most diverse group of Muslims anywhere except in Mecca during the annual pilgrimage, or hajj.
-Who cares, they are still Muslims, not half Muslims, not non practicing Muslims-real ones.

This profound diversity and relative affluence sets the Muslim community here dramatically apart from those in Europe, where Muslims came from their native countries as many as four generations ago largely as factory workers or laborers. “The Moroccans, the Turks, they were recruited for their illiteracy, for their strong hands and good teeth,” says the provocative Dutch singer Raja el-Mouhandiz, whose parents were from North Africa. When the factory jobs went away, Europe’s Muslims continued to live in ethnic ghettos, isolated from the larger society—a society that tended to be white, homogenous and, on some basic level, impenetrable. In most European countries, Muslim employment is 15 to 40 percent below the population at large.
-Got it. We have a better control on welfare than Europe. Good for us.

Significantly, one of the more notable cases in America—the young men from upstate New York, dubbed the Lackawanna Six, who were arrested in 2002 and pleaded guilty to having trained with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan—grew up in an environment somewhat analogous to that of Europe. Yemenites migrated to Lackawanna in the 1930s for jobs in the steel mills. Those jobs disappeared, but the Yemenite population, now fully American, grew and stayed, and the young people there continue to struggle with drugs, crime and unemployment. In the Yemenite neighborhoods of Lackawanna, about a third live below the poverty line.
-I see, crime creates Muslims. I’m not sure why but hey I didn’t write this crap.

An equally critical but perhaps less obvious benefit to U.S. Muslims is the religiosity of the American people. Even if a religious practice is regarded with suspicion in America, it is generally treated with respect. In a NEWSWEEK Poll, 69 percent of Americans said they thought Muslim American students should be allowed to wear headscarves in class. (The devout prime minister of Turkey, a Muslim country with a tradition of militant secularism, actually sent his daughters to America for college so they could continue wearing their scarves.) “When I say to an evangelical Christian, ‘It’s prayer time,’ they might question the way I pray, but they understand viscerally the importance of prayer,” says Eboo Patel, founder of the Interfaith Youth Core in Chicago. “When I lived in England”—which Patel did from 1998 to 2001—”and I said, ‘It’s prayer time,’ people looked at me as if I was an alien.”
-We as a people were ignorant of the threat, I have to agree with this paragraph. But we are getting better, no special treatment in San Diego anymore

It wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say that on September 10, 2001, the Muslim American universe was largely invisible. The only Muslims most people here knew by name were Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan and Muhammad Ali. If their doctor or accountant was Muslim, the average American probably didn’t give it much thought.
-See above

The Muslim community itself was partially responsible for this isolation—like the Italian, Irish and Jewish immigrants before them, many hunkered down in ethnic enclaves. They strove to fit in, but quietly. For decades, the Islamic Center of New England, in Quincy, Mass., was home to a growing group of Lebanese immigrants who came to America for work in the shipyards. It was a cozy place, where people with similar backgrounds came to meet, pray and gossip. The imam, a Lebanese man named Talal Eid, was a perfect fit—he understood the community’s values and he shared their interest in becoming American. “I have a woman with a head cover and a Muslim woman without a head cover,” he says of his congregation at the time. “I’m not here to judge which is good and which is bad. I am here to serve them all equally.” (In the past decade, however, his congregation changed as new immigrants arrived from Algeria, Morocco, Egypt and Pakistan; Eid was ousted in favor of a more conservative imam in 2005.)

The relative peace that came with invisibility disappeared after 9/11. When Muslims became objects of fear, “people who had never recognized and seen themselves as Muslims had no choice but to see themselves as Muslim,” says Muzaffar Chisti, director of the Migration Policy Institute at the New York University School of Law. Young women who had never before worn the traditional Islamic head covering—and whose mothers saw it as a symbol of the backwardness they had left at home—put on the veil. According to a 2002 study from Hamilton College, more than a third of Muslim American women now wear the veil every day.
-I am stopping here as I think I have made my point the entire issue is PC propaganda with no basis in reality. What you should take away from this is a life lesson. Early Muslim immigrants went unnoticed. As the numbers increased, we had problems, the same problems Europe and the rest of the world seem to have. The problems are not going away and we have enough data to form opinions based around a bit of pattern analysis.

-Future generations of Muslims will increasingly radicalize and not assimilate.

-Education, business success and position does not make one loyal to the nation, it people or ideals.

-No one in our Government has a valid plan to defend us.

-Our so called leadership will attempt to bribe them and hold them back util they are voted out of office and can pass the issue to someone else.

-Muslims will continue to come in increasingly larger numbers and infiltrate in sensitive positions. Back to sleep.

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