Another fun letter was published in the West County Times today. Jacqueline Cloidt, who lives in our neighboring high-rent district of Orinda, starts by stating that other groups besides the Democratic Party were happy with the November elections — she names al-Qaida, Hamas and Hezbollah, based on unattributed "recent reports", but forgets to mention the American people. But then she lights into Michigan congressman John Conyers, who is to take control of the House Judiciary Committee. Conyers, by her account, "... represents the largest Muslim population in the country ..." and, to make matters worse, " ... apparently does their bidding."
There is something wrong with this? We've just gotten over twelve years of House members who either obsessed about gaining and holding onto power (Tom DeLay) or spent their time feathering their own nests at our expense (Randy "Duke" Cunningham). And we are supposed to panic about a congressman whose major sin is that he listens to his constituents and does what they want him to? My own take on the matter is that if Conyers is doing what Cloidt accuses him of, he's got to be one of our best Congressmen, and we should cherish him, not fear him.
Of course, I can suppose that it's not Congressman Conyers who bothers Cloidt as much as it is that set of constituents; chances are good that she would like to drum them out of the body politic, based on their religion, which is alien to our way of life. And yet ... didn't we go through this same exercise around two-thirds of a century ago? In a time of equal (and much more justifiable) fear, didn't we collect a whole group of innocents and excise them from the body politic, based solely on their ancestry? Seems to me that you can still visit the concentration camps at Manzanar and other places where we relegated Americans of Japanese ancestry, based on nothing more terrifying than the fact that they were of Japanese ancestry. Do we really want to do that, today, to Americans who just happen to be believers in the religion of Islam?