This is a time-honored path to assimilation. The first generation are crooks, the second generation are cops and the third generation are lawyers.

David, reading your post is not at all heartening.

All three, crooks, cops, & lawyers can still be crooks. Looking at police corruption and prosecutorial misconduct (among whites), not to mention the current Milberg Weiss indictment, one has little reason to be optimistic.

It's like the line from the Don Henley song. You can steal a lot more money with a brief case than with a gun.

while it is outright racist to hold that certain nationalities or faiths can never acculturate

Sorry, this is starry-eyed nonsense and a misuse of the term "racist" to boot. If religious faith Z (not an ethnic group) has as a basic principle that society, government, and religion are all one thing that should be run according to the principles of Z, and all people who don't follow Z are second-class citizens if not infidels deserving of slaughter, that would certainly seem to prevent acculturation into a society that believes in religious freedom and separation of church and state, would it not? Just as a hypothetical.

Nice hypothetical, but in the real world it runs aground on, for example, the ease with which Muslims assimilate in the US.

And, Papaya, this story too many people are trying tell themselves these days that there is a world of difference between genetic racism (which they are horrified anyone would think they believe in) and kissing off a billion people who have held a faith since birth and know no other is just a little too legalistic. Sounds fine in genetics class, but they tend to merge in real life.

What would you say to the Muslim who arrived here and told you he believed in religious tolerance and the separation of church and state. Would you haul out your Koran and try to tell him that's impossible and he doesn't know what he is talking about?

And there is the heart of the problem.

Peter B, and he is not the only one here, mixes up racism with evaluation of cultures. Race really doesn't mean anything, they tell us, and they are mostly right about that, therefore members of various "races" get a free pass for dreadful behaviors.

This is because we should not judge behavior, it is now said, because to do so is "racist" and racism is bad.

Welcome to the wonderful world of multiculturalism. Traits are cultural when that suits the revolution and racial when the "r" word suits better, and truth means less than nothing.

"Race and culture merge in real life," it is said. So it was said before, beginning with d'Gobineau. Rejection of racism is a shield against the injustice of saddling the individual with traits believed to be characteristic of the group. Do not make it a sword with which to attack our own values.

the report gives insufficient weight to the motivation of those who made the complaints or issues of institutional racism.

Until this is satisfied how can any argument be closed?

David, I was just objecting to the sweeping statement. Sure, most Muslims have assimilated here pretty well so far. But if 20 million Wahhabis suddenly showed up? How about 100 million Satan-worshipping cannibal Nazis? Assimilation is not trivially easy or inevitable in all cases.

Peter, I reserve the right to prefer some religions over others, based on their basic principles and practices. I'm sure you do the same. For instance, I don't like religions that advocate theocracy and killing Jews and gays, and I consider Mohammed the dodgiest of all the founders of major religions, but that doesn't make me a racist.

I think Lou understands what I'm saying.

Papaya:

Of course it doesn't make you a racist, but what is going on in your head and heart is secondary. The point is that objectively the same result obtains.

Lou:

What values are you trying to preserve that weren't either built on generations of mass immigration or perfectly consistent with it?

I'm sorry, Peter, I think of that as a stereotypical leftist argument, as in: "The perfectly objective test required for the job is actually racist, as proven by the fact that members of some ethnic groups tend to fail at a higher rate than members of other ethnic groups." I don't think equality of results is a trump card.

In effect you are saying that if racists don't like Michael Jackson and OJ Simpson because they're black, and I don't like them because one's a pedophile and one's a murderer, then I'm wrong in my belief because it's the "same result." I don't buy it.

Papaya:

Come, come. Surely you can see the difference between judging someone on the basis of his proven actions and judging him on his ascribed beliefs.

Peter;

Surely we can judge someone on the basis of the proven actions of his belief system? After all, who here has difficulty in judging someone based on his belief in Socialism?

Thank you, AOG. Peter, obviously there's some fuzziness and uncertainty when we compare individuals and their actions with the belief systems they espouse. But I'd like to see much, much more distance between the more obnoxious tenets of Islam and the average Muslim.

Sure, maybe Muslim immigrants to the U.S. can acculturate. But many of their spokesmen (e.g. CAIR) often take positions I strongly disagree with, such as the desirability of Islamic law. And the experience of European countries is troubling. I believe in a degree of American exceptionalism, but it makes me nervous when Muslims don't seem to able to acculturate to any other new country, and instead want their new countries to adapt to them.

Surely we can judge someone on the basis of the proven actions of his belief system?

Belief systems don't have actions. People do. I suppose you can make the case that certain very limited/short term political and religious cults like Nazism or anarchism or death cults imply slavery to subversion by definition, but there is no way Islam fits that bill and, anyway, even there there are lots of armchair anarchists tending their gardens and doing the shopping for "mumsy". BTW, you can usually distinquish those kinds of truly menacing creeds by their contempt for family and efforts to undermine and interfere with it. That's hardly Islam.

I don't accept the analogy to socialism, which can't be compared to a 1400 year old established religion. But even there, a very large percentage of Jewish and East European immigrants from about 1900-40 were fervent socialists. Are you sorry you let them in? In the 1930's, German-Americans in very large numbers were attracted to German nationalism and were arguably organized in more threatening ways than anything modern Muslims have done. The Irish-American refusal to let the old country go is legion and has, at times, been outright subversive. And don't forget the whole Catholic Church was considered an implacable opponent of democracy until at least the end of WW1.

I am not as blase about all this as you may think, but there is no way anyone has ever said anything to convince me that violence or religious oppression (as in "kill the infidel") or theocracy or anti-Americanism are "intrinsic" to Islam. If they were, Islam never would have demonstrated the historical resiliency it has, because those are all losing proposition in the long term. And I never heard anyone ever suggest they were until at least the mid-1980's, which makes me wonder where everyone was for the previous 1,380 years. We already have millions of successful Muslim immigrants. This doesn't mean we should be blind and stupid and adopt the New Zealand nun theory of national security, or pretend modern Islam is analagous to the Anglican Church, but it isn't Islamicism. Let's not forget who shopped Zarqawi and why and which journalists broke out in applause at the news.

Gosh, Peter, if the mark of a "truly menacing creed" is undermining and interfering with the family, then do those Israeli kibbutzes count?

As for socialist immigrants: it's easier for people to outgrow a political ideology than a religion. And Germans and Irish and such never wanted to impose Sharia worldwide. But your fallacy here is to say in effect: "These earlier groups turned out not to be existential threats, therefore no other ethnic/religious group can be an existential threat."

As for Islamic history, for roughly the first 900 out of those 1,400 years, Islam was expanding largely by the sword, and clearly a force for violence and religious oppression. And what percentage of majority-Muslim countries today have religious freedom? If someone or something exhibits a characteristic 2/3rds of the time or more, it's not unreasonable to call it "intrinsic."