That is the big, bold title to the Sunday newspaper article I am looking at right now, by Margaret Talev for McClatchy Newspapers.  The sheer stupidity of the title’s question caught my attention.

Margaret, are you some sort of al-Qaeda agent-of-influence? Your question is bizarre, explicable only if you are either on the payroll of AQ or so blindly anti-American that you must reinterpret the obvious into the oblivious.

I will comment on your article for this reason: You serve as a study in how the rest of us cannot count on so many anti-American Americans, even to fight to defend our country.  At the end, I will address the dilemma our Muslim citizens and visitors now live under, created by these terrorists.

• Margaret is condescending: “Most Americans reflexively oppose an Islamic cultural center near ground zero….”
  We oppose the victory monument mosque because we just can’t actually reason.  Anyone opposing the victory mosque reacts by reflex, like a flatworm in a biology lab experiment, flinching from a drop of water too high in acid.  We have the brains of worms.
• Margaret then refers to an “expert” to prove we are dolts.  Noting how little Americans in general know of Islam, and how few of us know Muslims, she quotes a touchy-feely SUNY political psychologist to surmise: “It’s natural for people who don’t know Muslims to draw strong stereotypes from Sept. 11 and feel them reinforced by recent scares such as the Times Square bomb plot.”
  We do know that a large number of Muslim people hate our guts, burn our flag, cut off American heads when they can, and stay up late at night enjoying our hospitality but plotting new ways to kill us.  Not completely ignorant of how Muslims govern their own countries, we are suspicious that they are busily planting the seeds of authoritarian theocracy here, with the PR water being carried by the likes of Margaret.
• Margaret cannot ignore the 1972 Olympic Games, 1988′s Flight 103 Lockerbie bombing, and 9-11 (She omits many other attacks by Muslims.) but she moans that these have created a public relations problem.  She is concerned about Islam’s PR problem, not the mass murder.
• Margaret mocks us, picking on a lady from Muskogee, Oklahoma carrying a protest sign.  Margaret selects her photograph to serve as the poster-example of the redneck Muslim-hater.
  I do appreciate the little joke. At least Margaret knows of Merle Haggard.  But, Margaret, some of us would indeed be proud to identify with the Okies from Muskogee.  But, I guess you chose to caricature that woman to mock all of us.  We are all just “Okies from Muskogee” and too dumb not to be proud of it.
• Margaret, having mocked Oklahoma, fails to see that she is the one getting provincial: “Republicans and those without college educations tend to be less favorable toward Islam.
  Sniff, it’s a long way to look  down that nose.
• Margaret puzzles, “What shaped modern American impressions of Muslims?”
  Duh.
• Margaret thinks our surprise at Iran’s 1979 embassy takeover was our fault: “Death to America” was all about the CIA and 1953, justifying it all. If only we understood….
  What every American other than Jimmy Carter understood was that taking over our embassy and holding our people hostage was an act of war.
• Then she gets nastier.  She finds an associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of Kentucky who says “[C]onservative Christians long have been a source of anti-Islamic rhetoric….”
  Is that it, Margaret?  Is this all about your hating Christians?  In this smear, you reveal so much.
• Margaret then lapses into stating the obvious but needing a poll: “Muslims are the most negatively viewed faith community in the country.”
  Can’t imagine why.

What nonsense!  It’s pointless to talk with someone so blinded, so the rest of this post is addressed to Muslim people  who live here, and who want to travel and live here, and you are many.

American Muslims, here is the problem you have to figure out how you are going to deal with, and it’s not just a PR problem.  We all know that by far most Muslims are not terrorists, do not hate America, and are just ordinary people trying to make a living and have their kids turn out uncorrupted by MTV.

Here is the problem, and what Margaret is incapable of getting: We non-Muslim Americans cannot tell who from among Muslim visitors and citizens is here to enjoy the blessing of liberty, and who is here to plot new ways to blow us up.  How can we know?  Even you cannot always tell which young man is getting strange, saying strange things, becoming radicalized and about to assemble a truck bomb?  Which soft-spoken airport shuttle driver spends his off hours trolling the aisles looking for hydrogen peroxide?  Which neighbor who helped you jump-start your car is saving his money to attend a terrorist training camp?  How are we supposed to know you came here in peace? We thought the 19 came just to visit, and look what they did?

Our experience began with warnings far away, approximately with the 1972 Olympic Games and the murder of poor American Leon Klinghoffer, on a Mediterranean holiday cruise.  Now, Muslims who hate America sneak in among the far greater number who do not;  Those deceive us on their visa applications and in their neighborhoods.  They take jobs, blend in, and plot jihad.  And, they look and sound like you.  This is the complicated reality of being Muslim in America.  I sympathize with you, but we are, in fact, under attack by Muslims because they are Muslims and we are not.  In your case, they view you as apostate and you are lumped in with the rest of the degenerate West!  You don’t want bombings, terrorism, and jihad, but mixed in among you are plenty who do.  No one here can tell whether you answered the call to a life of liberty in America, or the call to Jihad echoing from your minarets.

We wonder if more widespread hatred for the Jews so colors your alliances that you blame us for bringing Jihad upon ourselves.  If it weren’t for America’s support for Israel….

Margaret, you are a fool.  America is wary of Islam, as America should be.  I have no hope that you will figure out why.