There are quite a few statements on this thread that I would like to take issue with , but right now, in the wake of Al's last post, I think the thing that really needs saying right now, is that identifying the radical extremists and keeping them out of America is not actually a solution.
I don't have an alternative solution to propose. If such a thing as a real solution exists then I don't believe anybody is going to find it without first facing up to a plethora of uncomfortable facts, the chief of which would be: it's not that simple. I'm not claiming to to know all the relevant uncomfortable facts, but I'm pretty damned sure that the dialogue on this issue (world over) is dominated by prejudice, and that prejudice is always apt to find spurious solutions, via facile analysis of problems.
Unfortunately the SJW are as prejudiced as everybody else is . I'm not trying to use the word "prejudice" as a pejorative. Prejudice is a natural human condition, arising from our inabilty to process every little bit of information that comes our way; we just have to live with that somehow, and figure out ways of preventing it from having catastrophic effects . You certainly can't legislate against it. The best that legislation can do is displace one set of social prejudices with another, as the dominant "politically correct" norm. Ofc, education is effective, but I use that term broadly. If "education" is all about absorbing societal norms from any culture whatsoever , then it will serve to deepen prejudice, nort undermine it. Education has to equate to that old-fashioned English notion of "broadening the mind". (I call that old fasdhioned because i really didn't see that happening at my English grammar school, back in the seventies. I saw much lip-service to that idea, and a curriculum that more often worked to the opposite effect. But at least , back then, that defect appeared to be unintentional. Nowadays, the whole concept of broadening the mind appears to have been left behind- at least in the State sector - in favour of making education "relevant") . In practice, then, I guess that has to mean self-education
I do very much like like that the "liberal" bigotry is being effectively challenged. It had become really dangerous, IMO .But it's no use challenging that in isolation, as if some other form of bigotry would make a better job of things. I'm not even convinced that the powers-that-be really care what kind of bigotry we adopt, just so long as it distracts our attention, and keeps the little guy attacking some other little guy.
I do believe Islam is a problem , and needs to be acknowleged as such. But it would need to acknowleged as such, even if it wasn't any part of the problem, because you can't just suppress a commonly-held point-of-view without creating worse problems than the ones you might expect to resolve in that way. (Hey! maybe we should make Psychology a compulsory subject in schools? That might work to curtail the widespread enthusiasm for naive, simplistic solurtions that don't work, mightn't it? )
Arguably, Trump is that "worse problem" , in America. But my point is that the "Islam problem" has been defined in such a way that idfentifying "radical exteremists" and refusing them admittance to Amnerica can be profferred as a credible solution.
It's not hard to find reasons why that couldn't possibly make much of a difference to anything (beyond increasing righteous indignation in various quarters) . Here's the the one that's uppermost in my mind right now (mostly because I think it's inarguable)
The Muslim terrorists and jihadists in Britain have repeatedly turned out to be home-grown. That is native British Citizens, not from "over there" at all. Nor are they the offspring of radical Muslim parents. The parents most often turn out to liberal , and sometimes even non-Muslim. Maybe that pattern has yet to emerge in other countries, where Muslim imnmigration is a relatively novel phenomenon? I don't know. But it's very clear , here.
I hesitated to say that, because, personally, i don't think terrorism and jihadism are the real issues any way, just another ugly symptom of a bunch of deeper , more complex problems, few of which are specifically Islamic. Also, it's probably easy to find a credibible hypothesis as to why that occurs, and run with that hypothesis straight into some other spurious solution. There are loads of theories, and we're always too fast to get behind them, because nobody likes to think that they "just don't know", do they? We all like to think that we know exactly what 's going wrong, and exactly how to fix it.
Anyway, be that as it may, this idea of screening immigrants is surely a spurious solution.