I don't usually care what Marty Peretz of The New Republic has to say.  I just usually dismiss him as a crazy old coot and perhaps some one past his intellectual prime.  So, whatevs.

But not he's gotten into it with Nicholas Kristof (another guy I don't usually care much about) over a recent column where he argued that Muslim Americans don't deserve the protections of the First Amendment and where he has claimed that Muslims "don't value life." He and Kristof actually seem to agree on this point (at least in Peretz's account.)

Peretz and Kristof believe that moderate, mainstream Muslims in the U.S. and abroad need to speak out more against extremist violence, both to prevent it and, I guess, to prove that they don't support it because if they don't yell loudly enough the default assumption will be that they're secretly pro-violence.

This is clearly lunacy.  We don't expect the mainstream Protestant preacher down the street to have to speak out against or even address the group of Christian extremists in the compound just outside the city limits, do we?  When it comes to Christians we have no problem separating mainstream believers from extremists ones. We also wouldn't expect the extremists to care much about what the mainstream church leaders have to say.  You know... they're extremists!  When some nut shoots an abortion doctor we don't corner the Pope and demand a proper denouncing, do we?

So why do I care about this?  Because it seems oddly familiar.  It sounds to me a lot like the talk of "black on black" violence that dominated U.S. domestic discourse from thw 1970s right on through the L.A. riots.  These people don't value life!  Their leaders don't denounce street gangs forcefully enough?  There's no dealing with these people, they destroy their own neighborhoods because they just don't care!  None of these things were true and over time, some of America's worst urban neighborhoods lifted themselves out of poverty and a whole lot of things basically changed.

So now we're saying the same thing about Muslims.  You just can't deal with them because they don't value life the way we do.  People who say stuff like that basically believe that Muslims are Klingons -- angry, warlike and driven only by blood feuds and honor.  No people are like that.  None.  So when people talk about Muslims in this kind of language you know that they are not, in their hearts, talking about people.  They have dehumanized their enemies or are trying to.  That alone is good reason to exclude them from the discussion.