| | I have to disagree with Ethan's harsh assessment of Yaron Brook. I disagree with a number of Yaron's positions, but I've never seen him as a fool. I love his passion and I'd love to stand should to shoulder with him and declare that we should close down every mosque that supports jihad or sharia law. But, I think it would be wrong to do that. Yes, it would attacking people that are our enemies, but doing so in ways that violate our own principles.
This is a complex issue and deserves a better level of commentary than it has been getting. I enjoyed that PJTV discussion on the Mosque and even when I disagreed with one of the speakers, I could appreciate their position and the passion they brought to it... and the fact that they shared their views side by side.
There is a lot of mis-information. People say that prohibiting the mosque would be unconstitutional because it would violate freedom of worship. That's wrong because Congress would not be making any law regarding religious practices. It would require throwing Federalism out the window and using the 'Living Constitutionalists' incorporation argument to override some decision of zoning board.
People say that it would violate freedom of speech. That's wrong because there is no specific act of speech being prohibited - the discussion is about prohibiting the building of a specific building in a specific location.
The individual right that is violated isn't explicit in the constitution - property rights. The constitutionality of building that building in that location would need to be argued from the 10th or 14th amendments. Property rights are often violated with building codes, zoning ordinances, etc. That is the individual right that would be trashed by prohibiting the building of the mosque at that location, but not at other locations.
Yaron's point was that we are at war and therefore war powers would supersede normal constitutional practices in determining legality and for determining what would constitute treason. He was upset that congress had not declared war and that if they had that would have made explicit who is an enemy. I don't think it is as simple as that.
We have the following issues at play regarding war:
- War as a legal status versus War as an actual fact
- 'War' meaning a condition of initiated force versus 'war' as an ideological conflict between two cultures.
Legally we are not at war. Ignore Iraq, ignore Afghanistan, and ignore all the rhetoric on the War on Terrorism. Congress hasn't declared war, so legally we aren't at war.
If we were, it would change the application of some laws, like Treason, but with the Objectivist understanding of individual rights, including the right to self-defense, I've always thought that war should not make any change in what is or isn't constitutional in the sense that war powers could never override individual rights.
We may not be at war legally, but clearly we are at war in fact. There are troops engaged in on-going conflict on foreign soil, and there are people who continue to plot the violent destruction of our nation.
There are three kinds of war:
1. War in the literal sense of initiation and defense against destructive forces,
2. War in a broader sense - meaning conflict that may or may not include physical force - that is intended to vanquish the opponent. A cultural war waged against Western culture by fundamentalist Islam falls into this category. It is physical and ideological and political and psychological and cultural.
3. And there is the use of the word 'war' as a metaphor, like the war on terror, and that usually just means such attempting to determine what is what in a murky are containing such imprecision that it ends up causing problems.
How does a constitutional nation that honors individual rights deal with organized attacks by a large group of individuals who intend to topple western civilization but are not directly represented by a government? In other words who do you declare war on? (The liberals want to get away from this concept of war that doesn't involve nations and treat terrorists as criminals. This doesn't work in the practical world and it doesn't address a threat against the nation as such, and ignores the fact that it is a war in fact.)
It isn't that all of these conspirators and attackers and their active supporters just happen to be Muslims. And they are not just justifying the attacks with their religion. They are unified by goals that they draw from their religion and their war is being carried out for religious purposes.
And their religious scriptures do call for some of what they do (but not all). It would be simple if all Muslims agreed with the positions taken by the fundamentalists we could declare war on Muslims - but they don't. (Ethan said that Yaron conflated the fundamentalists with Islam. Yes and no. We are in a cultural war with Islam, but a fighting war with the fundamentalists - and the fundamentalists are exclusively Islamic. No so much a conflation as a failing to separate out where we do battle with ideas from where we do battle with guns.)
So, what do we do? There is a real war (we have been and continue to be under attack and are making military efforts to fight an enemy). We should either stop doing that, or we should make it legal since it is always wrong to be a nation of men and not a nation of laws, and it is always wrong for government to take actions it isn't legally empowered to take. Because the attacks and the organized efforts behind future attacks are real they obligate the government to act in self-defense. So, we need to declare war, but who do we declare war on?
I think congress needs to declare war on a list of organizations which would include Al Qaeda, and add any active supporting organizations or governments. That handles the legal side of things, might give more clarity to what actions make sense and which don't, and it might even lead to a rational, moral criteria for determining when a mosque or organization should not be permitted to open its doors on our soil - like closing down any Hitler Youth Groups after declaring war against Germany.
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