Okay, so the express rationale behind the feds suing to block Alabama's immigration law is that states aren't allowed to set their own immigration policies.

Gallup has a new poll out that sheds some light on American religious views on violence, some of which might be startling. Muslims are by far the least likely among all religious groups to justify targeting civilians, whether done by the military or by "an individual person or a small group of persons." Seventy-eight percent of Muslims say that military attacks on civilians are never justified, while the numbers for Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and atheists hover in the 50s. The only religious denomination that comes close to Muslim disapproval is Mormons at 64 percent.

I mostly enjoyed this column by Roger Cohen about his upbringing as a Jew in South Africa, except for this:

Hatred of Muslims in Europe and the United States is a growing political industry. It’s odious, dangerous and racist. Thanks to my colleague Andrea Elliott, we now know the story of the orchestration of the successful anti-Shariah campaign in the United States, led by a Hasidic Jew named David Yerushalmi who holds that “most of the fundamental differences between the races are genetic.” The rightists in Europe using anti-Muslim rhetoric are true heirs to the Continent’s darkest hours.

WaPo Obudsman Patrick Pexton defends Jennifer Rubin:

But when an attack happens elsewhere, whether Oslo, Bali, Madrid, Beslan, Mumbai or London, U.S. pundits and politicians climb on their electronic soapboxes and denounce the act as one more evil deed by the enemy we most love to hate, be it militant Muslims, or in Oslo’s case, militant Christians. There is no interval before scoring rhetorical and partisan points, not even time to mourn.

One of the reasons I've argued that the Shariah-panic crowd is not responsible for the massacre in Norway is that, despite their vitriol, their justifications largely center on arguments for curtailing Muslim rights, not for slaughtering people wholesale. That's noxious, but it's very different from religious extremists concocting religious justifications for terrorism, or even anti-choice radicals in the United States who try to frame the killing of abortion doctors as justifiable homicide.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross has a sobering analysis of al-Qaeda's strategy for exploiting popular discontent in the wake of the Arab Spring: