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. But Alabama's law, which, like Arizona's, demands that police check the immigration status of anyone they stop and requires schools to verify the status of students and their parents as well, has already resulted in the exodus of a significant amount of the local labor force and is likely to further harm the state's economy.

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. The number of Muslims who say attacks on civilians by "an individual person or a small group of persons" are never justified even higher, at 89 percent, while the other religious denominations fall somewhere in the 70 percent to 80 percent range. In a nutshell, Muslims are more likely than any other religious group to disapprove of targeting civilians, whether it's done by the government or by a terrorist group. That...

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. We don't know that because of Andrea Elliott. We know it because of Matt Duss , even if The New York Times pretends otherwise.

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. Rubin fell into this trap. She cited terrorist expert Thomas Joscelyn’s speculation that it had all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda operation, and then she argued that we don’t dare cut defense or homeland security funding, even in a debt crisis, because jihadists are still after us and we live in a “very dangerous world.” Rubin, like many others, assumed that the Oslo attack was the work of Islamic extremists. At the time, given the multiple targets and recent foiled al-Qaeda plot in Norway, I thought the same thing, so it’s hard for me to criticize...

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. Pamela Geller, however, has responded to the Oslo attacks by skirting dangerously closed to justifying violence by attacking the victims. Her recent posts contain the obligatory disclaimers regarding violence, but given her other statements these have all the force of the phrase "I'm not a racist but..." The day of the Norway shooting, I was blindsided by one of the survivor's statements to the press immediately after the shooting (see above). It was so outside the box, I thought it was the...

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross has a sobering analysis of al-Qaeda's strategy for exploiting popular discontent in the wake of the Arab Spring: We haven't seen Islamic law implemented or a caliphate established, of course, but al Qaeda probably sees a more fertile recruiting environment. The Arab Spring is not just about the desire for democracy. It is also about unemployment and skyrocketing food prices. Will material needs be met? The unemployment rate in Egypt has in fact increased rather than decreased since Mubarak was overthrown. Historically when you have sky-high expectations -- as you've had with the Arab Spring -- that go unfulfilled, extreme ideologies can take hold. I'm slightly more optimistic than Gartenstein-Ross, for a couple of reasons. Extreme ideologies can take hold during periods of economic misery, but I think they also flourish through repression. Part of how the Muslim Brotherhood drew support during the Mubarak era was because they were one of the few fonts of...