Davis Merritt: How to win the battle, lose war

America’s neo-xenophobes, from County Commissioner Karl Peterjohn through Gov. Sam Brownback to Donald Trump and Ben Carson, are becoming ISIS’ best recruiters.

They frame a religion as our enemy instead of the limited number of psychopaths who distort that religion, and they feign bravery by proclaiming their political incorrectness. In fact, they are acting out of unreasoning fear.

Their anti-Muslim words and proposed actions are not political incorrectness; they are political incomprehension.

The world’s people have valid reasons to fear the goals and actions of ISIS and other terrorist groups and what they represent. But lumping all 1 billion Muslims into that category only increases the danger because it reinforces ISIS’ primary recruiting pitch: that the West is intent upon destroying Islam.

Since Paris, it has become evident that America also has a great deal to fear from its own leaders who are willing to override such ingrained democratic values as freedom of speech, religion and association.

If it had not been so anti-democratic, Peterjohn’s soliloquy at the weekly Sedgwick County Commission meeting would have been merely bizarre. After “reminding” his captive audience of county employees that President Obama had a Muslim father and was educated in a foreign Muslim school, he showed mug shots and abbreviated rap sheets of a dozen or so criminals who share some variation of the name Muhammad. Of the hundreds of thousands of peace-loving, good citizens – scientists, teachers, physicians, students – who also share that very common name, he said nothing, of course.

His point? Who knows? But the videotape of his rant will be in the ISIS recruiting toolbox forever: This is what the Americans think of you, young American Muslim; help us destroy America from within.

Brownback joined a mob of governors saying that they would not allow Syrian refugees to settle in their states. Never mind that the governors have no constitutional authority to do that; they can make refugees’ lives miserable through administrative actions. And it’s another way to test the questionable theory of state constitutional nullification, which was to any reasonable person settled by the Civil War.

Trump, Carson and the other members of the 10-ring presidential circus spent last week jockeying for the most bombastic positions on Syrian refugees and escalating the battle against ISIS. But, as columnist Dana Milbank wrote in the Washington Post, their strategy boiled down to killing ISIS with cliches.

Trump and Carson won that race to the bottom. In various forums and with changing levels of conviction depending upon who was listening, they endorsed the desirability of government databases to keep track of Muslims. Carson, with his deceptively soft, almost monotonal delivery – not unlike Peterjohn’s, or for that matter Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s – even trumped Trump, saying he would monitor “a mosque or any church or any organization or any school or any press corps where there was a lot of radicalization and things that were anti-American.”

We ultimately will overcome ISIS and its kin because we will do what is necessary to preserve our core principles. But if in the process we erode those principles and make them subject to real or imagined future contingencies, we will have won the battle and lost the war.

This story was originally published November 23, 2015 at 6:05 PM with the headline "Davis Merritt: How to win the battle, lose war."