Gratuitous attacks on peaceful citizens are detestable. It would be deeply irresponsible, however, not to mention morally and intellectually obtuse, to treat all faiths and ideologies as the same. Islam entails a set of beliefs, not a set of immutable features. The widespread violence, misogyny, child abuse, tyranny, and bigotry that exists in swaths of Islamic society around the world is a product of that culture.

So, if Muslims don’t believe embracing foundational American norms is a condition of good citizenry, then we have a duty to limit new immigrants from that world, because they will create divisions that other immigrant groups did not.

Though Hamid argues that Muslims shouldn’t live by those expectations, he also tries to create the impression that they already share the social conservative values of an average white Baptist in rural Oklahoma.

“Over the past decade,” Hamid contends, “surveys have shown that American Muslims are patriotic, civically engaged and more likely than the U.S. general public to say that political violence is never justified. You’d think that would be enough.”

No, that’s the bare minimum. “Polls,” moreover, tell us little. Hamid’s claims about civic life are derived from something called the “Islamophobia Index,” conducted by the “Institute for Social Policy and Understanding,” a Muslim-focused organization funded by a slew of left-wing organizations. I’m skeptical of the results and framing, and the notion that we all share the same definition of “patriotism,” but you can make up your own mind.

The hyperlink he provides to prove that Muslims are “more likely than the U.S. general public to say that political violence is never justified,” however, sends us to a nearly decade-old Pew Research Center poll that focuses on the uptick in concern from American Muslims about increasing “Islamic extremism.”

Not exactly an endorsement for more immigration from the Middle East.

In any event, the worth of “civic engagement” is largely dependent on the principles you’re championing. Are you attending mosques that preach violent extremism? Does your political activism include surrounding synagogues and Holocaust museums to harass and threaten Jews or marching to support Islamic terrorist states that whip women in the streets? If so, Americans are free to suspect that you’re bringing some highly corrosive and divisive ideas into the country.

Hamid, incidentally, has no problem smearing the American Jewish “establishment” as “authoritarians” and Fifth Columnists who not only support (imaginary) genocide but drag America into needless bloody wars.

OK. How does Islamic political culture comport with traditional American outlooks? Of the four Muslims in Congress — anti-Western, culturally progressive, left-wing radicals — at least two of them, Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), are outright bigots.

The most visible political advocacy group of Muslims, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, has a long history of accepting funding and supporting terrorist groups, and its director celebrates the wanton mass murder of young women, including American citizens. How many prominent Muslims or Democrats are critical of the CAIR?

Right now, perhaps the most prominent Muslim American in politics is podcaster Hasan Piker. His background wouldn’t matter if he wasn’t constantly championing Islamic terrorism. He believes the United States “deserved” 9/11 and that Republicans are the “biggest terrorists, the biggest domestic terrorists in this country, the biggest terrorists internationally.” Piker’s favorite flag belongs to Hezbollah. He says Shia supremacists of Hamas are a “thousand times better” than our liberal democratic allies in Israel. Both of his favorite Islamist groups have killed hundreds of American citizens.

This is the man who campaigns for the mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani. 

Now, Hamid disseminates many of the same ugly ideas under the cloak of respectable pseudo-academic prose he picked up while collecting a paycheck from a Qatari-funded think tank. When you point this out, he hides behind the shield of Islamophobia.

Hamid likes to compare the Muslim immigrant experience to other groups, such as Jews, who he points out have secularized and integrated, sometimes to their detriment. Islam, he says, is “increasingly integrated into American civic life, but it has done so while holding on to its religious commitments in a way that most other groups haven’t.”

No one stops anyone from praying. But sharia, according to Hamid, “roughly translated as Islamic law, includes guidelines on how to pray, fast and otherwise observe what it means to submit to God in daily practice,” which is like roughly like describing communism as a set of economic guidelines that help you submit to “the warmth of collectivism.”

Diverse cultural outlooks are seasoning that enhances our communal life. But Jews, religious or not, are not in conflict with foundational American ideals. Christians render unto Caesar. Does anyone seriously dispute that sharia law isn’t merely a religious framework but a political one, as well? There’s a simple way to think about the cultural difference between immigrant groups. Would a Washington Post columnist be able to satirize and critique Muhammad without fearing for their safety in the same way they could satirize and critique Jesus or the Pope or satirize and critique Jews or Vishnu or Buddha? No one who has lived through the past two decades could honestly claim so.

We are still compelled to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on counterterrorism every year because of an extremist element in contemporary Islam that doesn’t exist in other faiths. Expecting Muslim assimilation is more than reasonable.

“America was not founded on the assumption that its citizens would eventually come to agree on foundational questions,” Hamid ends his piece. “It was founded on the more radical proposition that they wouldn’t — that people who disagree about God, religion and the good life could share a country anyway.”

This is both a platitude and a strawman. Of course, we disagree about God, religion, and the good life, but if a group demands or corrodes foundational freedoms that create a culture of stability, freedom, and prosperity, which allows Americans to enjoy those things, we have a huge problem. Worrying about aggressive strands of Islam isn’t exactly a far-fetched concern after witnessing the experience of Western Europe, where large groups of Muslim immigrants entered nations that have zero expectations or demands of assimilation.

ERIC SWALWELL IS GUILTY ACCORDING TO THE ERIC SWALWELL STANDARD

Europeans instead adopted suicidally vacuous and relativistic ideas about their borders and culture. The European Union motto is “United in diversity.“ At this point, it might as well adopt “Muslims shouldn’t have to assimilate to belong.”

We shouldn’t.